Ted Genoways
In the following excerpted interview, Charles
Wright discusses with Genoways his life, influences
on his poetry, ideas on composing poetry, and plans
for future works.
Charles Wright’s poetry is a strange
alchemy, a fusion of the direct, understated
lyrics of ancient Chinese poets like Tu Fu and
Wang Wei, the lush language of nineteenth-
century Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, and
the allusive, rhetorical movement—the ‘‘gists
and piths’’—of Ezra Pound’sCantos.The ele-
ment common to each is a search for transcen-
dence in the landscape of everyday. For Wright
that landscape might be the shores of Italy, his
native Tennessee, or his own backyard on
Locust Avenue in Charlottesville. He calls it
‘‘eschatological naturalism: a school of one.’’
An imaginary argument with Tu Fu in ‘‘China
Mail’’ reveals the underpinning—both highbrow
and tongue-in-cheek, serious and self-effacing—
of Wright’s poetry: ‘‘Study the absolute, your
book says. But not too hard,// I add, just under
my breath.’’ Wright’s poems yearn for the ideal,
but are tempered by a suspicion of futility.
This focus on unanswerable questions has
allowed Wright’s work to be peopled by family
and familiar locales without slouching into
private confession. And the unfolding of his
‘‘impersonal autobiography’’ over three decades
has earned him the praise of critics—from Har-
old Bloom to Helen Vendler—and the seemingly
unanimous admiration of other poets. In 1979 he
won the PEN Translation Prize for his version of
Eugenio Montale’sThe Storm and Other Things;
in ’83 he received the National Book Award for
Country Music: Selected Early Poems; and in ’95
he was awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize from
the Academy of American Poets. Yet nothing
could have prepared Wright for the laurels
heaped upon his 1998 collection Black Zodiac,
which won the National Book Critics Circle
Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and
the Pulitzer. When we talked in his office at the
University of Virginia in early June, he was at the
end of a nonstop string of interviews, readings,
and appearances. All of which makes Wright
both pleased and a bit uneasy.
When he joined the military and was assigned
to a counterintelligence unit in Italy in 1959,
poetry was not an avenue for Wright to gain
acclaim but rather a ready escape. It wasn’t until
a seminal experience inItaly—reading Pound’s
‘‘Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula’’ at the Grotte di
Catullo, on Sirmione Peninsula, the very ground
where the poem was conceived—that Wright felt
the desire to compose poems of his own. Until that
time, his life had followed a very different course.
HewasborninPickwickDam,Tennessee,in
1935, and grew up in nearby Kingsport. While
attending Davidson College, in North Carolina,
hemajoredinhistoryandplannedtoentera
career in law or advertising once he completed
his military service. But in Italy he read Pound
voraciously, usingSelected PoemsandThe Pisan
Cantosas his guidebook, and wrote some of his
first verses—including the prose poem ‘‘Noc-
turne,’’ which commemorates his experience on
Sirmione. Soon he had pulled together a small
batch of poems and sent them to the Iowa Writers’
Workshop.
He attended the workshop from 1961 to ’63,
then spent two years in Italy translating Montale on
a Fulbright, and returned to Iowa for 1965–’66.
Later that year he took a teaching job at the Uni-
versity of California at Irvine, where he remained—
apart from a one-year Fulbright lectureship at the
University of Padua—until 1983. Since then he has
taught creative writing at the University of Virginia,
where he holds the Souder Family Professorship. In
fall 1998, Farrar, Straus & Giroux released Appa-
lachia, to be followed by a fine-press edition of
North American Bear and another Selected volume
in spring 2000. With thatpublication, the thirty-
year project—the ‘‘trilogy of trilogies’’—will come
to an end.
We will have to wait to see what comes next.
What is certain is that Wright’s is among the
most interesting projects in contemporary Amer-
ican poetry. Wedding the Whitmanically inclu-
sive free-verse line with the introspection and
wit of Emily Dickinson, Wright’s poems are asEVERYBODY READS SOMEONE A LOT IN THE
BEGINNING, AND WHOEVER PULLS YOU IN STICKSWITH YOU. AND YOU HOPE SOMEBODY GOOD PULLS
YOU IN AND NOT SOMEBODY BAD—SOMEBODY YOU
CAN’T GET RID OF.’’Words Are the Diminution of All Things