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 / Spring 2008

As the Train Rolls Through, I Remember an Old Poem

By Charles Wright

Well, here we are again, old friend, Ancient of Days,

Eyeball to eyeball. 

POETRY / Spring 2008

Sundown Blues

By Charles Wright

There are some things that can’t be conveyed—
description, for instance,
The sundown light on that dog hair lodge pole pine
and the dead branches of spruce trees.

 

POETRY / Spring 2008

Time Is a Child-biting Dog

By Charles Wright

Like rivers, my thoughts flow south,
for no particular reason.
Must be the full moon
That floods the sky, and makes the night wakeful
and full of remorse.

 

POETRY / Spring 2008

The Book

By Charles Wright

Whose name will be inscribed in the book
                                                                 just before mine?

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 / Summer 2007

Bitter Herbs to Eat, and Dipped in Honey

By Charles Wright

We lay out our own dark end,
guilt, and the happiness of guilt.