About C. D. Wright: A Profile

"I am not easy, but I am worth knowing," C. D. Wright says of herself, and her friends would agree. Petite and graceful and usually soft-spoken, C. D. Wright's outward demeanor at once reveals and belies her wholly original personality, which is graceful but large, considerate but unconventional: "I am pretty neat, but there's considerable internal chaos," she says. "There's too much despair in me for anyone's good, many strata of heartaches, but I do have poetry and family and friends that could see the most miserable of us through."

Born in 1949 in Mountain Home, Arkansas, in the Ozarks, C. D. Wright was the younger of two children of a chancery judge and a court stenographer. She grew up reading and being read to, but not knowing writers and not thinking that writers could come from a town of five thousand in Arkansas. She could never, growing up, have imagined that one day she would herself become the author of ten books of poems, the recipient of major awards, and the holder of the Israel J. Kapstein Chair of English at Brown University.

Wright's route to her present success took her through many places: Memphis, Fayetteville, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, Mexico, and finally Providence. It was in Fayetteville -- where she received an M.F.A. at the University of Arkansas and met the poet Frank Stanford, who became a lifelong influence -- that Wright became a real poet. She wanted to be an artist of some kind, and she wanted to do something that she would be good at. Frank Stanford helped her to see that people like her -- young people, people from Arkansas, people with the same lexicon, not only the European or Northern or dead writers that she had read growing up -- could be writers, too. Her first book of poems,
Room Rented by a Single Woman, waspublished in 1977 by Stanford's Lost Roads Publishers (Wright and her husband took over the press in 1981 and have run it ever since). In the next ten years, she would publish three more books.

Wright moved to San Francisco in 1979 and worked at the San Francisco State Poetry Center. Within her first week in San Francisco, she encountered two seismic events: an earthquake and language poetry, in the form of Ron Silliman's
Ketjak. Reading
Ketjak, she says, was an "accident." There was a bookstore around the corner from where she was staying, and someone showed her the book. It both excited and scared her because, she says, "I didn't quite have my bearings." This introduction to language poetry made her more savvy: it allowed the city to enter into her work, and it made her more conscious about her use of language. In San Francisco, Wright also met the poet Forrest Gander, her future husband.

In 1983, Wright and Gander moved to Providence, Rhode Island, when she got a job at Brown. "I'm not a Yankee," Wright says with a laugh, and there were things about the Northeast that she didn't like: it is more aggressive and more class-conscious, a quality that is particularly unappealing to Wright, a true democrat at heart. But over the years, Providence has emerged from an economic depression and has become a good place for artists to live. It has a decent bookstore, a place to get good coffee, wine and food, and, most importantly, a real literary community, something that Wright has always been fortunate in having around her, no doubt because she helps to foster it. Through the writing community in Providence, she was forced to confront the literary tradition not only of the Northeast (after living there for close to twenty years, Wright admits to still favoring Faulkner over Melville), but also the larger community of experimental and international writers, many of whom would come to Providence
to visit.

So much contact with different places, people, and traditions at once expanded her abilities as a poet and helped her come into her own. What Wright at first had thought of as a restriction -- her background in the non-literary Ozarks -- led, in fact, to her greatest strengths: her sharpness, her individuality, her nonconformist voice. As she writes with her customary detail and humor in "hills," from her 1986 volume
Further Adventures with You, "once after a reading, I overheard a man say to another man, 'She's a real one, a real hillbilly.' I thought he was a patronizing fart, but I am, irrevocably, a purebred hill person. I don't see the literary life as being either scalded from or hidebound by that fact."

Wright now says that the most important lesson she has for up-and-coming poets is that they be their own poets, "not to be sycophants, acolytes, or suckers for trends which do not fuel their own intelligence." She encourages poets to "learn what they can from other poets with whom they come into contact, but don't succumb to disingenuous jostling. Protect your honor, and never fear failure." Even as she has garnered many mainstream accolades, including Guggenheim and Bunting fellowships and the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies for her collaboration with Deborah Luster, Wright has also worked consistently, as teacher and as editor, to make room in the poetry community for voices that are different, overlooked, outside. An "unreconstructed lefty," she is passionate about the world, about people, and about language, and her activities in the poetry community reflect all of these interests.

Wright advises young poets to be unabashedly ambitious: "You cannot," she says, "enter into a lifelong contract with art without ambition." In the 1990's, Wright embarked on a remarkable series of book-length projects, including
Just Whistle, which she considers "the first book I wrote wherein form held so much priority." Her early work was largely narrative and usually situated in a recognizable place. "But gradually," Wright explains, "voice would concede to other conditions, to a less spoken language and to a heightened formal consciousness."
Just Whistle, published in 1993, was also the first book that she created in collaboration with her friend Deborah Luster, the photographer. Combining photographs of the female body and experimental, erotic lyrics, the book probes the relationship between language and the body, language and form. It is not clear who the speaker is in
Just Whistle; instead, the book shows the influence of the European romantics, and attempts to render in language the intersection of consciousness and physicality. Vulnerably open to the world, Wright's sensibility is also so self-attuned as to verge, sometimes, on the hermetic: "HOLE OF HOLES: world in the world of the os, an ode / unspoken, hole in its infancy, uncuretted, sealed, not yet / yielded." In her next book,
Tremble, she applied more pressure to her language and set out to conquer the lyric form. A poem like "Privacy" illustrates the precision and efficiency of Wright's images in this volume: "The fishes must be moved / from the window / / Stiller than water she lay. / As in a glass dress."

Wright moved on in her next book,
Deepstep Come Shining, to perhaps an even more ambitious task. Another collaboration with Deborah Luster, the book emerged out of a road trip in the Carolinas and Georgia. Wright and Luster visited what they call "outsider artists" and at the same time researched and did fieldwork on all aspects of vision and blindness. From these different voices came, in contrast to the tightness and concision of
Tremble, the expansiveness of
Deepstep. The book's long lines and polyphonic voices resemble Whitman, Stanford, and Williams, but have the physicality and openness that is uniquely Wright's own. Through its use of repetitions and patterns, the epic journey of
Deepstep takes the reader into the unconscious of the individual and of America itself. Indeed, the project was such a large one that at one point, Wright literally hung the poem up in columns on the wall and saw the patterns that she was making. Underneath these patterns is a sense of wholeness: "The aim is to feel wholeness itself. She laid her hand on / the deeply furrowed bark, groping for the area of darkest / color."

Wright's most recent project,
One Big Self, was another collaboration with Deborah Luster, and again takes outsiders as its subject. The idea for the book was born when Luster, who was doing a photographic project on poverty in northern Louisiana, noticed the proliferation of prisons in the sparsely populated area. She thought, "Maybe this is where the people are," and sought permission to photograph inside. She encouraged Wright to join her, and the book comes out of the time that they spent with the prisoners. As is typical of Wright's work,
One Big Self shows her commitment to understanding other people and to incorporating different experiences into the space of poetry. Especially in her later work, it is the uniquely personal and idiosyncratic voice and viewpoints that make her poetry so overwhelming. To read her poems is to enter into the lived experience, not only of Wright herself, but of her characters. As she, or the speaker, says in
Deepstep Come Shining, "Welcome to my Sensorium."

Each of Wright's books has pushed against limitations, and has taken constraint itself -- in poetic form, in blindness, in imprisonment -- as a topic. In each new project, she discovers new directions in which to move and to grow. "Everything I do right involves overcoming a natural resistance to do otherwise," she says. "How I accomplish what I do is a mystery. I could easily be a dud on all fronts. But there's something in me, part gamecock and part hound, that doesn't give up without a bloody fight or at least one bone of my own to bury
."
Steal Away: Selected and New Poems, published this year by Copper Canyon Press, gives readers an opportunity to witness both the transformations in Wright's career and her consistency: the intensity, honesty, exuberance, and physicality that are always present in her language. Her sentences and turns of mind follow their own music, cut through the ordinary channels of perception and expression, and shape the world and the self in their own way.

These days, Wright is interested in moving beyond genre itself. "Increasingly," she says, "my work reflects a hybridity of structure and genre." She likes working with other people and other media, and tries to challenge poetry and language itself to be as expansive as possible.

Poet, editor, teacher, friend, wife, and mother, Wright fulfills many roles at once, and her life is an example not only of wholeness but of superabundance. This year the largeness of her life and personality have needed to come up against unusual physical constrictions. She, her husband, their fifteen-year-old son, and their greyhound have all been living in one room over their garage, while their schoolhouse home has been remodeled. It's been a trying year, but Wright approaches life itself as a challenge in which one is always -- as she likes to quote Flannery O'Connor -- "pursuing joy through gritted teeth."

Nadia Herman Colburn's poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Southwest Review, American Letters & Commentary, Harvard Review, Slope,
and elsewhere. She is completing a dissertation on poetic authority in twentieth-century poetry at Columbia University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.