a couple of articles:
a couple of videos:
Poet Charles Wright reads from Scar Tissue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF9Y9Kuz19U
Poet Charles Wright Reads His Work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbRFFM8z_dQ
http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2014/14-101.htmlLibrarian of Congress Appoints Charles Wright Poet Laureate
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced the appointment of Charles Wright as the Library’s 20th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2014-2015.
Wright will take up his duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary season with a reading of his work at the Coolidge Auditorium on Thursday, September 25.
"Charles Wright is a master of the meditative, image-driven lyric," said Billington. "For almost 50 years his poems have reckoned with what he calls ‘language, landscape, and the idea of God.’ Wright’s body of work combines a Southern sensibility with an allusive expansiveness, for moments of singular musicality."
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/13/321586882/charles-wright-the-contemplative-poet-laureateCharles Wright: The Contemplative Poet Laureate
Our next poet laureate may end up speaking on behalf of the more private duties of the poet — contemplation, wisdom, searching — rather than public ones. In one of his first public statements after learning of his new post, Charles Wright said that, as laureate, "I'll probably stay here at home and think about things." He also told NPR, "I will not be an activist laureate, I don't think, the way Natasha [Trethewey] was ... and certainly not the way Billy Collins was, or Bob Hass, or Rita Dove, or Robert Pinsky; you know, they had programs. I have no program."
This hermetic stance is in keeping with the personality of Wright's poems, which match a certain notion of what poetry ought to sound like: "wise," first and foremost, tackling big ideas such as spirituality and life and death. They tend to approach the spiritual in an open-ended way, as though someone smart were writing a kind of improvisational Bible with a Southern twang (like Trethewey, the outgoing laureate, Wright is from the South — Tennessee, to be exact) in which God and nature are mostly interchangeable.
a couple of videos:
Poet Charles Wright reads from Scar Tissue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF9Y9Kuz19U
Poet Charles Wright Reads His Work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbRFFM8z_dQ