A few years ago I had this idea to try to find “my poet,” that poet who I could become a completist with, a poet I could become an expert in through intensive scholarship and fan obsession. I thought of it like who is my Cher poet, so to speak? Short of an actual fan shed, I could develop a fan shelf.

I read about other poets having their favorite writers “to scholar” about and I was feeling FOMO, like I should have one too. In a lot of ways seeing other poets have “their poet” can help you understand both poets better. Like Robert Duncan being a scholar of the poet H.D. It says something about what poets are attracted to other poets.

My first attempt at this was a deep dive into the poetry of Philip Levine a few years ago.  Philip Levine was the first A-list, “famous” poet I ever saw in real life. He came to Sarah Lawrence one night in the mid-1990s to give a reading in the living room of Slonim House, a Tudor-style manor house on campus where all the graduate writing activities happened. I was standing in the entryway of the Slonim House and he came in with some of the other poets of Sarah Lawrence, probably Tom Lux and Marie Howe but I really can’t remember because Levine was like a superstar in this context. It was like the air was electric. He seemed a promising pick for my favorite poet. I even liked his greatest hits.

And so in the case of Philip Levine I spent months reading his poetry collections, interviews and essays. But I sadly came to the conclusion that he was not my poet. Although I loved his focus on labor subjects, it was all pretty humorless. And yeah politics can be humorless (especially now) but a poet should be allowed (or allow themselves) some breathing room in that area. Especially a poet as notoriously interpersonally funny as Philip Levine.

Last year I got the idea that my poet could be C.D. Wright. I came across an article on her by Stephen Burt from the L.A. Times. The article came from a huge stack of papers my friend Christopher who sent them to me almost a decade ago. (It’s taking me a minute to get through them.) The article is undated but it seems to have appeared after her sudden death in January of 2016.

This appealed to me particularly. Burt says,

“Wright’s artistic powers cannot be separated from her deep sense of democracy, her work against boundaries, rankings and exclusions, her insistence that poetry, and society, should become not a hierarchy or a star system or a way to exalt a singular self but a way to be generous, to share the powers we get, to give of oneself, to let everybody come in.”

I loved this. I feel this way all the time. Why is everything a f**king competition?

Burt goes on to explain how Wright came from the Arkansas Ozarks area. (And I grew up not far from the Missouri Ozarks area so I felt I might have some fly-over sympathy with her there too). Wright was incredibly worldly as well, having lived in San Francisco, Rhode Island and Mexico. (She died from a blood clot that resulted from an overly-long flight coming home from Chile.)

She seemed a good balance of worldly and local.

Burt calls her a “trustworthy” poet and he spent time with Wright and her husband, Forrest Gander. Burt wishes we all could have met her. And short of that he can be her critical champion: “What critics can do–maybe all a critic can do–is send you, with some encouragement or preparation, to the poems.”

So off I went. I realized pretty soon that I would love some of her long-form projects and not like the LANGUAGE or sentence-collage poems. In my favorite poems she had a beautifully meandering quality like what I love about reading Anne Carson. I felt a very similar pleasure reading these kinds of Wright poems, and the nerdiest parts of minutia like you find in Moby Dick and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But the collage ones made me want to skim. And so that rules out C.D. Wright as “my poet” but there is so much to love here and I’ll review the books I read, ranking them in reverse order.

Rising, Falling, Hovering (2009)

I didn’t love this book. The jacket calls it “deeply personal and politically ferocious” but I was lost in there. Nothing came at anything straight on and there was no guiding theme to keep me tethered. The book won the Griffin Prize. I feel like maybe this was a failure on my part but it is what it is.

The only single page I dog-eared was a page with these words:

“His face unfurls furls
Poetry
Doesn’t
Protect
You
Anymore.”

This came at the end of a section of long lines and shows you what a master of alternating lines she was. Every later-day book does this, long lines interspersed with short ones, just as any good novelists can take you through long Proustian sentences and then punch you suddenly with a short one.

I did also like “End Thoughts” when I read it again in the book below.

The Essential C.D. Wright (posthumously edited by her widower Forrest Gander along with Michael Wiegers, 2025)

This is Wright’s Greatest Hits and includes a few poems or excerpts from all of her books along with personal photographs.

This was a frustrating book to purchase for me. I had to pre-order it from my local bookstore. And the customer service people who worked there kept grabbing it for themselves whenever the book came in . Weeks later I would call to inquire about it and be told it had been sold by mistake. The owner apologized about this and even gave me a deep discount on another book. But honestly, I’ve felt weird about going back there ever since. I’ve been ordering from Bookshop.org and just sending profits over to my local (which is a great thing about Bookstop.org) but I have not been visiting the store in person.

I’ll get over it.

Anyway, this book shows Wright’s evolution over the years, how skinny her poems were in the beginning and how it feels like a move of assertion when she let her lines go long.

There were some uncollected drafts I really liked like “Abandon Yourself in That Which Is Inevitable” with it’s last stanza:

“Just. Could
somebody
please
tell me.
What did it mean
that I was a girl.”

And poems like “Sculptor and Model” and “Margaret Kaelin Vittitow” (a mentor who appears later in One With Others known as V) and the poem “Alla Breve Loving” from Alla Breve Loving. And then from the book Terrorism the poems “Obedience of the Corpse” and the music poem “Tours.” There’s a good poem “Clockmaker with Bad Eyes” from Translations of the Gospel Back Into Tongues. The book Further Adventures with You had the lines starting to lengthen out in poems like “Wages of Love,” “Scratch Music” and “This Couple.” String Light had a numbered list poem called “Remarks on Color.” By One Big Self: An Investigation she is fully into paragraph poems and experiments with not only line length but line spacing. By Shall Cross she’s back to short lines and few-lines of poems, like “Light Bulb Poem.”

This book was an interesting overview of things but it didn’t feel quite essential to me and maybe the fates were telling me something when I kept getting my copies snatched out from under me at my local. But also I think the problem is that Wright really shines in the book-length poem and she is not really reducible to these excerpts taken out of context of her very formidable momentum.

It’s sweet that poet-husband Gander writes her introduction here. I can’t imagine Monsieur Big Bang doing that for me as he’s not very interested in poetry (aside from me being one). But in a lot of ways, this poet-couple of Wright and Gander seemed of-a-piece.

Casting Deep Shade (2019)

This was the book Wright was working on when she died. It’s Wright’s long, obsessive ode to the beech tree.

Although it wasn’t my very favorite of her books, this one “grew” on me, (Ha!) and is surely in my list of great book-length poems. I even talked it up on a walk last weekend with some of my friends who are tree peoples.

The book reminded me of the obsessive cataloging in Moby Dick; and I always have respect for any writer willing to go overboard (more puns) while researching a topic and then to expose some of that research in the final product. It reminds me of visiting a historic building and having some part of its structure exposed as an exhibit. The New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe does this with pieces of the old adobe building the museum is housed in, going back through time and renovations. It draws attention to the compiled and assembled nature of things.

As her last book, this one was given elaborate binding, maybe a bit excessive. But the poem is interspersed with beautiful distressed and abstract photographs of beech trees taken by Denny Moers. There are also illustrations throughout. One page I dogeared has a description of the scientific “Miura fold” for solar panels along with a diagram and how this relates back to beech tree leaves.

Clearly this was a labor of love and it feels good reading it.

In Essential I also dogeared “Why Leave You So Soon Gone” with lines like “Sharpen yourself     on rock    Say yes    Don’t forget” and the poem reads like a self help guide for us and for the trees!

Here is a video of the publisher showing the book and her husband reading excerpts.

One With Others (2010)

The first book I read and definitely one of my top three favorites of hers. I immediately recommended it to my St. Louis book group, the one that focuses on American racial issues.

This long poem deals with the racial violence that happened in her hometown around the 1969 March Against  Fear and the research she did to try to figure it out. The jacket calls it “a stunning work of investigative journalism and poetry” and it is quite an amazing collage of introspection, interviews, oral histories, photographs and newspaper research.

Wright interviews witnesses, activists, police, fugitives and follows the firing of a teacher in a black high school and the black students who protested it and their threatening detainment in an empty swimming pool. Most intimately, it follows the story of Wright’s mentor, another teacher who became involved  which led to her being run out of the state of Arkansas (Margaret Kaelin).

It is one of the best books of poems I’ve read dealing with racism in America. Up there with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler. My copy is dogeared and there are marginalia comments all over it. She deftly uses her page-layout experiments to evoke emotions and control the pacing and release of information.

Collage work at it’s very best. `

The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roach, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (2016)

This is Wright’s delightful ars poetica, her poems about the writing process and how one becomes inspired by other writers. It’s my favorite of all the books I read. So amazing, just poem after poem, even the off-the-rails title alluding to the messiness of the whole process.

Again, another book impossible to excerpt although this one is maybe easier than Casting Deep Shade or One With Others. She has multiple poems with the same titles where the same ideas keep getting reworked and mulled over and over again.

The “In a Word, a World” poems talk about word etymologies and connotations and parts of speech. Those are juicy things.

In most of the poems, she’s in conversation with her favorite poets and artists like Flannery O’Connor and Jean Valentine (all the “Jean Valentine, Abridged” poems, one example) and painter Agnes Martin and fiddler John Taggart, poets George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky and a list of others. Her poems titled “Hold Still, Lion” are all for poet Robert Creeley (one example).  She has a series for William Carlos Williams all titled “Spring & All.”  She talks back to them, agrees and disagrees, riffs on things they’ve said. She quotes her husband.

She attempts to define what poetry does. It’s so amazing.

“The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess.”

She gets academic. She gets political. She talks about how poems are building projects. She defends poetry. The title of one great poem is “Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the World’s Biggest Retailer” in which she says “Poets do not have the answer. They say what they see. They take their own pulse. They stay up thinking of lines of poetry that they might use.”

“Poetry abhors the lie” she says and the best of it “extends the line into perpetuity” and “enlarges the circle.” Poems awaken the dreamer and the schemer. “They draw not conclusions but further quantify the doubt.”

Yes, indeed.

She says, “Poetry is hard to abuse except by writing it poorly, and then the damage, let’s face it, is finite.”

She critiques her own project Rising, Falling, Hovering (how brilliant is that?) for four pages of dense paragraphs, like her own harsh review. She says, “Often lineation just does not bear up. Instead, she tried applying more pressure to passages that asserted themselves as prose.” The struggles of writing this book get continued in later sections and is all fascinating.

It’s fascinating how she holds herself accountable it all her messy, unsettled process. And accountable to the world. “Mostly, poets will fail. Words will tumble and fall. But in so failing and fumbling poets refuse to be accomplices.”

Like One with Others, my book is written all over and dogeared. This is a book every poet should read. And one of books I’ve read that makes me think, “I want to try that.” The whole book generally and “Questionnaire in January” specifically.

Of Robert Creeley she says what we would want anybody to say about us, “He was a man of his words. He was given to write poems.”

Of Jean Valentine she says, “She followed the string in the dark.”

Oh man. What a tangled and beautiful homage to the art of writing.

Cooling Time, An American Poetry Vigil (2005)

Separate from the poetry, Wright published a great books of essays, or a long meandering essay. I found this one pretty thick and impenetrable when I started it but then my brain broke through and I really loved it.

If the book above is an ars poetica, this one is a fluid kind of essay or group of essays. They’re very similar in some ways or both reaching toward the same thing from two separate ends. This feels more didactic or declarative than her normal verse.

From her “Op-Ed” intro:

“I believe the word uses wrongly distorts the world”

And then:

“Also I think that antithetical poetries can and should coexist without crippling one another. They not only serve to define their other to a much more exacting degree than would be possible in the absence of one or the other.”

[My point about autotune generally.]

On difficult poetry she says,

“It is not that complexity is overrated, but it is overcomplicated; it is not that obscurity is too obscure, it’s that the underside grows grungy if it isn’t exposed to a change of air.”

About trying new things, “it is about how differently things actually play out if you come and go by different portals, long live la difference; as for transcendence, well baby, that’s the sun’s job.”

And to those who work completely in experiment and beyond politics, she says:

“If you are so afraid of ending up with an opinion, afraid it will color your work, you might ask yourself how transparent is your refusal to make choices, how disinterested can any work be and still stand. How obvious is your withdrawal. What is the artistic advantage of neutrality, allowing such a condition never existed. How would it be distinguished from indifference or mere self-interest.”

That’s it exactly. You may have your motives but it all looks the same to the reader (because we’re not mind readers): neutrality and indifference.

And this:

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable alliances.

Narrative is. You have to know when to enter in, when to egress, when to provoke, when to let it be. However, narrative is overly identified with Southern poetry, whereas it is a life-long global condition not a literary convention. Poets should be willing to exploit the rind of narrativity, and be more than willing to be lost at the heart. Exceptional intellection is being exercised to decry narrative. I am not learning much from that line of refuation.

Never deprive the reader of opportunities for multiple egresses.”

A way with words, this one has. Later she says,

“If you do not use language you are used by it. If you do not recognize the terms peacekeeper missile and preemptive strike as oxymorons, your hole has already been dug.”

Page 92 goes into her theory of the line. She’s mostly suspicious of “line laws.” There’s a long statement about the survival prospects of poetry. She’s full of piss and vinegar in every direction:

“It is all to fair to assume most of us are poets or we woudln’t be reading this, not when we could be watching the Redskins or be down in the den cleaning the guns or communicating something tangibly effecive that we could either sell otherwise have the opportunity to make availbable to crowds such as porn stars and evangelists routinely reach.”

and

“I am among many of the hard-pressed to accept the fixed-foot-flat-earth-survivalist school of poetry calling itself ‘new formalist’ as being new much less formally interesting. By the same reading, only by lack of scrutiny and challenge could free-verse poets call verse free.”

She says, “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”

And this, this this:

“While some writers are choosing sides, others are building intricate arches over the gorge. Laying track. Crossing the borders by dark to take what they need from the novel here, history or astronomy there, and no more….

“The struggle for legitimacy is as unrelenting as the vigilance required to contain it…”

“We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going–often in different directions at once. And the behavior of language is such that parallel concerns and sympathies are available to serious practitioners on many levels, at any point in space and time–the formal, the inventive, the revelatory, the message plane itself…”

“Of the vanguard I can say, I admire their procedures, but I think their attitude stinks. Of the rear guard, I think their procedures and their attitudes stink. When this discord erupts into an all-or-none competition, the last reader can exit in a body bag…

“I submit you will have to strike down your own mythology about yourself, your loves, your ravishing and atavistic homeland. I am interested in the vision beyond this confrontational…I still want to keep pressing toward the outer edge of my own enterprise.”

Whew. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. So even if C.D. Wright is not “my poet” she is certainly a mentor and a kindred spirit at bare minimum.  But just not someone I can obsess over.

Her website has many other poems to pursue.

While I was reading the long lines of C.D. Wright I got kind of tired, too. This happens also when I read Anne Carson and Albert Goldbarth. They are so intense and dense.

So while I was reading C.D. Wright I found a book on Charles Burkowski from my local library.  Something about his thin, off-the-cuff lines on gritty topics worked like a refreshing sorbet while reading C.D. Wright. When I got tired of Wright’s sort of thick, dense tone, I could switch over to Burkowski’s irreverent one and then when I got sick of his somewhat spiritually-emaciated poetry I could go back to Wright for some meaty bones. But after I finished the library book, I ended up purchasing his Greatest Hits.

Essential Bukowski Edited by Abel Debritto 2016

Burkowski is a good poet of place, particularly Los Angeles. He is always refreshingly outside-of-the-academy system, although he works his own tramp schtick a bit cartoonishly.

Some of my favorite parts of the later book:

From “for Jane”

“what you were
will not happen again.

the tigers have found me
and I do not care.”

“the laughing heart” is perfect in as a contrast of Burkowski’s cynical and optimistic gestures.

“You are marvelous
The gods wait to delight
In you.