The second annual Charles E. Burchfield Award was presented to the current United States Poet Laureate Charles Wright at a recognition dinner on Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 6:00 p.m.
Charles Wright is the author of 24 poetry collections, two books of essays, and three books of translation. His many international honors include the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Bollingen Prize, Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the International Griffin Poetry Prize, as well as the 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize in Poetry from the Library of Congress.
The Charles E. Burchfield Award recognizes outstanding achievements in the arts which express a commitment to environmental sustainability. “Charles Wright’s work echoes the paintings of Charles Burchfield,” said Burchfield Penney executive director Anthony Bannon, Ph.D. “Both orient their art around ideas of landscape and the spiritual they discover. And both speak with a shared voice about the virtues of sustaining our natural environment.”
Photos from the event can be found here.
About Charles Wright
Wright was born in 1935 in Tennessee and served with the U.S. Army, first exploring poetry while stationed in Italy, and was later a professor at the University of Virginia. His influences range from the work of Ezra Pound to that of ancient Chinese poets. In 2011, he told PBS that the content of all of his poems, no matter their precise subject matter, is “language, landscape and the idea of God.” He also noted that his poems have gotten less “loquacious” as he’s gotten older. “I once said if a guy can’t say what he has to say in three lines, he better change his job,” he joked. “I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I’m down to six lines.”
His poetic bona fides are many: 24 poetry collections and two books of essays. A Pulitzer Prize. A National Book Critics Circle Award. A National Book Award. The International Griffin Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. A National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A term as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. The U.S. Library of Congress’ own award for lifetime achievement in the form and consultant in poetry.
He is now a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. On June 12, 2014, the Library of Congress announced that Wright would serve as Poet Laureate of the United States.
Wright's early work, including The Grave of the Right Hand (1970), received positive critical attention, and his reputation has increased steadily with each poetry collection. From The Grave of the Right Hand to lauded works such as The Other Side of the River (1984), Chickamauga (1995), Appalachia (1998), A Short History of the Shadow (2002), and Scar Tissue (2006), Wright has worked in a style that creates a feeling of immediacy and concreteness by emphasizing objects and personal perspective. Poet David Young described Wright’s work in Contemporary Poets as “one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Many critics believe that Wright’s childhood in rural Tennessee remains a vital force in his writing, as he shows a typically southern concern for the past and its power. Yet Wright often reaches beyond his southern roots, creating images of landscapes from Italy to Virginia in what award-winning poet, journalist, and editor Ted Genoways typified as a “search for transcendence in the landscape of the everyday.” According to Genoways, “Wright’s poems yearn for the ideal, but are tempered by a suspicion of futility,” and are a “strange alchemy, a fusion of the direct, understated lyrics of ancient Chinese poets like Tu Fu and Wang Wei, the lush language of nineteenth-century Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the allusive, rhetorical movement—the ‘gists and piths’—of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.”Pound’s influence is notable, particularly on Wright’s early poetry. Wright himself has said that he used Pound’s Italian Cantos as a guide book during his time in Italy—first as a means to discover out-of-the-way places, then as a reference, and finally as a “copy” book. Pound’s influence is also readily evident in The Grave of the Right Hand, Wright’s first major collection. These poems “have the polished clarity one would expect from a master of the plain style,” Georgia Review contributor Peter Stitt observed. “They are obviously meant to speak to the reader, to communicate something he can share.” At the same time, The Grave of the Right Hand is the most symbolic of all Wright’s works, with images of gloves, shoes, hands, and hats recurring throughout. These images introduce some of Wright’s recurring themes: memory, the past, states of being, the natural and spiritual world, and personal salvation.
After publication of The Southern Cross, Wright’s style went through a period of change. Longer, looser works such as Zone Journals (1988) and the collection The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990) reflect Wright’s “departure from his earlier crystalline short lyrics that aimed for inevitability of effect,” Helen Vendler observed in the New Republic. Poet and author Richard Tillinghast wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Wright’s journal poems “weave diverse thematic threads into a single autobiographical fabric” which can be read as a single work; “Freed from the stringencies of unity and closure demanded by the sort of poem most readers are used to, Mr. Wright is at liberty to spin out extended meditations that pick up, work with, lay aside and return again to landscapes, historical events and ideas.”
Wright’s books from the 1990s are all built on what might be called imagistic narratives, where the narrative impulse runs beneath the contemplative moment of each individual poem. As Wright has said, his poems come from “what I see, rather than from an idea I had in mind: idea follows seeing rather than the other way around.’’ Black Zodiac (1997), which secured a host of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award, contains long, dense poems in this vein. With Chickamauga and Appalachia (1998), the volume comprised the third of Wright’s trilogies. The three books were published together as Negative Blue (2000).
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”