Charles Wright to Become Next Poet Laureate of the United States

It's been decided, Charles Wright has been named the next U.S. poet laureate. The New York Times reports:

The Library of Congress is to announce on Thursday that the next poet laureate will be Charles Wright, the author of nearly two dozen collections of verse that fuse the legacy of European modernism with mystical evocations of the landscape of the American South.

Mr. Wright, 78, a retired professor at the University of Virginia, has already won just about every other honor in the poetry world, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

But reached by telephone at his house in Charlottesville, he still sounded a bit wide-eyed with surprise. “I’m very honored and flattered to be picked, but also somewhat confused,” Mr. Wright said in a softly accented voice, after apologizing for the sound of buzz saws cutting trees in the yard that he has described in poem after poem.

“I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he continued. “But as soon as I find out, I’ll do it.”

Wright will be filling some big shoes, following Natasha Trethewey's tenure as PLOTUS. If you're wondering why Wright was chosen for the position, we turn back to the NY Times:

Explaining his choice, James Billington, the librarian of Congress, said that as he read through the work of a dozen or so finalists, he kept coming back to Mr. Wright’s haunting poems, many of them gathered in a Dante-esque cycle of three trilogies known informally as “The Appalachian Book of the Dead.”

His “combination of literary elegance and genuine humility — it’s just the rare alchemy of a great poet,” Dr. Billington said. Mr. Wright’s work, he added, offers “an infinite array of beautiful words reflected with constant freshness.”

Congratulations, Charles Wright!