Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 11, 1993 TAG: 9305110428
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long
Maybe they wield their Lawnboys and muse:
Forsythia purrs in its burning shell,
Jonquils, like Dante's angels, appear from their blue shoots.
How can we think to know of another's desire for darkness,
That low coo like a dove's
insistent outside the heart's window?
And maybe University of Virginia Professor Charles Wright, who wrote those lines and shares those beliefs, would like to split his $75,000 with them. Or maybe not.
Wright, 57, last week won the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the richest poetry award in the country. Already he has plans for the money: "One thing I'm going to do, is I'm going to buy a suit for the awards ceremony."
He'll also put his son through graduate school and take a trip with his wife. Then it's back to the university, back to the pad and pen, back to his yardwork.
"That's about what I do, is cut the grass What Charles Wright does best is paint images with words. and think about poems," he says.
So far the combination has resulted in 10 published collections and, in 1983, a National Book Award. All this for a man who considers himself something of a failure in a failed land: practicing a dying art in the faded sun of the South.
Poetry came relatively late in life for Wright; he didn't start writing it until he was 23. He had failed at fiction, failed at being in the Army and lost heart for journalism. He snuck into the fabled Iowa Writers' Workshop without being accepted. His biggest claim to literary genes is that his mother once dated William Faulkner's brother.
What Wright does right is concoct images with words - not tell stories, just make pictures. He writes about his ancestors, people he knew growing up in the South, and about the landscape. Everyday things, for the most part, but presented in a way that makes them stand for more.
"He is a master image-maker whose word pictures evoke haunting dimensions in the American landscape, particularly the South of his childhood," said Joseph Parisi, editor of Poetry Magazine, in announcing the Lilly award.
Wright uses images for their power beyond words. From "Night Journal:"
If we were as eloquent,
If what we say could spread the good news the way that dogwood does,
Its votive candles
phosphorous and articulate in the green haze
Of spring, surely something would hear us.
Sitting in his office, with a single window framing the China blue sky of one of his poems, Wright tilts his Reeboks on the rim of a desk so sparse it looks like he has cleared out to leave: On the left, a telephone and note pad; then a wide empty expanse; then a wire basket and two pieces of mail. That's it.
"It's not normal," he says. "I mean, it's normal for me but not a normal way for a normal person to be. I'm neat with everything. It's an obsession. Or not neat, but orderly; there's a difference. I'm compulsively orderly."
He's that way with words. His poems take time, sweat, doubt and more doubt as Wright struggles to bring order to his thoughts. And even awards don't make him satisfied with the results.
"Everything falls short," Wright says. "If you stopped falling short, you'd stop writing." A poem is finished "when you can't mess it up anymore."
Wright has the same compulsion for order in conversation. He talks, then pauses and sums up with a tasty zinger of a line that sometimes holds more truth than he realizes.
For a profile in The Washington Post last week, for instance, Wright characterized his audience as mostly "ex-nuns and failed Catholics, and maybe some hermit out there in the desert somewhere."
After the Post story ran, Wright got a call from an admirer he hadn't spoken to in years. "She said, `I read that and I started crying. He means me! He means me!' I really hadn't thought of her when I said it," he says. The woman was an ex-nun.
That kind of unconscious rightness has served Wright well throughout his life (including winning the Lilly award this year, because the payoff just tripled from $25,000).
Born in western Tennessee, Wright traveled the state with his family until settling in Kingsport. His father built dams for the Tennessee Valley Authority; his mother, Wright believes, harbored a secret desire to be a writer.
"So I assume all my mother's original desires got laid on my head. It turned out to be very lucky for me," Wright says. "Most parents think being a writer is the black hole of life."
It could have been a black hole for Wright. In high school and at Davidson College in North Carolina, he tried fiction. "I failed," he says. "I couldn't write a narrative. What I wrote came out all purple and it was all just musings."
Four years in the Army set him on course. Stationed in Italy, working a desk job in counterintelligence, Wright had no interest in the military. He did have a car and money and a yen to explore, and someone had given him a volume of poems by Ezra Pound.
Sitting at Roman ruins on a lake outside Verona, Wright read a Pound poem describing that very scene. Something clicked - the literary term would be epiphany - and he realized he wanted to write poetry.
He scratched plans to study journalism at Columbia University and switched to the University of Iowa. Not realizing he needed a separate application for the school's Writers' Workshop, Wright spent a year studying poetry before the faculty realized he had never formally been admitted. By then he was in. Literary term: good luck.
He spent more time in Italy as a Fulbright scholar and lecturer, then taught at the University of California at Irvine. For 17 years, Wright lived in the West and wrote about his ancestors in the South - his mother's roots in Clarke County, Va.; his boyhood in Tennessee and North Carolina; his father's roots in Arkansas.
The past was "my connection with things. It's where I've been, who I've known, what I've seen, who I've thought about. Those are connections that keep you human, I guess. It keeps you aware of who you are. Keeps you from getting above your raising," he says. He pauses, organizes, and makes it snappier:
"You can't relive the past; you can reread it."
In 1983, Wright was co-winner of the National Book Award for his collection "Country Music: Selected Early Poems." That same year he accepted a job at the University of Virginia. And, moving back to the South, he stopped writing about his ancestors.
Knot by knot I untie myself from the past
And let it rise away from me like a balloon.
What a small thing it becomes.
What a bright tweak at the vanishing point, blue on blue.
That passage from "Arkansas Traveler" was Wright's last look back.
His recent work has more to do with landscape, spirituality and the passage of time. "The subject of all poems is the clock," he writes in "Portrait of the Artist with Hart Crane."
Time is the great limitation, "carrying you away from everything you know, everything you loved," he says. "That's why the past seems so seductive, I suppose." No one feels that more deeply than a son of the South, a place defined by defeat and the loss of a mythic Golden Age.
Poetry is the perfect language for such a place and person. It, too, is "basically a dying art, but a dying art that will never disappear," Wright says. "Poetry is language that sounds better and means more; there will always be room for that."
The fat paycheck of a Ruth Lilly prize also helps keep poetry alive, because it helps keep struggling poets alive. Wright can forget about money for the next year. He'll still work, but he can enjoy things a little more - working in the yard, being with his family and his dogs.
Wright might even resurrect his long-neglected golf game. The ordered landscape and the futile struggle for perfection are, after all, what he is all about.
"If I had to go out and play golf and shoot par on every hole, wow, what a boring thing. You'd stop golfing immediately - no unexpected, no new possibilities," he says. Once again he stops and looks for the cleaner line. And finds it:
"Hell would be where you parred every hole always."
by CNB