In a former life, I worked as the publicist for Copper Canyon Press,
the venerable nonprofit poetry press based out of an old cannon repair
shop in Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington. At the
time, the press was publishing the work of some major, award-winning
American poets who most of my friends had never heard of (Ruth
Stone, Ted Kooser), and some major, award-winning poets who maybe a few
of my friends had heard of (Jim Harrison, W. S. Merwin). While I count
working for Copper Canyon as one of the best experiences of my
life—working daily with people so genuinely in love with, and
committed to, the power of language—I grew a little weary.
The task of publicizing poetry can easily feel Sisyphean. It is one
thing to love poetry; it is an entirely other thing to try and convince
book editors with shrinking column inches to review a book of
single-minded reflection when what people seem to be clamoring for are
books with titles like Confessions of a Shopaholic. It was, I
am sorry to say, easy to wonder if poetry does anything but offer
sensitive, middle-aged folks a chance to, as I probably once wearily
wrote in a press release, “glean moments of beauty and transcendence
from the seemingly inconsequential details of everyday life.” But then
I discovered C. D. Wright and my mind exploded.
The opening line of Cooling Time: An American Poetry
Vigil—
I believe in a hardheaded art, an unremitting, unrepentant
practice of one’s own faith in the word in one’s own obstinate
terms.
—published just as Wright was awarded a prestigious
MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, best describes, in the poet’s own words,
the work of one of America’s most important and idiosyncratic
contemporary writers. (Worth noting: The title Cooling Time is
derived from a line of defense unique to Texas courts that states if a
person kills someone before having had time “to cool” after receiving
an injury or insult, he is not guilty of murder. Also worth noting: The
cover art for the book, a painting called Man/Beast by
outsider artist Douglas Humble, depicts a man wrestling with a
bloody-toothed animal that looks like a giant piece of meat.) There is
no one like Wright. Her voice—crackling and edgy, corporeal and
erotic—carries with it the sound and feeling of her birthplace,
the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, though she’s lived the last 20 years
outside of Providence, where she teaches at Brown University. She has
an uncanny and characteristic reverence for both the vernacular and the
esoteric, which leads to riveting and rare depictions of American
culture.
Wright’s body of work, which includes 12 collections of poetry and
prose, is nothing short of incendiary. Her last book, One Big
Self, a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster, was an
astonishing journey into the Louisiana State Prison system. Luster took
inmate portraits while Wright composed the accompanying multilayered
text, which comprised inmate conversations, prison data, counts of
things, and letters to try and capture the physical and psychic toll
such confinement takes.
For such a demanding and avant-garde writer, Wright gets her due.
Having worked as Wright’s publicist, I’m aware of nearly everything any
critic or reviewer has ever said about her, most of it glorious and
true. Dave Eggers, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said, “For a long while now, C. D. Wright has been writing some of the
greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.” When I
read her latest book, Rising, Falling, Hovering, another
critic’s words entered my mind: “Wright gets better with each book,
expanding the reach of her art; it seems it could take in
anything.”
In Rising, Falling, Hovering, a book anchored with a
lengthy title poem that interweaves the war in Iraq, the war on illegal
immigration (“to be ashamed is to be American”), and the challenges of
parenting into an astonishing, deeply personal meditation on empire and
human relationships: “The momentum of lives shifts into the absence of
thought/The first task is to recover the true words for being.”
It’s been a while since I read an entire book of poetry in rapture.
After finishing Rising, Falling, Hovering, I was reminded of
why I love the medium, what it can do. I remembered something Wright
once told me over e-mail: “Just because the commercial world does not
count poetry in does not mean the private world counts it out. The
numbers are discouraging, the determination isn’t.” 
C. D. Wright reads Wed June 4, Central Library, 7 pm, free.
