Charles Wright

Charles Wright was a National Book Award Poetry Winner in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and a Finalist in 1974 for Hard Freight.

The book that changed my life was The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, which I read in March 1959 and which made me want to write poetry myself. One poem in particular from that book overwhelmed me, "Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula", a poem celebrating the physical beauty of the natural world at Sirmione peninsula, on Lake Garda, outside Verona, Italy, the very place I happened to be reading the poem. I was hooked.

As for one work which in particular influenced my own writing, I would have to say Confessions, by St. Augustine. Not only is the book fascinating in its own right, of course, but it somehow gave me the 'permission' I needed to embark on my own project of self-examination and self-disclosure that took 27 years and three trilogies to complete - Country Music, The World of the Ten Thousand Things and Negative Blue. Augustine only took a handful of years, as we know. But then he was a saint, no? The Confessions was the Penguin Classic book translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin, published in 1961. The Selected Poems by Pound was the New Directions edition that was published in 1957.

I hope this is of some help. Both books are classics, one a Modernist classic, the other an eternal one. It's always nice when one is influenced by really good books.

All best regards-

Charles Wright