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

“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 / Summer 2007

Next

By Charles Wright

The Great Scribe, who remembers nothing,
not even your name the instant he writes it down,
Would like it up here, I think,
The blank page of the sundown sky, the tamarack quill points,
and no one to answer for.

 

POETRY / Summer 2007

With Horace, Sitting on the Platform, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee

By Charles Wright

Seventy years, and what’s left?
Or better still, what’s gone before?
A couple of lines, a day or two out in the cold?
And all those books, those half-baked books,
sweet yeast for the yellow dust?

 

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

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...

POETRY / Spring 2004

Wrong Notes

By Charles Wright

To bring the night sky to life,
                                          strike a wrong note from time to time.