Charles Wright in New Haven

Hello All Locals--

Here's an opportunity to hear one of the most important living poets read from his work. If you're going, I hope to see you there.

Poet Charles Wright
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, 6 p.m.St. Anthony Hall, 483 College Street, New Haven
Sponsored by the Department of English and St. Anthony HallFree and open to the public
Charles Wright is one of the most widely acclaimed and critically beloved poets of the past thirty years. His poems, which in their long lines combine near-Biblical weight with a sharp wit, examine with striking clarity the central dilemmas of time, experience, and language's power to capture either. "The secret of language," he wrote in his most recent collection, "is the secret of desire," and Wright's preoccupation so often is to probe his own unfolding language for the bedrock truths that, almost geologically, underlie it. His subject is landscape; his landscape, Appalachia. His most recent book is Littlefoot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); his other volumes include Scar Tissue (2006), Buffalo Yoga (2004), Appalachia (1998), Black Zodiac (1997), Zone Journals (1988), The Other Side of the River (1984), Country Music/ Selected Early Poems (1982), and The Southern Cross (1981), among others.Wright has been the recipient of many awards, most notably the Pulitzer Prize(for Black Zodiac), the National Book Award (for Country Music: New and Selected Poems), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.