Professor C.D. Wright (October 2004)



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It's not every day that President Simmons participates in a ruse to fool faculty, but when the MacArthur Foundation called with news that Professor C.D. Wright was being named to a $500,000 fellowship, they wanted the president to guarantee a time that the poet would be in her office. "A luncheon was set up for me with President Simmons," Wright explains over a glass of wine at the Paragon Café, "and I was at my office excited about going to University Hall for lunch. Her office didn't cancel until late that morning; so naturally I was there, in my office—with a big bow in my hair."

When Wright picked up the phone, she wasn't convinced that it was her work being called into recognition. When asked if she knew where the call was heading, she answered, "Are you going to ask me to nominate someone?"

But the call was indeed for her, and with good reason. The MacArthur people say it best: "No single description adequately captures Wright's work; she is an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvents herself with each new volume." [View full text from MacArthur Foundation]

Indeed, Wright's work defies labels. Southern? Well, maybe. She was born in Arkansas, but has also served as Poet Laureate to Rhode Island. When asked what it means to be a Southern writer, Professor Wright answers as fast as a Northerner. "Not much," noting that if any great difference exists, it's between the urban and the rural. She is not easily cast into the mold of what people expect poets to be, alone in their world of words. "I've written a few solitary books that I am also proud of," Wright explains, "but I feel unequivocally good about the collaborative works."

Perhaps most notable of these collaborations is the Louisiana prisons project One Big Self, a piece recently completed with photographer Deborah Luster. The literary journal Ploughshares cited One Big Self for its ability to "produce intimate, haunting, and oddly gorgeous portraits…giving voice to the isolation, heartache, and individualism" of the inmates. Wright helped to bring their voices to the surface by asking what she calls "poetic questions" that had little to do with the inmate's crimes. "I designed an interview that was poetic, or at least intuitive, you know like: 'Have you ever made anything of which you're proud? Have you ever had your own room? What's your favorite color? What's your idea of a good car? Do you dislike any food groups?' Questions that had nothing to do with their crime or their sentence. Just to get a better idea of the person and of the child they had been."

Because the MacArthur Foundation gives its awards to recognize the importance of the creative individual in society, one wonders if this implies that a dearth of such recognition exists in the daily lives of creative individuals, a de facto sense of unimportance. When asked why, Wright again answers with a question: "You mean why does our country despise its own culture—is that the question?" She explains further, "Isn't this pure capitalism? So if you can't market it, then it's not worthy. And if you can market it, then its worth is directly relational to its dollar value. That's not just on the surface. It's very pervasive in our culture, and I know everyone does not buy into it, but it is suggested to them day in and day out. And I think we are very lonely because of it." Lonely, but not alone. Poets like C.D. Wright are here to give us a voice.

- Writer, Eric Beeman