Wright began to read and write poetry in Italy, while he was in the Army. It’s nothing like Wright’s mature work, but it makes clear that he will be one of those poets, like Wallace Stevens, who bring sumptuous particulars into the world by negation. Although it is sometimes taken at face value, the new poem that Wright describes is certainly not “The New Poem,” which, despite its austere rhetoric, is full of yearning. The poem is nine such statements in nine end-stopped lines. It will not have dirt on its thick hands. “The New Poem” begins on a pugilistic note:
Wright’s second collection, “Hard Freight,” from 1973, includes a prank manifesto that almost instantly entered anthologies and syllabi. A prose poem, a sprawling free-verse composition, and a sequence of economical sestets: they sound little like one another, but they all sound like Wright. The resulting “country music” is the distinct twang of one mind, remarkably constant despite sometimes audacious changes of form. The name of one of his works, “Poem Almost Wholly in My Own Manner,” describes many of his others, too.Įven the title of this volume gives a taste of Wright’s method of blending vocabularies: the word “oblivion” boasts a provenance in Western philosophy and literature, while the sound of the banjo brings back the “tinkly hymns” of Wright’s Southern childhood. Everything Wright touches takes on his style, a vernacular scavenged from place-names in Tennessee and Italy, the songs of the Carter Family and the cadences of the blues, and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Li Po, Dante, Emily Dickinson, and others. He taught for many years at the University of Virginia, publishing volumes of poetry at regular intervals.
He attended Davidson College and the University of Iowa and served in the Army, in Italy. Wright was born in 1935, in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee. Amid the ordinary gains and losses of the calendar year arrive the vivid envois of the past: a country drugstore, the “kamikaze Fiats” of Rome, a statue of Dante under alpine snow. In them, “places swim up and sink back, and days do,” leaving behind their residue. Charles Wright’s massive new volume of selected poems, “Oblivion Banjo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is assembled from nearly fifty years of his “small words, / Out of the wind and the weather.” The poems are banked impressions, like snowdrifts after a blizzard, or deposits left by a receding tide.
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