C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has published eleven collections of poetry. Wright’s most recent book is collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (Twin Palms Publishers, 2003). It was awarded the Dorothea Langue-Paul Taylor Prize for a work in progress from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Their collaboration goes on exhibit at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, May 27, 2004. Her selected and new poems, Steal Away was published in 2002 (Copper Canyon). Other titles include the book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining (Copper Canyon, 1998), Tremble (The Ecco Press, 1996), and Just Whistle, another book-length poem (Kelsey Street Press, 1993). String Light (University of Georgia Press, 1991) won the 1992 Poetry Center Book Award given by San Francisco State University. Poems and essays have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Arschile, BRICK, CONJUNCTIONS, sulfur, and numerous other magazines. Her work is much anthologized. Wright has composed and published two state literary maps, one for Arkansas, her native state, and one for Rhode Island, her adopted state. In 1981 she received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts which prompted a move to Mexico. She was awarded the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1986, and in 1987 Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bunting Institute. A second NEA was awarded in 1988 as well as a GE Award for literary essay. She was a 1989 recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award. And a 1990 recipient of the Rhode Island Governor’s Award for the Arts. In 1994 she was named State Poet of Rhode Island, a five-year post. On a fellowship from writers from the Wallace Foundation, Wright curated “a walk-in book of Arkansas” a multi-media exhibition that toured her native state for a two-year period. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall of 1997. The University of Arkansas presented her with the Citation of Distinguished Alumni in 1998. In 1999 she was awarded a Lannan Literary Award, and an artist award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. For over twenty years she co-edited Lost Roads Publishers, an independent literary press. Wright is Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University. She and her husband, poet and translator Forrest Gander, have a son, Brecht. They live outside of Providence, Rhode Island. Buy some of her books here. See some work here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? The first poem I memorized because I was so struck with it was “buffalo bill’s defunct” by cummings. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I’ll read anything, but most of the writing that I get through is “literary” whether or not it actually fits one of the designated literary genres. For the past couple of years I was on a fairly steady diet of prison writing by political prisoners such as Gramsci and Wilde and Dostoyevsky, and criminals such as Jean Genet, Malcolm Braley and Jack Abbott, and incarceration studies such as those by Foucault, Rhodes, and Franklin. I am still reading studies of violence. Also works on landscape and on photography and on Mexico, Central and South America. I tend to read around projects; read my way into a project. It’s a pleasure, learning about something. It’s a pleasure how one book tips your hand to another. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? My reading of philosophy is sporadic. I am sometimes blocked by the vocabulary, among the least attractive to me. The ideas can be quite buried; I mis-read, and I get impatient. It’s my loss. I think philosophers should read more poetry. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I’m teaching a course of poetry in translation this fall including books by Pessoa, Schwitters, Roubaud, Saenz, Jabes, Christensen, Collobert, Negroni, and Mayröcker. Sadly, my own reading skills in another language are very remedial. Inger Christensen was a joy to discover. I looked for texts I had reason to think were well-translated, and works I had enjoyed in translation. I just read two by Marquez, decades after I thought I would not be seeking out his work anew. And am reading Rulfo’s Padre Páramo more attentively than I read it before. I think Gregor Von Rezzori is much under-read here—else his translated books would be in print, no? I read works in translation because I hear about them through someone whose taste I generally share. My husband gets almost all of the New Directions books and they are still committed to translations of prose, likewise Dalkey Archives. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read enormous amounts of poetry. I read very little on line; so I couldn’t be more out of it in relation to blogs and e-zines. Recently I read: Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes by Rosmarie Waldrop, Travelling Library by David Kirby; Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works (as well as three books about her); Danielle Collobert’s Notebooks 1956-1978; I Promise To Be Good, Letters of Rimbaud; new books by former students; new manuscripts in production. And I have been spending time with Forrest Gander’s Science and Steepleflower which of course I read in manuscript and when it first came out, but now, spending real time with—that’s a whole other love affair. I’ve been reading--anew and again--Creeley and “digging” the texts along with his presence now that he has come to Providence, though Forrest keeps taking the books to his office where he hoards the New Directions books. Reading former students and reading for competitions and magazines keeps me in touch with the younger poets. I can’t read everything by everyone, and I have to have poetry-free periods, but I wouldn’t stay in the genre if I did not care enough about it to read it. I can hardly stand listening to people who say there isn’t any good poetry out there. The vitality of the genre stands in total opposition to its paucity of readers, among them people who call themselves poets. It’s so obnoxious that attitude of read just yourself or read just the dead. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know why anyone should have any assumptions about my reading habits. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I don’t think I could currently explain anything adequately to a seven year old. It’s been a long time since I taught Poetry in the Schools. I would have to prepare all over again to face that daunting task. Our son, now seventeen, reads a lot of poetry with tremendous understanding; so at the time he was seven we must have slipped in the right material. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I think I’ve addressed this too many times to want to reiterate. I have a prose book coming out, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, I’m sure I circle that question throughout. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Not interested in this question. 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? My writing is very physical, at least by my lights it is.