The U.S. Congress building in Washington D.C. The newly installed Poet Laureate of the United States recently gave a reading at the Library of Congress. Photo: MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images/Files WASHINGTON — You don’t often see a standing ovation at a poetry reading, but here we are, hundreds of us, up on our feet and pumping our fists for a white-haired wise guy who needs a haircut and rhyming lessons.
The target of our cheering is Charles Wright, 79, newly installed Poet Laureate of the United States, a writer whose philosophies of life, time and verse can be summarized by the opening lines of a poem entitled Ancient of Days:
This is an old man’s poetry,
written by someone who’s spent his life
Looking for one truth.
Sorry, pal, there isn’t one.
Well, Happy New Year to you, too, bub. Maybe it AIN’T such a wonderful life.
Charles Wright, 79, is the newly installed Poet Laureate of the United States.
The auditorium at the Library of Congress is jammed with boisterously literate Washingtonians, even though – or possibly because – the woebegone Redskins are playing across town at the same hour. The crowd is composed of university students, bearded hipsters, retired-librarian types with Vera Bradley handbags, and one reporter who wouldn’t know a chapbook from a ChapStick.
But Charles Wright, a U.S. army veteran, native Tennessean, retired University of Virginia professor, and now this country’s official federally funded sonneteer, is accessible enough to make even the prosaic lyrical. He calls poetry “this business I waste my heart on.”
“We don’t know what counts,” Wright admits. “It’s as simple as that, isn’t it? We don’t know what counts.”
The U.S. Laureateship is a buoyant vessel to sail. Unlike Canada’s Parliamentary versifiers, who are encouraged to issue commemorative couplets on portentous national occasions, there is no requirement that an American designee author anything at all during his or her two-year term. Praised once for his “vibrant” work, Wright responded by saying “So I’m just going to sit here and vibrate.”
“If you can’t say what you want to say in three lines,” he chastens us, “get a different style.”
“What if the soul indeed is outside the body?” Wright asks in his Washington debut, waxing poetic. In the final lines of Body & Soul, he urges us to:
Write as though you had one hand with the last pencil on earth.
Pray as though you were praying with someone else’s soul.
Much of Charles Wright’s work is descriptive of landscapes effaced by progress and fading memory – Dog Creek: cat track and bird splay, Spindrift and windfall; woodrot; Odor of muscadine. This is what the best poetry offers — restitution for our own forgotten histories, a residue that we can turn to when, as Wright wrote more than 40 years ago,
The heart is a hieroglyph;
The fingers, like praying mantises, poise
Over what they have once loved;
The ear, cold cave, is an absence,
Tapping its own thin wires;
The eye turns in on itself.
“Why does poetry matter?” an interviewer once asked Wright, and he answered:
“I knew someone was going to ask me that, and I spent all summer, three months in Montana, thinking about that, and I finally came up with an answer: I don’t know. I really don’t know. I know why it matters to me.”
We go back to Ancient of Days. In search of that elusive “one truth,” the poet recants his glib surrender, and finds verity in:
whatever the eye makes out,
And sends us, on its rough-road trace,
To the heart . . .
Wright begins to read from Under the Nine Trees in January, part of an old man’s newer
collection that one reviewer has called “a great poet’s last gasp.”
The world is a handkerchief.
Today I spread it across my knees.
Tomorrow they’ll fold it into my breast pocket,
white on my dark suit.
Hearing his own funereal words, the writer laughs out loud.
“I hope to be buried in Levi’s,” the Poet Laureate says.
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