(Tree Swenson, Charles Wright) A reading featuring readings by an award winning poet, Charles Wright. Presented by the Academy of American Poets.

Published Date: October 19, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Washington DC on February 4th, 2011. The recording features Tree Swenson and Charles Wright. Now you will hear Tree Swenson provide introductions.

Tree Swenson:

The goal of the Academy of American Poets is actually to represent, in as much as possible, a really wide range of what's going on in poetry in the country. And though it's difficult from our perch in New York, we do try to pay attention to things that are going on all over, because this entire country is full of remarkable writers.

Former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Charles Wright, broke my heart when he decided to resign early from that post shortly after I arrived as the Director at the Academy of American Poets. He's been a poet I have revered and adored since the early years when I was first starting at Copper Canyon Press, a poet whose work I turned to whenever felt my spirits flagging a bit at the prospect of trying to keep a small press running.

The externals of his biography are a little daunting. He is the recipient of pretty much every award you could have won, including the National Book Award in 1983 for country music, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1998 for "Black Zodiac", which also won the Los Angeles Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received the PEN Translation Prize for a book that was particularly dear to me, a translation of Eugenio Montale's "The Storm and Other Poems".

He's taught in a number of different places, including the University of California at Irvine and the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton University, and most recently at the University of Virginia. His most recent book, Sestets, came out in 2009 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and he has a selected later poems due this April, and the title of which is Bye and Bye, spelled B-Y-E and B-Y-E.

But none of this is really important, somehow, when I open a book of Charles Wright's poetry. He's often described as a poet who has chosen landscape as his subject, and it's true, undeniably, that his investigations of the land around him, in those investigations, he can strike a correspondent chord in the soul. But he's equally capable of pulling a snatch of an old song into focus, or remembering a comment made long ago, and in the same way tapping the transcendent until it vibrates for all of us. He's long been revered by poets and readers. He wrote once, "Nothing much changes in the glittering rooms of the heart". Wright knows how to open the door to those glittering rooms. Charles Wright.

Charles Wright:

Thank you, Tree. Hell, thank everybody. I appreciate it. This poem is called "Relics", which is, I guess, pretty much what my generation has become. "After a time loss, it makes such little difference what anyone writes. Relics, it seems, of the thing are always stronger than the thing itself. Palimpsest and pentimento, for instance, saints bones or saints blood, transcendent architecture of what was possible, say, once upon a time. The dogwoods bloom, the pink ones and the white ones in blots and splotches across the dusk, like clouds, perhaps. Mock clouds in a mock heaven, the faint odor of something unworldly or otherworldly, lingering in the darkness, then not, as though some saint had passed by the side of yard."

"The odor of paradise, as Aldo Bootsy has it, odor of heaven, the faithful say. And what is this odor like, someone who'd smelled it was asked once. He had no answer and said, 'It doesn't resemble any flower or any bloom or spice on this earth. I wouldn't know how to describe it.' Lingering as the dark comes on. St. Gaspar del Bufalo was one of these fragrant saints, Bootsy continues. St. Gaspar, who walked in the rain without an umbrella and still stayed dry. Miraculous gift. He knew, he added, one of the saint's relatives, a pianist who served him an osso buco once in the penthouse in Milan." Let's see, "A cold spring in Charlottesville, end of April, 2000. If you can't say what you've got to say in three lines, better change your style."

"Nobody's born redeemed, nobody's moonlight, golden fuse in the deadly trees. White wind through black wires humming a speech we do not speak. Listen for us in the dark hours. Listen for us in our need." So I'll read two poems of three lines each. "Landscape with Missing Overtones". "The sun is set behind the blue ridge, and evening with its blotting paper lifts off the light. Shadowy yards. Moon through the pine trees."

"Portrait of the Artist" by Lee Chang Yin, who obviously was a Chinese poet from, I think it was from the Tang Dynasty. And I put him in there because I took one of his lines and laundered it, changed it, scalped it, and made it worse than it was when he wrote it. "My portrait is almost finished now, in the book of white hair. Sunset over the blue ridge, puce floating cloud. A minute of splendor is a minute of ash."

And now I'll read two poems of 48 lines each, just to show you that I'm not pigheaded or anything. This poem is called "Body and Soul", and it's dedicated to Coleman Hawkins, the great saxophone player, who I am told in 1939 recorded the song "Body and Soul" in the first example of freeform jazz. And since this poem has no storyline, but just beautiful riffs, I thought I would read it. "Body and Soul".

"The world's body is not our body, although we'd have it so. Our body's not infinite, although this afternoon under the underwater slant shine of sunlight and cloud shadow, it almost seems that way in the wind. A wind that comes from a world away with its sweet breath and its tart tongue and casts us loose like a cloud, heaven-ravaged blue pocket. Small change for the hand. I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible. That how we said the world was how it was, and how it would be. I used to imagine that word sway and word thunder would silence the silence and all that. That words were the word. That language could lead us inexplicably to grace, as though it were geographical. I used to think these things when I was young. I still do."

"Some poems exist still on the other side of our lives and shine out, but we'll never see them. They are unutterable, in the language without an alphabet, unseen, world-long bone music. Too bad. We'd know them by heart if we could summer them out in our wounds. Too bad. Listening hard. Clouds, of course, are everywhere and blue sky in between. Blue sky. Then what comes after the blue? Our lives, it turns out, are still life's. Glass, bottles and fruit, dead animals, flowers, the edges of this and that which drop off most often to indeterminate vacancy. We're beautiful, and hung up to dry. Outside the frame, mountains are moving, rivers flash, a cloud-scrumbled sky. Field patches nudge up to comfort us. A train crosses a trestle. Across the room, someone gets up and rearranges the thing."

"Insubstantial as smoke, our words drum down like fingertips across the page, leaving no smudge or mark. Unlike our purloin selves, they will not rise from the dead. Unlike our whimpers and prayers, they lie low and disappear. This word, that word, all fall down. How far from heaven the stars are, how far the heart from the page? We don't know what counts. It's as simple as that, isn't it? We just don't know what counts. Midwinter in Charlottesville, soul shunt and pat down crumbs, snow flicked across the backyard, then gone on the sun's tongue. These are the four lessons I have learned. One from Martha Graham, three others from here and there. Walk as though you'd been given one brown eye and one blue. Think as though you thought best with somebody else's brain, write as though you had in hand the last pencil on earth, pray as though you were praying with someone else's soul."

And this second 48 line poem is called "Body and Soul II", which is dedicated to Coleman Hawkins, who as you might remember, in 1939, recorded this tune, and the first version of freeform jazz.

"The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, like the structure of music, seamless, invisible. Even the rain has larger sutures. What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together, is faith, it appears - faith of the eye, faith of the ear. Nothing like that in language, however, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms blown by the wind. April, and anything's possible. Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang. A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to Southern India and back - on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on foot. Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645, mountains and deserts, in search of the truth, the heart of the heart of reality, the law that would help him escape it, and its attendant an inescapable suffering. And he found it. These days, I look at things, not through them, and sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get. The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral, the neighbor's back porch light bulbs glow like anemones."

"Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead. This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark, when everything starts to shine out, and aphorisms skulk in the trees, their wings folded, their heads bowed. Every true poem is a spark, and aspires to the condition of the original fire arising out of the emptiness. It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite. It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by. Shooting stars. April's identical, celestial, wordless, burning down. Its light is the light we commune by. Its destinations our own, its hope is the hope we live with."

"Wang Wei, on the other hand, before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River, just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains, and lived there, off and on, for the rest of his life. He never traveled the landscape, but stayed inside it, a part of nature himself, he thought. And who would say no to someone so bound up in solitude, in failure, he thought, and suffering. Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small dollop of butter hazily at the western edge, getting too old and lazy to write poems, I watch the snowfall from the apple trees. Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation."

"Don't just do something, sit there. And so I have. So I have, the seasons curling around me like smoke, going to the end of the earth and back without a sound. Time will tell. Time was when time was not, in the world an uncut lawn ready for sizing. We looked and took the job in hand. Birds burst from my fingers, cities appeared in small towns in the interim. We loved them all. In distant countries, tides nibbled our two feet on pebbly shores with their soft teeth and languorous tongues. Words formed and flew from our fingers. We listen and love them all. Now finitude looms like anti-matter, not this and not that. And everywhere, like a presence one bumps into, oblivious, unwittingly. Excuse me, I beg your pardon. But time has no pardon to beg and no excuses.

The wind and the meadow grasses, the wind through the rocks, bends and breaks whatever it touches, but it's never the same wind and the same spot, but it's still the wind, and blows in its one direction, northwest to southeast. Anointment upon the skin, a little saliva. Time, with its murderous gums and pale windowless throat, its mouth pressed to our mouths, pushing the breath in, pulling it out.

The woodpecker pecks, but the hole does not appear. It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become, how quickly all that we've done is unremembered and unforgiven, how quickly bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls, how quickly and finally the landscapes subsumes us and everything that we are, becomes what we are not. This is not new. The orange finch and the yellow and dun finch picking the dry clay politely. The grass is asleep in their green slips before the noon can rouse them. The sweet oblivion of the everyday like a warm weskit over the cold and endless body of memory. Cloud-scarce Montana morning, July with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map, huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things, tweets on the evergreen stumps, swallows treading the air. The ravens hawking from tree to tree. Not you, not you, is all that the world allows and all one could wish for."

Oh Jesus, I got this whole book of six line poems, which I'll not read all of. I'll read a couple of them, if I can read them fast. God almighty. Well this one has a title from a Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs song. Well, actually it's the line, no, I guess it's the title. It's also a line. "We'll get up rounder to let a working man lay down. The kingdom of minutiae, that tight place where most of us live is the kingdom of the saved. Those who exist between the cracks, those just under the details. When the hand comes down, the wing white hand, we are the heads of hair and finger bones yanked out of their shoes. We are the rapture's children."

Or as Garrison Keillor says, "And then you look over there and there's a circle of Episcopalians just standing around and saying, what the hell happened?" I'm an Episcopalian, but I thought that was pretty funny.

"Bees are the terrace builders of the stars. It's odd how the objects of our lives continue to not define us no matter how close we hold them unto us. Odd how the narrative of those lives is someone else's narrative. Now the increasing sundown, the Bible draws the darkness around it. No foot bridge or boat over lathe, no staircase or stepping stone up into the into. when the horses gallop away from us, it's a good thing. I always find it strange, though I shouldn't, how creatures don't care for us the way we care for them. Horses, for instance, and chipmunks and any bird you'd name. Empathy is only a one way street. And that's all right, I've come to believe. It sets us up for ultimate things and penultimate ones as well. It's a good lesson to have in your pocket when the call comes to call."

And then there were a circle of Episcopalians over there saying, what the hell happened? We love our Episcopal church. Let's see. I got one more of these and then get out of the way. I don't know what to read. They're all equally odious.

"Like the new moon, my mother drifts through the night sky. Beyond the boundaries of light and dark, my mother's gone out and not come back. Suddenly now in my backyard, like the slip moon, she rises and rests in my watching eye. In my dream she's returned just like this over a hundred times, and knows what I'm looking for. Partially her, partially what she comes back not to tell me."

And then a couple of more recent things. This is called "Sentences II", which the perspicacious of you will realize that I once wrote a poem called "Sentences" years ago when I knew what one was. Last chapter, last verse. "Everything's brown now in the golden field. The threshing floor of the past has passed. The over mountain men of the future lie cusp in their little boxes, the sun backs down over the ridge line at five after seven. The landscape puts on its black mass and settles into its sleeplessness. The fish will transpose it, half for themselves, half for the water ten thousand miles away at the end of the darkening stream. To live a pure life, to live a true life, is to live the life of an insect."

"Grace II", I once wrote a poem called "Grace". "It's true, the aspirations of youth burned down to char strips with the years. Tonight, only memories are my company and my grace. How nice if they could outlive us, but they can't, or won't. No Indian summer for us. It's rough and it's growing dark, the sunset pulling the full moon up by its long fingernails. It's better this way. The unforgiven are pure, as are the unremembered."

And one last one called "Road Warriors". "My traveling clothes light up the noon. I've been on my way for a long time, back to the past, that irreconcilable city. Everyone wants to join me, it seems, and I'll let them. Roadside flowers drive me to distraction, dragon flies hover like lapis lazuli, there, just out of reach. Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy, unsettled. Seven yards short of immortality and a yard short of, not long to live. Better to sit down in the tall grass and watch the clouds, to lift our faces up to the sky, considering for most of us, our lives have been one constant mistake." Thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

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