A Living Season

Rowland Bagnall discovers “The Essential C. D. Wright,” edited by Forrest Gander and Michael Wiegers.

By Rowland BagnallMay 19, 2025

• Poetry

ON JANUARY 5, 2016, a day before her 67th birthday, C. D. Wright published The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, a collection of essays whose very title captures something of the breadth of her career. Drawn from her occasional prose, the book offers a glimpse into Wright’s lifelong commitment to the power of pinpointing language, of endlessly surrendering to doubts and contradictions. “Poetry is nothing if not equipped for crisis,” she writes. “Sharp and penetrating, it cuts through every fear by which we are secretly governed, brings each to the light of the page and names it.”

One week later, Wright died in her sleep following the unexpected onset of thrombosis, the result, according to her brother Warren, of “an overly long flight [home] from Chile,” where she had celebrated New Year’s Eve with friends, accompanied by her husband, poet Forrest Gander. Wright would not live to see the publication of her next book of poems, the prophetically titled ShallCross (2016), nor would she finish work on her ambitious, sprawling memoir-cum–research project Casting Deep Shade (2019), a poetic codex of the beech tree, left “in a perpetual state of becoming,” writes Ben Lerner of the book’s unfinishedness, leaving a “live graph of her process.”

In the weeks following Wright’s death, dozens of reflections and obituaries appeared, many written by her former students at Brown University—Lerner included—where she had taught alongside Gander since the early 1980s. Beyond her generosity, her work ethic, and her fierce advocacy for poetry—bone-deep, all-encompassing—these pieces often linger on the challenge of summarizing Wright’s poetics. She was “utterly beyond category,” begins Margalit Fox’s tribute in The New York Times. “Even categorizing her as uncategorizable is too easy,” wrote Lerner in a piece for The New Yorker: “she was part of a line of mavericks and contrarians who struggled to keep the language particular in times of ever-encroaching standardization.” The conundrum of how to sum up Wright’s career brings to mind Borges’s fictional taxonomy of animals—see “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1942)—a system that includes the category of creatures “included in this classification.” “I have never belonged to a notable element of writers […] partly because I come from Arkansas,” Wright suggested to Kent Johnson in a 2001 interview, “specifically that part of Arkansas known for its resistance-to-joining, […] where readily identifiable groups and sub-groups are less likely to form.” To reiterate Joel Brouwer’s well-worn line from his review of Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008), “Wright belongs to a school of exactly one.”

In typically Borgesian style, the question of how best to curate an “essential” selection of Wright’s work seems paradoxically impossible to answer, at least without compromising the essentially unessential nature of her writing. Edited with devotion by Gander and Michael Wiegers (Wright’s longtime publisher at Copper Canyon Press), the new collection The Essential C. D. Wright attempts a solution to the problem, bringing a selection of the poet’s work—spanning five decades of writing—into a single, understated volume. The publication serves as a reminder that the poet’s death “isn’t the end. It simply / cannot be the end,” to quote the opening of “Morning Star,” “It is a road. […] It is a living / season.”

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As Stephanie Burt has noted, “Wright’s history as a poet should not be separated from […] the places where she has lived.” Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas, in 1949; her early poetry, especially, is rooted in “the snake-threaded hilly tangle of rock that is the ozarks” (“A Farm Boy”). Wright has consistently acknowledged the environment and language of the Ozarks as the underlying principle of her poetics, her “idiom Ozarkia.” “Every year the poem I most want to write […] changes shapes, changes directions,” reads a passage from Wright’s Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005), but “in this poem it is always Arkansas, summer, evening.” “Those dark arkansas roads,” suggests “Key Episodes from an Earthly Life,” “that is the sound / I am after.” Bearing traces of the Southern Gothic, Wright’s early poems take the form of sparse, fragmentary narratives, both haunting and haunted, presenting snapshots of communities and individuals enduring hardship and brutality. “The midwife puts a rag in the dead woman’s hand,” begins “Obedience of the Corpse,” relating a tragedy during childbirth: “She hopes the mother’s milk is good awhile longer, / the woman up the road is still nursing.” “My poems are about desire, conflict, the dearth of justice for all,” Wright posited in an early statement. “They are succinct but otherwise orthodox novels.”

There is an elegiac quality to Wright’s poetry, where even the beauty of “snow nobody has walked on” and Rothkoesque shades of beetroot are tinged with melancholy. “I have never thought it hyperbole to say coming to poetry is a near-death experience,” Wright suggested: “I myself arrived here after a succession of losses,” culminating in “the death by suicide of Frank Stanford.” In a story that has acquired “an increasingly legendary patina” (in Harris Feinsod’s phrase), Wright and Stanford met in 1975 while Wright was studying at the University of Arkansas. The two began a short-lived, flame-like affair—Stanford was married to the painter Ginny Crouch Stanford—which greatly informed and intensified their writing. After his death in 1978, Wright took over the directorship of Stanford’s Lost Roads imprint and, in the year 2000, oversaw the reissue of his magnum opus, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977), a massive Southern odyssey running to over 15,000 lines. While Wright wrote about Stanford in an elegiac essay—“Frank Stanford of the Mulberry Family: An Arkansas Epilogue” (1997)—his figure presides, specter-like, over Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues (1982), where “Horses flinch / Against the cold spurs in the sky” and “love is darker / Than cola” (“Falling Beasts”).

Featuring cinematic jump cuts and jazzlike improvisations, moments of microscopic precision giving way to metaphysical abstraction, Wright’s poetry sparks between a tangible, earthbound reality and something harder to pin down, caught between “the human dimension” of our lived experience and the “existential drift” of memory and imagination (“End Thoughts”). At times, Wright’s poetry seems almost photographic in its clarity, presenting intimate snapshots of a world of people and their treasured things, setting words down on the white space of the paper like objects on a tablecloth. (While they are largely shot in Arizona, Wright’s poetry most reminds me of the strange, raw, blood-and-mud-stained photographs of Frederick Sommer.) “It is poetry that remarks on the barely perceptible disappearances from our world such as that of the sleeping porch or the root cellar,” Wright explained. “And poetry that notes the barely perceptible appearances.” Like all photography, Wright’s work asserts a quality of preservation, holding something back, as though a trace of the figure or object in question were suspended in the poem itself, “not the words,” exactly, but “the substance” (“Light Bulb Poem”). I’m reminded of a comment by the British poet Alice Oswald, writing about Homer:

If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you’ll see something of the difference between Homer’s poetry and anyone else’s. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the Iliad, real animals, real people, real light attending everything.

“You don’t just read a C. D. Wright poem,” suggests Karen Solie, detecting something of the same: “You breathe its magnolia, cigarette smoke, local water. You live in it, or it in you, you feel less alone.”

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Although the editors reproduce no images in this new selection, it comes as no surprise to discover Wright’s collaborations with photographers, notably Deborah Luster. One Big Self: An Investigation (2003) offers a journalistic interrogation of the US prison-industrial complex, for which Wright visited a number of Louisiana penitentiaries, developing an intimate, poetic exposé of a system all too easily rendered invisible, her text accompanied by Luster’s striking portraits of the inmates. Woven with the language of Wright’s interviewees, One Big Self is a collage of voices, a river made of many streams, a form of collective polyvocal poetry—a genre which infuses several of Wright’s book-length projects, particularly Deepstep Come Shining (1998), her extended ode to the Ozarks, and arguably the clearest statement of her contribution to American poetry.

For Burt, this collective mode betrays Wright’s “deep sense of democracy, her work against boundaries, rankings and exclusions,” an “insistence that poetry, and society, should become, not a hierarchy […] or a way to exalt a singular self, but a way to be generous, […] to let everybody come in.” Walt Whitman’s own attempts to sing American democracy—“A Nation announcing itself”—are surely close at hand here. At the same time, the fragmentary nature of Wright’s poetics, its abrupt juxtapositions and sudden changes of direction, equally aligns her writing with the eccentric chorus at the heart of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), even with the rabble of unruly ghosts that occupy the pages of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). In an interview with Rob McLennan, Wright referenced an 1897–98 painting by Paul Gauguin, a work whose title seems to summarize the impetus behind her democratic poetry: “‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’—those questions are still worth contemplating.”     

The Essential C. D. Wright feels generous and comprehensive, drawing from the poet’s earliest lyrics to her more recent and unpublished poems, making valuable selections from the posthumous collections. Simultaneously, the publication seems somehow lacking, calling attention to what’s missing; several of Wright’s books are represented only by a handful of poems—occasionally as few as three—and Gander readily acknowledges the difficulty in pulling from Wright’s longer works, “linked sequences so interconnected they can’t be wholly represented in excerpt.” While spanning the extent of her career, it seems a shame that The Essential offers less of Wright’s work to new readers than certain previous selections. Like Something Walking Backwards (2008), a UK edition, presents an expanded version of Copper Canyon’s Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (2002), including the complete text of Deepstep Come Shining.

Nevertheless, an “essence” is a distillation, a concentration from the whole, and while this publication may encourage readers to seek Wright’s work in greater quantities elsewhere, the power of her writing—its thick “mud and butter / and barbecue sauce” (“Everything Good Between Men and Women”)—more than survives. In fact, perhaps the word “essential” here refers less to Wright’s poetry than to its readers: her writing is essential to us, both indispensable and necessary. “In my book poetry is a necessity of life,” she asserts in Cooling Time: “I could not live without it. Not in this world. Not in my lifetime.” “Poetry is the language of intensity,” Wright observes, and “because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”