Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

"C D Wright passed away at the beginning of 2016. She did so many things so well. She has turned out – and this has been true for 20 years – to be a model and a sort of guidepost for American poetry. She wrote book-length poems with journalistic elements, about people in trouble, about the civil rights movement, about contemporary southern poverty, about incarcerated people. She is a poet of visuality – she often collaborated with a photographer – of the world as seen . She’s a poet of regional identity and regional English, she is a poet of the uncontrollability and the delights and the scary abjection of embodied experience and, in particular, of women’s sexual experience. She’s a poet who inherits the will to break apart prose sense: to resist certain kinds of clarity, to really give you fragments of statements rather than statements in order to be truer to the messiness of experience, and to resist institutional and empowered and hierarchical impulses to bring everything into a definite shape. So, Wright is a poet of personality and of resistance to personality. She is a poet of a powerful shaping voice and of resistance to shapeliness. She is a poet of the present moment, but also a poet of American history. And she’s a poet of big messy book-length poems but also of tiny perfect lyric moments. She just does so many things so well. And in a way that’s really been true of no American poet since the death of William Carlos Williams, C D Wright is a poet where there is something in there for everyone. Yes. She wrote works that you can read as manifestos but she didn’t like telling people what to do. She wanted to support people who didn’t want to be told what to do. And her work, indeed, often says ‘don’t tell me what to do.’ She felt like an outsider in terms of her combination of stylistic influences. And she was certainly a regional outsider; came from a part of America that was rural and sort of off the map and and often looked down on or overlooked by people who come, as I do, from the large east or west coast metropolises. “She is a poet of a powerful shaping voice and of resistance to shapeliness; she is a poet of the present moment but also a poet of American history” She was very much a part of Arkansas and, at the same time, she looked outside Arkansas. And there’s quite a lot of her later work that doesn’t make sense unless you’re willing to look up something about Providence, Rhode Island where she made her home, along with her husband, the very good poet and translator Forrest Gander. There’s a wonderful quasi- and anti-narrative multi-part poem in one of her later books, Rising, Falling, Hovering , that records their travels in Mexico, with and against the travels of her son. That poem, in turn, calls back to poems from the 1980s about Wright and Gander’s time in that country. So she’s also a poet of Mexican-American interactions. And that’s another way in which she is making connections across differences. She wanted to be a poet of what we would now call intersectionality – of outsiders talking to other outsiders – rather than a poet of people hiving off into tiny little groups and not talking to one another. So, she’s a poet of connections made and I think she would say connections among outsiders. That’s part of the strength of her language. Yes. So, her and Forrest Gander’s relation to Lost Roads has to be thought of in connection with the history of that press. It was a press that continued to exist – and I think it still exists – as a way to do independent publishing: to promote voices that wouldn’t be heard otherwise. It has its origin in the Arkansas poetry scene of the late 70s, shaped by Wright and a number of other writers, but principally by the poet Frank Stanford. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Stanford was quite prolific and died quite young. It’s hard to separate the history of Lost Roads from the beginning of Wright’s career and her involvement with Stanford, but it’s quite important to look at the individual volumes excerpted within Steal Away , to see how much she changed. I like to start with Tremble . I don’t want to say it’s objectively her best – I don’t think there’s objectively a best volume – but Tremble is a vey good place to start. You can also start with String Light, from 1991. It’s quite important to see someone like Wright as someone whose career has multiple stages, multiple genres, multiple goals, and not to reduce it to who she was and who she knew and what she wanted to do in her twenties. That’s where she started."