Charles Wright

Biography

Charles Wright served as the US poet laureate from 2014 to 2015. His many awards include the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, and the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. His most recent books include Caribou (FSG, 2014), Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems (FSG, 2012), Sestets (FSG, 2009), and Littlefoot (FSG, 2007). He served as the guest editor of the 2008 edition of The Best American Poetry.

See Work

POETRY / Spring 2008

Sundown Blues

By Charles Wright

There are some things that can’t be conveyed—
description, for instance,
The sundown light on that dog hair lodge pole pine
and the dead branches of spruce trees.

 

POETRY / Spring 2008

Time Is a Child-biting Dog

By Charles Wright

Like rivers, my thoughts flow south,
for no particular reason.
Must be the full moon
That floods the sky, and makes the night wakeful
and full of remorse.

 

POETRY / Spring 2008

The Book

By Charles Wright

Whose name will be inscribed in the book
                                                                 just before mine?

POETRY / Spring 2008

As the Train Rolls Through, I Remember an Old Poem

By Charles Wright

Well, here we are again, old friend, Ancient of Days,

Eyeball to eyeball. 

POETRY / Summer 2007

Next

By Charles Wright

The Great Scribe, who remembers nothing,
not even your name the instant he writes it down,
Would like it up here, I think,
The blank page of the sundown sky, the tamarack quill points,
and no one to answer for.

 

POETRY / Summer 2007

With Horace, Sitting on the Platform, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee

By Charles Wright

Seventy years, and what’s left?
Or better still, what’s gone before?
A couple of lines, a day or two out in the cold?
And all those books, those half-baked books,
sweet yeast for the yellow dust?

 

POETRY / Summer 2007

Bitter Herbs to Eat, and Dipped in Honey

By Charles Wright

We lay out our own dark end,
guilt, and the happiness of guilt.

POETRY / Summer 2007

The Gospel According to Yours Truly

By Charles Wright

Tell me again, Lord, how easy it all is—
renounce this,
Renounce that, and all is a shining—
Tell me again, I’m still here,
your quick-lipped and malleable boy.

 

POETRY / Summer 2007

On the Night of the First Snow, Thinking about Tennessee

By Charles Wright

It’s dark now, the horses have had their half-apple,
mist and rain,
Horses down in the meadow, just a few degrees above snow.

 

POETRY / Summer 2007

Stiletto

By Charles Wright

Why does each evening up here
always, in summer, seem to be
The way—as it does, with the light knifing low from right to left—
It will be on the next-to-last one?