[New-Poetry] Reading Report: Charles Wright

[Anny Ballardini]

Thanks for sharing. Wonderful the oaken windowed fireplaced room, as you
said, one does feel more intelligent just by being there.


On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 7:42 PM, <jforjames at aol.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday night I drove down to Yale to hear Charles
> Wright read. I've followed his work over the years and this
> was first opportunity I've had to hear him read. So I was
> looking forward to the evening.
>
> The room was one of those oaken appointed, Gothic windowed,
> large stone fireplaced old college halls. (You get smarter just sitting
> inside a room like that.) Behind and above the lectern
> was a huge mounted elk's head and rack. (I noticed its attention
> never flagged during the reading.) The reading was well attended,
> Maybe as many as 150 in the house. Not a single poetry book
> for sale in the back of the room or near the entryway. (Probably
> the best place to sell poetry books is at a reading and so many times
> I find this to be the case.) Wright read in an easy and casual manner,
> with a nice Tenn/Carolina/Virginia accent.
>
> Maybe I wasn't in the right mode (no pun intended) but I
> was a little disappointed by the reading. I expected lanscape-based
> and memory-driven meditations, but somehow
> I thought the language would have a bit more verve to it.
> I don't have the recent book Scar Tissue, which he
> read quite a few poems from, so I don't know those poems
> at all. Many of the poems he said had been
> written in Montana near the Canadian border.
> The last group of poems he read were all six-line poems
> he called Sestets. Those really seemed light-weight
>  to me and not kind of work one should end a reading on.
> But like I said, I may just have been in wrong frame
> of mind to hear the work that night.
>
> One of Wright's asides (in paraphrase: [Reads title of
> poem, pauses] "I'm really attracted to that title. When
> you're get that way about titles, you know you're done for."
>
> JD "Sandy" McClatchy gave one of those glowing,
> over-praising intros that no poet could live up to.
>
> Finnegan
>
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-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
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I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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