Charles Wright

Biography

Charles Wright’s many awards include the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His recent books include Caribou (FSG, 2014), Littlefoot (FSG, 2007), and Scar Tissue (FSG, 2006), and he was the guest editor of the 2008 edition of The Best American Poetry. He is the emeritus Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In 1993, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. In 2014, he was named Poet Laureate.

See Work

POETRY / Summer 2007

Cowboy Up

By Charles Wright

There comes a time in one’s life when one wants time,
a lot of time, with inanimate things.

POETRY / Summer 2007

No Angel

By Charles Wright

In the Kingdom of the Hollow-at-Heart, the insect is king.
In the Kingdom of the Beyond,
all lie where the ground is smooth.
Everything’s what it seems to be, and a little less.

 

POETRY / Summer 2007

“I Shall Be Released”

By Charles Wright

There is a consolation beyond nomenclature
of what is past
Or is about to pass, though I don’t know what it is.
But someone, somewhere, must, and this is addressed to him.

POETRY / Summer 2007

Hasta la Vista Buckaroo

By Charles Wright

So many have come and gone, undone
like a rhinestone cowboy,
Dazzle and snuff, Lord, dazzle and snuff,
In a two-bit rodeo.

 

POETRY / Summer 2007

Little Prayer

By Charles Wright

Lord of the ugly chair and broken sofa,
Lord
Of mouse piss and pack rat shit,
Lord of the badger bite and the pine squirrel nest,
cleanse me and make me whole.

 

POETRY / Summer 2007

Kingsport Harmony

By Charles Wright

That landscape—unpeopled, unburiable, sun-stunned—
Lifts me re-orphaned out of language
Into the nomenclature of stones,
unangeled, unsought-for.

 

POETRY / Winter 2006

from Littlefoot

By Charles Wright
ESSAYS / Spring 2005

Old Papa Cosmos

By Charles Wright

Walt Whitman has always been problematic for me. Too vatic, too nationalistic, too in-your-face. For years I didn’t pay much attention to him, being smitten with Miss Dickinson, who told it slant, and others who told it otherwise but in a...

POETRY / Spring 2004

The Minor Art of Self-Defense

By Charles Wright

Landscape was never a subject matter, it was a technique, 
A method of measure, 
                                a scaffold for structuring. 
I stole its silences, I stepped to its hue and cry. 

 

POETRY / Spring 2004

A Field Guide to the Birds of the Upper Yaak

By Charles Wright

A misty rain, no wind from the west, 
Clouds close as smoke to the ground, 
                                                      spring’s fire, like a first love, now gone to ash, 
The lives of angels beginning to end like porch lights turned...