Country Music: Selected Early Poems

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C O U N T R Y M U S I C This page intentionally left blank Other Recent Works by Charles Wright Halflife: Improvisations &Interviews, 1977-87 The World of the Ten Thousand Jliings: Poems,1980-1990 Chickamauga, QuarterNotes: Improvisations &Interviews A Short History of the Shadow: Poems Black Zodiac Negative Blue: Selected LaterPoems Appalachia COUNTRY MUSIC SELECTED EARLY POEMS CHARLES WRIGHT SECOND EDITION With a Foreword by David St. John WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Middletown, Connecticut Published by Wesleyan University Press,Middletown, Connecticut 06459 All rights reserved Poetry copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1982 by Charles Wright. Preface copyright © 1991 by Charles Wright. "Charles Wright's Country Music" © David St. John, 1991. This essay appeared in an earlier form in WRIGHT: A Profile, published by Grilled Flowers Press, 1979. By permission of the author. Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the following periodicals, in the pagesof which all the poems in this book were first published: TheAmerican Poetry Review. "Autumn," "Saturday 6 a.m.," "Tattoos"; The American Review. "Dog," "1975," "Snapshot"; Antaeus: "Going Home," '"Where Moth and Rust Doth Corrupt'"; Arena: "Nocturne," "Storm"; The Atlantic Monthly: "April"; The liarataria Review. "Easter, 1974"; The Chicago Review. "Death," "Indian Summer," "January," "Quotidiana"; Choice: "Him," "The Poet Grows Older"; Cold Spring Journal: "Reply to Chi K'ang"; Crazy Horse: "Grace"; Field: "Born Again," "Captain Dog," "Dino Campana," "Invisible Landscape," "Morandi," "Self-Portrait in 2035," "Snow"; Greenhouse Review. "Moving On"; Grope: "Spider Crystal Ascension.""Thinking of Georg Trakl"; Hearse: "Yellow"; The Iowa Review: "Anniversary," "Homage to ArthurRimbaud," "Homage to X," "Reply to Lapo Gianni,""12 Lines at Midnight"; Lillabulero: "Delta Traveller ," "White"; Marilyn: "California Twilight," "Reunion," "Depression Before the Solstice "; The New Yorker: "Childhood," "Clear Night," "Edvard Munch," "Homage to Baron Corvo," "Homage to Ezra Pound," "Noon," "Remembering San Zeno," "Rural Route," "Sentences," "Stone Canyon Nocturne"; The Oberlin Quarterly: "The Voyage"; The Ohio Review. "At Zero," "Bays Mountain Covenant," "Cancer Rising," "Virgo Descending," "Wishes"; Occident: "Next"; The PartisanReview: "Link Chain"; Ploughshares: "Sex"; Pocket Pal: "Bygones"; Poetry: "Blackwater Mountain," "Chinoiserie," "Clinchfield Station," "Congenital ," "Dog Creek Mainline," "Negatives," "Nightdrcam," "Northhanger Ridge," "Skins," "The Fever Toy"; Poetry Northwest: "Aubadc"; The Pomegranate Press Broadsides: "Equation," "Nerval's Mirror"; Red Weather: "Signature"; The Seneca Review: "Slides of Verona"; Skywriting : "Primogeniture,""Sky Valley Rider"; The SouthernPoetry Review. "Hardin County"; The Southern Review: "Homage to Baron Corvo" and "Homage to Ezra Pound"; Three Rivers Poetry Journal: "Cloud River." The poems "Aubade," "The Poet Grows Older," "The Voyage," "Nocturne," and "Storm" were published in Canada in 1968 by The House of Anansi Press of Toronto in a limited edition of a booklet entitled The Dream Animal and arc copyrighted in Canada by the publisher. The poems "Definitions," "Firstborn," "The New Poem," "Nocturne," "Notes for Oscar Wilde at San Miniato," "One Two Three," and "Oscar Wilde at San Miniato" first appeared in The Venice Notebook, published by the Barn Dream Press of Boston in 1971. Cover and frontispiece illustration: I960, landscape, pencil drawing on paper, Raccolta Tavoni, Bologna, by Morandi. Reproduced from Morandi, Drawings, by N. Pozza, bypermission of Franca May Edizioni. Printed in the United States of America 5 4 CIP data appear at the end of the book For Holly, 8MB This page intentionally left blank "The country was always better than the people." —Ernest Hemingway This page intentionally left blank ...