Poetry for Students, Volume 35

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

The great-grandson of two Confederate captains
and the son of a Tennessee Valley Authority
(TVA) civil engineer, Charles Wright was born
in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, on August 25,
1935, the first baby born in the new hospital
built for the TVA. His early childhood was
nomadic as the family moved with his father’s
job. When Wright was ten, however, the family
settled in Kingsport, Tennessee, where his father
went into the construction business. Wright
became immersed in country music and the
activities of his Episcopalian church, spending
his teenage years at religious summer camps and
small parochial high schools. Both music and
spirituality would become important elements
of Wright’s poetry.

After high school graduation in 1953, Wright
got a summer job with theKingsport Times-News
as a police reporter, a job that caused him to think
about being a writer. He also read works by Wil-
liam Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Ernest Hem-
ingway. He then attended Davidson College,
where he majored in history and planned to go to
law school. After graduation in 1957, he joined the
U.S. Army Intelligence Corps and was schooled in
Italian. He spent three years in Verona with the
430th CIC Detachment, during which Wright dis-
covered the works of Ezra Pound and visited the
Italian countryside that Pound described in his
poems.

Profoundly affected by Pound’s work, Wright
began composing his own poetry, and in 1961, he
enrolled in the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Work-
shop at the University of Iowa. After earning his
master’s degree, he spent two years as a Fulbright
scholar at the University of Rome. In 1965, Wright
returned to Iowa to pursue a doctoral degree, but
abandoned that plan the next year to take a teach-
ing position at the University of California at
Irvine. He remained there until 1983 except for a
year’s Fulbright lectureship at the University of
Padua. In 1969, Wright married Holly McIntire,
a photographer; they have one son.

Wright’s first major book of poetry was
published in 1970, and he has continued to pub-
lish collections of poetry every couple years
since. Nine of his books are grouped into three
trilogies, and each trilogy has its own structure.
These trilogies areCountry Music,The World of
Ten Thousand Things, and the set that includes
Chickamauga,Black Zodiac, andAppalachia.

In 1983, Wright went to the University of

Virginia to teach creative writing and was hon-

ored there with an endowed chair as the Souder

Family Professor. His many published works

have earned him numerous prizes, including a

Guggenheim Fellowship (1975), a PEN transla-

tion award (1979), a National Book Award

in poetry (1983), and a Merit Medal from the

American Academy and Institute Arts and Let-

ters (1992). In 1997, he received a National Book

Critics Circle Award and in 1998 the Pulitzer

Prize for Black Zodiac. Wright was inducted

into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

in 2002. As of 2009, he continued to live and

work in Charlottesville, Virginia.

POEM TEXT

The brief secrets are still here,

and the light has come back.

The wordremembertouches my hand,

But I shake it off and watch the turkey buz-

zards bank and wheel

Against the occluded sky. 5

All of the little names sink down,

weighted with what is invisible,

But no one will utter them, no one will smooth

their rumpled hair.

There isn’t much time, in any case.

There isn’t much left to talk about 10

as the year deflates.

There isn’t a lot to add.

Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster

like unattractive angels

Wherever a thing appears,

Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable 15

in their mute and glittering garb.

All afternoon the clouds have been sliding

toward us

out of the Blue Ridge.

All afternoon the leaves have scuttled

Across the sidewalk and driveway,

clicking their clattery claws. 20

And now the evening is over us,

Small slices of silence

running under a dark rain,

Wrapped in a larger.

POEM SUMMARY

‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’ is a

partly autobiographical free verse poem consisting

of three stanzas, the first two consisting of eight

lines with the last one at nine lines. The situation in

Words Are the Diminution of All Things