Lannan Foundation

C.D. Wright, Poet - Marfa, Summer 2003

C.D. Wright can be described in many ways: she is an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvents herself with each new volume.  Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.

She has written ten volumes of poetry and recently published Cooling Time, a book comprised of poetry, memoir and essay.  In it she writes, “Many writers maintain a guarded border between language thick with hair and twigs and the reified, rarified stuff.  No matter which side of the border poets live on, they tend to act as if they were being overrun.  All I want is a day pass.  I like to sleep in my own bed.” A recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, Wright is a professor of English at Brown University.  With her husband, poet Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers. 

I could hear the scales fall from my eyes when I walked into my Marfa study. Watching the birds dip in their bath and the breeze stirring the stippo grass--anything could come up. There isn’t a better place to face the light of the page, at least I have never been there.