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 everyday. For Wright that landscape might be the shores of Italy, his native Tennessee, or his own backyard on Locust Avenue in Charlottesville. He calls it “eschatological naturalism: a school of one.” An imaginary argument with Tu Fu in “China Mail” reveals the underpinning—both highbrow and tongue-in-cheek, serious and self-effacing—of Wright's poetry: “Study the absolute, your book says. But not too hard, // I add, just under my breath.” Wright's poems yearn for the ideal, but are tempered by a suspicion of futility.

This focus on unanswerable questions has allowed Wright's work to be peopled by family and familiar locales without slouching into private confession. And the unfolding of his “impersonal autobiography” over three decades has earned him the praise of critics—from Harold Bloom to Helen Vendler—and the seemingly unanimous admiration of other poets. In 1979 he won the PEN Translation Prize for his version of Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Things; in '83 he received the National Book Award for Country Music: Selected Early Poems; and in '95 he was awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Yet nothing could have prepared Wright for the laurels heaped upon his 1998 collection Black Zodiac, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pulitzer. When we talked in his office at the University of Virginia in early June, he was at the end of a nonstop string of interviews, readings, and appearances. All of which makes Wright both pleased and a bit uneasy.

When he joined the military and was assigned to a counterintelligence unit in Italy in 1959, poetry was not an avenue for Wright to gain acclaim but rather a ready escape. It wasn't until a seminal experience in Italy—reading Pound's “Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula” at the Grotte di Catullo, on Sirmione Peninsula, the very ground where the poem was conceived—that Wright felt the desire to compose poems of his own. Until that time, his life had followed a very different course. He was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935, and grew up in nearby Kingsport. While attending Davidson College, in North Carolina, he majored in history and planned to enter a career in law or advertising once he completed his military service. But in Italy he read Pound voraciously, using Selected Poems and The Pisan Cantos as his guidebook, and wrote some of his first verses—including the prose poem “Nocturne,” which commemorates his experience on Sirmione. Soon he had pulled together a small batch of poems and sent them to the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

He attended the workshop from 1961 to '63, then spent two years in Italy translating Montale on a Fulbright, and returned to Iowa for 1965–66. Later that year he took a teaching job at the University of California at Irvine, where he remained—apart from a one-year Fulbright lectureship at the University of Padua—until 1983. Since then he has taught creative writing at the University of Virginia, where he holds the Souder Family Professorship. In fall 1998, Farrar, Straus & Giroux released Appalachia, to be followed by a fine-press edition of North American Bear and another Selected volume [Negative Blue] in spring 2000. With that publication, the thirty-year project—the “trilogy of trilogies”—will come to an end.

We will have to wait to see what comes next. What is certain is that Wright's is among the most interesting projects in contemporary American poetry. Wedding the Whitmanically inclusive free-verse line with the introspection and wit of Emily Dickinson, Wright's poems are as conversational as they are complex. Though he eschews conventional narrative, the forward tug of time dominates. The quotidian acquires its own transcendence; he remains ever mindful of Dante's assertion that “the true purpose of and result of poetry is a contemplation of the divine and its attendant mysteries.” Without fanfare or pretension Charles Wright addresses those mysteries. Though soft-spoken, his voice is singular and unmistakable.

[Genoways:] Talk a bit about what drew you to poetry.

[Wright:] Well, I had no interest at all until I graduated from college and realized I wouldn't be able to write prose, because I had tried to write stories and they had all ended up purple: you know, no storyline, no action, no definition of any kind. And I can remember sitting in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters at Ft. Holleburg, Maryland, and being very proud of myself one evening, because everyone else had gone to the bar and I sat home drinking wine and reading a book of Chinese poems—translations I had found somewhere. And I don't know whether I liked the poems so much or whether I liked the idea of myself staying away from the riffraff and reading a book of Chinese poems as a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant. Right after that, I remember going to New York on leave for the weekend and buying—since I was interested in poems by that time (in the abstract)—a copy of The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. When I went out to California to the language school, I didn't have time to do that sort of business. I was studying every night for hours and every weekend, but I still had Pound's Selected Poems, and I took that to Europe. When I got to Italy, the book of Chinese poems, somewhere in the mists, got lost.

In March 1959, two months after I got to Verona, where I was stationed, a friend of mine had borrowed—when he found out that I had it—the Selected Poems of Pound, and he gave it back to me. I told him I was going one afternoon to Lake Garda, and he said, “Read this poem, ‘Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula,’ because you will be sitting at the end of Sirmione Peninsula on Catullus's supposed villa.” And I did, and I thought it was fabulous. And it didn't have a storyline; it was a lyric poem. It worked by accretion—it described the landscape; it had interior questions that were unanswerable, the rhetorical questions one tends to ask in one's life. I thought this was pretty much it, and from then on I got very much interested in trying to write poems. Or what I thought were poems. I didn't know what a poem was. Of course, I'd taken English courses in college, but I never paid much attention to poetry … but I started hearing something, and I continued to hear it as I moved through the rest of the Selected Poems.

There was an old bookstore on Villa Mazzini where Arni Schweiwiller published fine-press books. Al'insignia del Pesce d'Oro: at the sign of the golden fish. That was his logo. Pound was so weird at that time—just one year back from St. Elizabeth's and living up in Milano—that he would let Schweiwiller, who had a little press in Verona, have the first editions of his poems; then they would go to Faber & Faber, then to New Directions. This little bookstore had these editions of cantos, of odd poems and translations, and it also had commemorative items. So there was access to some Pound material. That was basically how I came to it, and that was the only thing I knew about poetry—which wasn't enough, of course, but it was a start. I got a tune in my head.

And from there I went to Iowa, where I was never officially admitted. I just sort of walked in and started taking classes. No one knew any different, because there were two teachers [Donald Justice and Paul Engle], and each thought the other had taken me in over the summer. It was very loosely run in those days. I think it was actually much more interesting, and I can say that, because I've taught in the current one. I realized from the first day that The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound was not going to get me very far in the workshop, and so I had better start reading something else.

When you got to Iowa, you began schooling yourself in and writing a lot of formal poetry.

Yes, well … It was mostly during the three years afterward—two in Italy and then the third year back at Iowa—that I was writing in pentameter and rhyme and meter, trying to get that under some kind of control. At least get a handle on it. I did experiment with that some at Iowa in the first two years, but since everybody else was doing syllabics, hey, why shouldn't I? I didn't know anything; I was doing whatever was happening.

I was very lucky to be there during the breakup of the '50s glacier of strict formalism that Iowa had had. There was still enough of that ice around so that I could find out what it was about, but people were leaning toward freer movement in their lines. Syllabics were a halfway house. People had been trying to write some free verse, of course, but it was still OK, and even applauded, to write formal meters too. At the same time, people were doing prose poems. It was a good time; a lot of things were going on.

The syllabics you began writing, those that appeared in The Grave of the Right Hand, are all either five-syllable or seven-syllable lines. And your lines still have odd syllable counts.

Well, except for every once in a great while.

What is the appeal of the odd-syllable line?

For one thing, I like numbers. I graduated from high school in '53, college in '57, and my laundry number in college was 597. … There are all these odd numbers. But mostly it was to keep it out of any kind of normal progression, which is to say that if you have even numbers you're more likely to fall into tetrameter or pentameter. Easier to keep it out—but still have the ghost of it—with the odd, because you get an extra little syllable. The seven-syllable line is still my ur-line even now, thirty-five years later. And my seven-syllable line will stretch to thirteen, another one I like, or fifteen or seventeen, sometimes nineteen, and then back down to as low as three or five. But the seven-syllable line is the one everything starts from—either goes forward from or stays back from. I suppose that's because once I started doing that I really heard it in my head, and I can't get it out. Sort of like someone learned pentameter and then did other things, but when they come back without thinking to what a line of poetry sounds like, it always sounds like pentameter. Well, I didn't have that; I had the seven-syllable line, and it's close enough to formal meter that it pleases my ear. It makes a musical sound, and even if you stretch it and shrink it, you have this background of formal meters to overlay your conversation on. Not chitchat, but a conversational tone that keeps it from being, you know, “What hast thou, O my soul, with paradise?”—the first line of “Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula,” which I thought was so gorgeous at the time. Still OK, but a little Victorian. Pound was, as we all know, the last great Victorian. He threw his body over the barbed wire, and modernism ran up his back and over into no-man's-land. He was there, looking, but he still got hung up on the wire the rest of his life. Without him modernism wouldn't have gotten there, but I'm not sure he ever really caught up. He was a great Victorian, just like Hopkins. That has nothing to do with what you asked. …

But it's interesting, because both Pound and Hopkins seem to have so profoundly influenced your work.

I guess it's sound patterns. I like sound. That's no secret, and Hopkins was so idiosyncratic and so odd, inimitable, that you can really enjoy him—or dislike him, I suppose, if you're William Carlos Williams and think he's taking everything the wrong way—but you can enjoy him without guilt and without fear. Pound is somewhat the same way. I haven't read him in twenty, twenty-five years. Everybody reads someone a lot in the beginning, and whoever pulls you in sticks with you. And you hope somebody good pulls you in and not somebody bad—somebody you can't get rid of. So, yes, I was pulled in by an occasionally great poet, someone who's very interesting and helped shape the way we look at things in this century. I would rather have been pulled in by Pound than by Eliot, even though I admire Eliot's poems, and I especially like Four Quartets. But I would much rather have been initiated by Pound, because I think the possibilities for exploration are larger. At least in my case, Pound would be expansive and Eliot restrictive. But I didn't have a choice—I just happened upon Pound; that's the way it went. I feel fortunate.

The statement at the beginning of Appalachia bills it as the completion of a “trilogy of trilogies.” Hard Freight, Bloodlines, and China Trace, together with a prologue from The Grave of the Right Hand, became Country Music; then The Southern Cross, The Other Side of the River, and Zone Journals, together with the epilogue Xionia, became The World of the Ten Thousand Things; and now Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia complete the last trilogy. What do you see each of those sequences as doing, and how do they work as a whole? You describe it as a sequence.

It's an odd sequence. All three trilogies do the same thing, and they have essentially the same structure. Past, present, future: yesterday, today, tomorrow. That's just the guiding—well, it's not a thought—the guiding sound bite behind the first trilogy, which actually went that way, I think. Then I wanted to technically alter the way I was writing the line in the next group, and I went on other explorations. For instance, I tried to do more narrative in The Other Side of the River; I did longer poems in Zone Journals. And I wanted to bring in other kinds of business, like raising the diary form to a higher level of artifice. I don't know exactly how to say that, but I wanted to make it a more serious form, and I wanted to see what one could do with it in poetry and still have it be entries. So all that was behind the next group of books, but they're still structured the same way. There's the past, the present, and the future, but larger. And so is the last one. I still don't know the name of the last trilogy, but that's on top of the second trilogy, so you get an inverted pyramid. It's the same pyramid but larger each time.

So, to answer your question, they're all doing the same thing, which is a kind of radar echo, I suppose, of the Divine Comedy. You know, I don't even like to bring those words up, but—the way James Merrill had three books in The Changing Light at Sandover, and the way Pound was trying to write one, the way a lot of people do—that's the thing the sonar is coming back from that you can never see and never approach.

That's why I said Appalachia is not a paradiso, because I seem to be incapable of writing one. Though mentally, perhaps, certainly spiritually, it's become a book of the dead, because I can give a pep talk to those who might be true believers, which is what most books of the dead are, the Egyptian books of the dead. That's why it's the last one, and, I guess, why it was written so quickly in terms of my usual production. Chickamauga took five long years to write, and both Black Zodiac and Appalachia together took three years and four months. I saw the end in sight, I saw the conclusion of what I was trying to do. And when I didn't do anything for months and months and months, I realized I really was at the end. I wasn't just kidding myself. I had had something I was trying to do, and I did it, and that was it. Now I can sort of shut up again, I hope.

That's a real glaze-over, because there are lots more things that go together to make up each individual book, and each poem is individual—they don't depend on what precedes and what follows—but they are enhanced, I think, in the overall thing. And I do think that this last trilogy is as much one as the first was. I suppose the middle one would be the least “trilogeic,” in the sense I've been talking about, but since it's more about the present—you know, “the world of the ten thousand things”—that seems only fair. Naturally, it should be the least structured.

And Appalachia seems to be a conclusion not only to this trilogy but to all of them. There are references throughout to your earlier books.

There are things in Appalachia that go all the way back to the first trilogy, particularly China Trace, because that's its mirror book. That's on purpose, not because I didn't know what else to say. That's why I said the trilogies are all doing the same thing, only differently, more expansively.

Some of these poems seem even to look like the earlier poems. There are a number that are completely left-justified, with none of the trademark drop lines.

I don't know why. It's just the way I was hearing it. Maybe once I sped up and saw the end, the lines moved faster. What I've been working on since Appalachia is this thing I started in March, and I'm still … I have a couple of stanzas, each about six lines, and one or two of them will be dropped. I do know that every once in a while in Appalachia there seems to be a spate of them with not too many drop lines. I don't know why that is.

How do you decide how the poem will move across the page? How do you decide between a drop line and a line break, for example?

I don't have a program for the way I use them. It's the way I hear them. If it's coming together and springing, then I'll drop it down. If it needs to have a little push, I'll drop it. If it seems to be breaking under its own weight, then I'll drop it to the next line. If it doesn't, I let it go. I don't have any program: “Out of every five lines one or two must be dropped.” It's not like that.

No, but there is an amazing sense of structure in your work—which is surprising, when so much of it seems to be an argument against narrative.

Not really. Do you mean professionally or in my own stuff?

In your own stuff. I don't think you're being dogmatic. But there is a tension between your resistance to narrative and this overarching architecture—in each individual poem and in constructing a twenty-seven-year cycle. And so many of your books move forward in time, in strict allegiance to chronology. Explain the difference, in your mind, between structure and narrative, and between chronology and narrative.

Overt narrative tells a story. Covert narrative also tells a story, but in a different language. Everything has a narrative to it; don't get me wrong. It's just that I'm no good at storyline. My story is always underneath, always covert. Chronology perhaps is a way of helping move that mole under the ground, and you watch his little pile behind him as he goes. Structure, of course, is my substitute for storytelling. I guess I'd like to be like Robert Frost and spin yarns in beautiful blank verse, but I can't do it, so I have to make up my own prosody. Out of a deficiency I've tried to make a positive thing. And I talk about it so much that people think, “Even if I don't like it, at least he knows what he's doing.” But structure long ago became paramount to me in forming my poems, because narrative is not going to hold it together. So the way I layered impressions, images, the observations, is key to covert, unspoken narrative, but it was there inevitably. At least I hope it was there, holding it together, because something has to. You can't just put it in a box and say, “There's a structure.” That's what the New Formalists try to do. The Old Formalists built that box, you know? There's a big difference. So I was trying to build my own box in a different way. That's why I have this juxtapositional way of putting things together. That works in poems; it would be disastrous in prose. And it is, which is why I don't seem able to do essays or that sort of thing, because my mind just doesn't work in those terms. I can get a thought from A to B, but I go circuitously. I can't go straight to it. I think I'm going straight to it—I'm trying to—and the storyline gets you there, but as I say, it's always hidden. Like a punji stick underneath the trail. Sometimes you stumble on it, sometimes you don't. All I can say in answer to that question is that I perceived in my poetic makeup a huge deficit and deficiency, and I've tried to make something out of that void.

And others are embarked on similar projects. What sets your work apart for me—and David Young points this out—is your sense of humor. It seems when you're up against the most serious matters in your poems, you're at your most self-effacing. It's not looking directly into the face of the divine. …

It's checking out the belt buckle. As I should. That's true. It would be foolish to take one's self as seriously as one's subject matter. I'm really glad that David Young recognized this, because everybody is always saying, “This guy is so morbid, so somber,” and I never thought of it that way. I thought I was talking about serious things, but never in a way that would be ponderous or turgid. In one's secret self, one comes up against these things; you have to face them, but you also have to realize that you're just a song-and-dance man. So you had better sing as best you can and shuffle off to Buffalo. And that's it. But you don't want to not go in and do it.

I don't know. It's hard to talk about that. It's all so much larger than all of us. You have to be careful how ponderous you can start to sound, or no one is going to take you seriously. You can't sound like Ecclesiastes all the time.

In Appalachia, the poem “Star Turn II” opens with the description of the night sky. There are a few comparisons, but after it's compared to a sequined dress, there's this drop line: “—hubba, hubba—.”

My favorite line in my entire works. I knew it from the second I wrote it.

But it's not the sort of interjection we expect to find in contemporary poems, especially not those tackling the sorts of issues you're taking on.

Yes. The seriousness you're trying to describe is there, but there is also a little levity to make it easier to take. I think “hubba hubba” is witty—actually, I think it's funny. Most of my stuff tries to be witty. For instance, there's the line “‘Sainthood the bottomless pity’ someone said.” Well, I said that, because I thought it was sort of witty and it had to do with what I was getting ready to say. It's a serious thought, but it's also humorous. I'm not as funny as Jim Tate, for instance, who is amazingly and continuously funny. As Woody Allen once put it, “Too much seriousity is a bad thing.” So I try not to have too much seriousity.

You've spent twenty-seven years creating your poetics and writing this trilogy of trilogies. What are you going to do with next twenty-seven years?

I really don't know. Obviously, I'm going to keep writing poems. This spring has been kind of crazy, but I hope everything will settle down and I can get back to work. I obviously will not have this same path or trajectory in mind, so … it's hard, it's impossible to change what you're thinking, but I've got to come at it in a different way from the journey this project seems to have been on—from the early poems in Country Music to the last poems of Black Zodiac and Appalachia. At least I see a definite arc—a movement with different weaves to it—but the arc is always the same: from the past to the impossible or possible, the improbable or probable future. And that's good. I did that. Now I've got to figure out how to be interesting to myself with the accouterments that I have accrued over the years. And not write the same poems. We've all got maybe four or five ideas in our heads our whole lives. We know that, and we all write basic variations of the same handful of poems, because those are what our interests are. If you don't write what your interests are, it will be a piece of fluff—or worse, a piece of something else. And so I have my concerns and my interests, and I'll have to figure out a way to reshuffle them and keep on writing poems. I can't turn into an essayist, because I can't keep the thoughts straight. If I'd had a life, I could have written a memoir. I never got a life; it's all in my poems.

Or all you're willing to show.

Well, yes.

One can't help but notice that you've appeared uncomfortable at times this spring, especially at the Pulitzer reception.

Well, one wants one's work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author of Black Zodiac. That's impossible to do, I know. Some people love the spotlight; I like the shadows. I like the spotlight on my work, because that's what's important. It's better-looking and younger and wealthier and more articulate. No, I never have liked the spotlight. I have friends who love it and are great at it. Not me. The attention for the book is wonderful. I'm not sure it's gotten me more readers, but I've got more buyers, and that's good. So keep those cards and letters coming to the bookstores. Not me.