Stephen Burt Remembers C. D. Wright
The outpouring of tributes and remembrances of C. D. Wright, across publications and on social media, has been much expected and yet still astonishing. As we reported last week, Wright died in her home on January 12th. Yesterday at Jacket Copy, Stephen Burt shared his thoughts on the life and work of Wright. Burt writes:
When C.D. Wright died Jan. 12, American poetry lost one of the great ones, one of the figures who changed what the language can do, one of the writers whose lines and titles, sentences and similes are going to last at least as long as American English. That’s something I believe, but it’s also something that seems inappropriate, even rude, to say, because Wright’s artistic powers cannot be separated from her deep sense of democracy, her work against boundaries, rankings and exclusions, her insistence that poetry, and society, should become, not a hierarchy or a star system or a way to exalt a singular self, but a way to be generous, to share the powers we get, to give of oneself, to let everybody come in.
She came, as all her readers have noticed, from the Ozarks, the daughter of a judge and a court reporter whose stenotype’s imprint adorns the interior pages of her 1998 mostly-prose poem “Deepstep Come Shining.” Wright’s earliest poems, penned in Arkansas in the 1970s, exercised a scary, compact, post-Surrealist, Southern Gothic mode, shared with the charismatic, prolific, self-destructive poet Frank Stanford, whose life and death Wright’s “Translation of the Gospel Back Into Tongues” (1982) remembers. “Maybe you have to be from there to hear it sing,” Wright would speculate later, in her beautiful compact sequence “The Ozark Odes” -- but part of the point of her projects was that you don’t. The crackle and idiosyncrasy of her language, the concretely sensory weirdness of it all, meant that you didn’t have to live Wright’s life, or anything like it, to feel that she spoke to you.
To learn how to write that way, she had to leave: first for San Francisco, where she encountered dry avant-garde techniques and wove them -- one of the first poets to do so -- into what had been steamy late Romantic modes. In San Francisco, too, she met Forrest Gander, later to become an important poet (start with “Torn Awake”) and a major translator and editor of Spanish-language poetry (look for his “Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda” soon). Gander and Wright fell in love and moved briefly to Mexico. Then, in 1983, Wright got a job at Brown University. For the next three decades, young American poets who wanted to sound both personal and strange, both observant and unpredictable, who wanted both to experiment and to sing, would try to study with her there.
Burt goes on to look at the span of Wright's writing career, her teaching and relationship to students and fellow poets, and her many other achievements. Go now to read the remembrance in full.