Charles Wright
As we reach the end of the traditional work-week, we note the birth date of American poet Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) known for his lyricism and use of lush imagery in his poems about nature, life and death, and God.
Wright shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States.
In Country Music (1982), Wright reflected on some of the most eternal of human concerns—time, truth, nature, and death. The compelling representation of place is a notable feature of his poetry. Particularly effective are his descriptions of the American South, including the area around Charlottesville, Virginia, where the poet spent much of his life.
For the collection Black Zodiac (1997) Wright won both a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize (1998). Critics praised that collection for its innovative mixture of meditations, fragments of narrative, humor, and literary and artistic allusions.
Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn
Three years ago, in the afternoons,
I used to sit back here and try
To answer the simple arithmetic of my life,
But never could figure it—
This object and that object
Never contained the landscape
nor all of its implications,
This tree and that shrub
Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient
I took from or carried to,
nor do they do so now,
Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate,
Looking to see what adds up.
Everything comes from something,
only something comes from nothing,
Lao Tzu says, more or less.
Eminently sensible, I say,
Rubbing this tiny snail shell between my thumb and two fingers.
Delicate as an earring,
it carries its emptiness like a child
It would be rid of.
I rub it clockwise and counterclockwise, hoping for anything
Resplendent in its vocabulary or disguise—
But one and one make nothing, he adds,
endless and everywhere,
The shadow that everything casts.