Country Music: Selected Early Poems

Foreword: "Charles Wright's Country Music'"

Charles Wright's COUNTRY MUSIC It has been ten years since the first edition of Charles Wright's Country Music: Selected Early Poems, which gathers work from his first four collections of poetry: The Grave of the Right Hand, Hard Freight, Bloodlines, and China Trace. In that time, Wright has dazzled his readers with four more quite extraordinary new volumes: The Southern Cross, The Other Side of the Riper, Zone Journals, and Xionia, which have now been collected into one volume entitled The World of the Ten Thousand Things. For the many readers who have been longtime admirers of his poetry, it has been gratifying to note that the critical reception to Charles Wright's work has also kept pace with the widening of his audience, an audience which has been increasinglydrawn to his poetry by its great power and beauty, its incisive spirituality and meditative elegance. Certainly, the fact that Helen Vendler, David Kalstone, Peter Stitt, Calvin Bedient and others have championed his poetry in their thoughtful and perceptive reviews has helped this audience at large to recognize that Charles Wright is without question one of our preeminent American poets. His many prizes, including the 1983 National Book Award for Country Music, The Academy of American Poets' Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the Brandcis Creative Arts Citation for Poetry, have also shown the high regard in which he's held by his peers. Yet it strikes me that Charles Wright's poetry is highly unusual in that it stands not only in the context of its own time (and such temporal accolades), but that its lucid illuminations are also intended to reflect far into—while casting light upon— those dark recesses of our futures. For his readers, Charles Wright's poetry often serves as a kind of prayer book, a kind of poetic hymnal or speculative field guide we might carry with us on our own metaphysical journeys. Over the past twenty years Charles Wright has written an impressive and demanding body of work that can stand in its accomplish ments as the equal of any poet's in the latter part of the twentieth century. This has been not onlv an artistic achievement of notable FOREWORD / xiii dimension but a spiritual one as well. Quite simply, Charles Wright has emerged as the most visionaryAmerican poet since Hart Crane; he is that most rare of poets—one who is stylistically(and tirelessly) inventive, yet who speaks to and from a tradition that harkens back to Dante. With the mirror of his collection The World of the Ten Thousand Things so recently before us, it seems to me a proper occasion to look back at the rich and complex harmonies of Charles Wright's selected early poetry, Country Music. * * * Throughout his career, Charles Wright has been a highly adept literary architect; he is not only a formal master, he is also an endlessly imaginative sculptor of larger unifying structures for his work. China Trace, Wright's fourth full collection, completed the triptych of books begun with Hard Freight (his second volume) and which he'd continued through his much praised third book, Bloodlines. In Country Music, Wright has selected only five brief prose poems from his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, as a kind of prologue to this triptych of his subsequent books. It has always seemed natural to me (after the finely crafted, visually acute and precise poems of his debut volume) that Wright should feel the need to gather his past, in some sense to write—and rewrite—not only that past, but also the self (the poetic self and voice) which he was bringing to maturity in his newer and more ambitious poems. Clearly, in terms of both style and subject matter, this new direction was signaled by the poem "Dog Creek Mainline" from the book Hard Freight. Knotty, rhythmicallymuscular, alliterative , yet still highly imagistic and visual, Wright's poetry took on a beautiful rasping quality;his work began more deliberately to reflect the abstract concerns embodied in his retrieval of the past, all the while exhibiting the enjambed music that seemed to arise so magically from his lines. Wright also began revealing in these new poems from Hard freight and Bloodlines his self-conscious choice to use both overt and covert autobiographical subject matter. These now familiar impulses in Wright's poetry began to grow, it seems, along with his conviction that the "unknown," or the spiritual and metaphysical , could best be encountered...