I’m country but sophisticated. I’m particular and concrete, but I’m
probing another plane. . . . There are many times when I want to hammer
the head. Other times I want to sleep on the hammer.
probing another plane. . . . There are many times when I want to hammer
the head. Other times I want to sleep on the hammer.
– C. D. Wright
C.D. Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and her experience within the Ozarks and her native region have left an unshakable mark on a career that’s seen the poet and her work meet with audiences across the country.
Wright is the daughter of a judge and a court reporter; this biographical note helps to provide a familial and regional context for poems which can stun and dizzy readers in their abilities to transcend normal temporal and spatial expectations. In books such as Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected Poems (2007) or the much-loved Deepstep Come Shining (1998), Wright utilizes a one-of-a-kind amalgam of narrative, collage, and lyrical techniques – yet, unlike a great many of her contemporaries, this stylistic DNA is not an end in itself, but a way of telling stories deeply rooted in local experience.
Her most recent book, One With Others, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry. Dan Chiasson, writing in The New Yorker, offers this excellent introduction to both the book and Wright’s poetics:
In August, 1969, a Memphis man known as Sweet Willie Wine led a group of
black men on a four-day March Against Fear, from West Memphis to Little
Rock, passing through the small towns of the Arkansas delta. One with
Others the Arkansas-born poet C. D. Wright’s new, book-length poem,
tells the story of the march, and of the only outsider to join it, a
small-town white woman, Margaret Kaelin McHugh, whom Wright calls V. The
gnomic title suggests the bargain that V made: the act that momentarily
unified her with others permanently singled her out. Becoming “one with
others,” she ended up a pariah—one with others. The book is
foremost an elegy for McHugh, whom Wright, in interviews, has described
as “a giant of my imagination, an autodidact, deeply literary, an
outraged citizen, a killingly funny, irresistible human.”The era has been so memorably captured in documentaries that, even when
you imagine it, you end up drifting into documentary conventions. It
turns out that the literary genre least likely to get in the way of this
story is poetry, which, despite its reputation for gilt and taffeta,
comfortably veers close to “documentary” conventions. It comes
especially close in Wright’s angular strain of postmodern poetry, which
draws on refractive techniques now a hundred years old: collage,
extensive quotation, multiplicity of voice and tone, found material,
and, often, a non-authorial, disinterested stance. “One with Others”
represents Wright’s most audacious experiment yet in loading up lyric
with evidentiary fact.
If white people can ride down the highways
with guns in their trucksI can walk down the highway
unarmedScott Bond, born a slave, becamea millionaire. Wouldn’t
you like to run wildrun free. The Very Reverend
Al Greenhailed from here. Sonny Liston
a few miles west,San Slough. Head hardenedon hickory sticks. A reporter
asks a familyof sharecroppers quietly watching
the procession,Does this walk mean anything
to you.The father says, the others
nod,It means that Sweet Willie
Wine is walking.