WRIGHT, C(arolyn) D.

---

Nationality: American. Born: Mountain Home, Arkansas, 6 January 1949. Education: Memphis State University, Memphis, Tennessee, 1969–71, B.A. 1971; University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 1973–76, M.F.A. 1976. Family: Married Forrest Gander in 1982; one son. Career: Graduate teaching assistant, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 1973–76; poet-in-the-schools, Office of Arkansas Arts and Humanities, 1976–78; office manager, The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1980–82. Since 1983 professor, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Co-editor, Lost Roads Publishers, Providence, Rhode Island. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1982, 1988; Witter Bynner Poetry prize, 1986; Guggenheim fellowship, 1987; General Electric award for younger writers, 1988; Whiting Foundation award, 1989; Rhode Island Governor's award for the Arts, 1990; Poetry Center Book award, 1992; Lila Wallace Writers' award, 1992; State Poet of Rhode Island, 1994; Lannan Literary award, 1999; artist grant, Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts, 1999. Bunting Institute fellowship, 1987. Address: English Department, x1852, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Alla Breve Loving. Spokane, Washington, Mill Mountain Press, 1976.

Room Rented by a Single Woman. Fayetteville, Arkansas, Lost Roads Publishers, 1977.

Terrorism. Fayetteville, Arkansas, Lost Roads Publishers, 1978.

Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues. Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1981.

Further Adventures with You. Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon Press, 11986.

String Light. Athens, Georgia, University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Just Whistle. Berkeley, California, Kelsey Street Press, 1993.

The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1994.

Tremble. Hopewell, New Jersey, Ecco Press, 1996.

Deepstep Come Shining. Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 1998.

Recording: C.D. Wright (videotape), The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, 1992.

Other

The Reader's Map of Arkansas. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1995.

Editor, The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1995.

*

Critical Study: "Politics and the Personal Lyric in the Poetry of Joy Harjo and C.D. Wright" by Jenny Goodman, in Melus: Theory, Culture, and Criticism, 19(2), summer 1994.

C.D. Wright comments:

Poetry is my central station. All that can converge in a given individual intersects there for me, under the big clock. Many of my influences are extraliterary-friends, trees. Others answer to other arts—music, photography. Other disciplines—folklore, recent history. Still others, to temperament—leftist. And of course a lifetime of reading helter-skelter through the layers of time and translation, only gaining consistency and some pattern, from rural to urban, with contemporary American poetry. I still try to sustain a certain tolerance toward the whole field even as my own writing seems to be shifting allegiances. I try not to forfeit what can never be recovered—my hardheaded, idiomatic bedrock. I try not to remain ignorant of the ever changing present tense of poetry. Some say the genre is anachronistic. I say these people, their lives, have become too prosaic.

*  *  *

In the prose text "hills," which introduces her 1986 collection Further Adventures with You, C.D. Wright explains that her poems "are about desire, conflict, the dearth of justice for all. About persons of small means. They are succinct but otherwise orthodox novels in which the necessary characters are brought out, made intimate, … engage in dramatic action and leave the scene forever with or without a resolution in hand or sight. Each on the space of a page or less." This statement captures several qualities common to all of the work of this Arkansas-born poet, whose earliest writing was dialect based and regional in focus: its storytelling impulse, its focus on everyday things and events, its backdrop of melancholia and brooding violence, its necessarily elliptical brevity. Yet in a crucial respect Wright's later work has superseded the ars poetica she offers in "hills," for the relation between poetry and prose in her writing has become more complex, and her lineated stories veer demonstratively toward less orthodox forms.

Typical of Wright's earlier "orthodox novels" is the poem "Vanish," from Translations of the Gospels Back into Tongues (1981). This is a poem of memory, loss, and desire, all states of absence that Wright's poem comes to occupy, offering its lineaments of story to mark the place which the vanishing experience had occupied and now leaves bare. The poem offers fragmentary recollections of an encounter between a girl and a sailor, perhaps before the funeral of the girl's brother. The encounter ended long ago without issue, and the sailor and girl have separated. The poem's first-person voice shifts over the course of the poem's thirty-one lines from the aged sailor to the now mature girl. "Vanish" begins,

Because I did not die
I sit in the captain's chair
Going deaf in one ear, blind in the other.
I live because the sea does.

By the end, however, the girl's fading memories swallow up the sailor's voice, consigning it to the near oblivion of the sea swell:

Because I did not marry
I wash by the light of the body.
Soap floats out of my mind.
I have almost forgotten
The sailor whose name I did not catch,
His salty tongue on my ear,
A wave on a shell.

Only between these two drifting buoys of consciousness may the broken pieces of their common story surface, traces of the shipwrecked possibilities of love.

Wright's stories are often mediated through a wounded interiority or a dreaming mind, as in the title poem of her 1986 book Further Adventures with You:

We are on a primeval river in a reptilian den.
 
There are birds you don't want to tangle with, trees you
   cannot identify …
 
   Somehow we spend the evening with Mingus
in a White Castle. Or somewhere. Nearly drunk. He says
   he would like to play for the gang.

The dream—with its expression of unspoken wishes, its mobilization of childhood memories and ephemera of the day, its enigmatic yoking of distant scenes—serves as an apt model for the lyric consciousness implicit in Wright's poetry generally and not only in her "dream poems." For dreams, despite their apparent incoherence, are ways of revisiting what in our waking lives is irrecoverable, whether because of passing time or by our failure to attend to it as it was lived. Poetry, too, may be such a mode of dreamlike remembrance. As Wright suggests in "the box this comes in," an allegorical "deviation on poetry," a meditation on poetry via the image of an antique box, "Within the limits of this diminutive wooden world, I have made do with the cracks of light and tokens of loss and recovery that came my way."

Both Further Adventures with You and String Light, however, exhibit Wright's discovery of nonverse forms, which in turn seem to shift the center of gravity of her poetry from states of desire toward the experiential richness of language forms as such. Thus, in her sequence "The Ozark Odes" the section entitled "Arkansas Towns" is dedicated purely to the delightful and strange place-names of Wright's home state:

Acorn
Back Gate
Bald Knob
Ben Hur
Biggers
Blue Ball

—all the way up to "Whisp," "Yellville," and "Zent." Similarly, the prose poems subjoined to "What No One Could Have Told Them" isolate a single detail—a toddler urinating, a child yawning—and repeat it in new word contexts until the detail takes on luminosity as language, independent of its humble content. Wright's numerous prose poems, and above all the Kerouac-like "sketching" of "The Night I Met Little Floyd" and "The Next Time I Crossed the Line into Oklahoma," both in String Light, bear out the distinction she drew in "hills": whereas her poems are based on narrative, her prose "is about language if it is about any one thing."

—Tyrus Miller