Contemporary Literary Criticism | Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Charles Wright with Ted Genoways (interview date Spring 2000)

Charles Wright with Ted Genoways (interview date Spring 2000)

SOURCE: “An Interview with Charles Wright,” in Southern Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring, 2000, pp. 442-52.

[In the following interview, Wright discusses his education and formative influences, the thematic unity of his trilogy of collected works, and his poetic style, technique, and approach to serious philosophical subjects.]

All my poems seem to be an ongoing argument with myself about the unlikelihood of salvation.

—Charles Wright, Halflife

Charles Wright's poetry is a strange alchemy, a fusion of the direct, understated lyrics of ancient Chinese poets like Tu Fu and Wang Wei, the lush language of nineteenth-century Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the allusive, rhetorical movement—the “gists and piths”—of Ezra Pound's Cantos. The element common to each is a search for transcendence in the landscape of...

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