C.D. Wright: University Poet

Thinking on the work and career of the poet C.D. Wright, I return, in my own elliptical fashion, to two quotes (and one idea) from two writers who write about the nature of literary production at the end of the twentieth century:

When I think about C.D. Wright, I think first and foremost about a poet whose language drew me in with its scalpel precision. I think of her use of uncertainty. Her work re-estranges for me the home from which I had always felt alienated. When I read her, I'm reminded of my own stories of driving through the part of the world where I grew up. I also think about her as the professor I had: the hours of classes, the notes on poems, the often-silent responses to work. I think on friends and classmates, some also gone now, circled around her. I think of a photo I took of her that she hated (but she thanked me anyway). I think about the dozens of emails still sitting in my inbox from someone who often reached out on a bad day — a "Vic Chesnutt day," she wrote once. But these pedagogic and personal roles she inhabited are not so separable — indeed, beyond being embodied by one individual, they are also enabled by and central to higher education.

I want to first add that I do not think calling C.D. Wright — or indeed any poet — a "university poet" is any kind of insult. Quite the contrary: I find that anyone who has navigated poetry's various institutions along with the institution that is higher education in the United States to not only be intriguing, but also someone with an incredible amount of drive and maybe even a kind of magical power, or maybe it just feels that way in 2025. But in order to understand the full picture of Wright's career in the field of poetry, we must understand it in tandem with her career in the academic field. In her case, these realms are not exclusive. As Wright gained prominence in one, she was rewarded in the other, the beneficiary of a much sought-after transfer of different forms of capital across the fields.

But there's a risk in describing Wright this way: the anti-intellectual move of calling anyone (or any cultural object) that does not fit a broad, post-Fordist, public-focused vogue "elite," or in other words exclusionary, haunts us still. Such targets are cultural works or workers who are based not in the public sphere, but in the university's orbit, apparently shielded from the open market of cultural production, whose exchange value is defined by data that easily equates to ways we measure success in the current moment, like sales, hits, or views. However, critique of academic elites' insularity does not only come from outside of higher education. Poets working within it often harbor this misguided notion, believing that their art is capable of persevering autonomously without the backing of academic institutions. Pierre Bourdieu would remind us that this is a form of disavowal, a psychoanalytic term that does not mean the existence of something that is unknown, but rather that there has been an attempted erasure of it from discussion — an erasure that can only last so long. The disavowal of higher education institutions and their influence is an ideological move, and the well-worn quote from Slavoj Žižek yet applies beautifully: "How tempting to recall here the formula of fetishistic disavowal: 'I know very well, but still . . .'"3

Poets like C.D. Wright,4 whether through generational inclination or aesthetic alliances, know the power of economic capital, the need for money at all stages of production, and yet there is some deep joy in ignoring this influence, as if somehow the field of poetry does — or rather, should — exist above material needs or capitalist structures. In short: some of us want to believe that all of Wright's success, or indeed the success of any other poet or artist, is based on the poetry itself. Why would we not? So often we harbor the delusion that the work is the most important thing, but that is hardly ever true in any field of cultural production. Further, to deny that Wright's success hinges on both her creative work as well as her university career ignores a crucial aspect of Wright's achievement. Wright's work, whose perceived success is surely not immune from the reality of strong sales figures, is part of a generation in which we can recognize how different aesthetic camps in poetry's field interact with one another.

Further, Wright's ascent took place in the midst of the solidification of graduate writing programs in the university system. But in recent decades, as the U.S. higher education system has faced increasing financial pressure to consolidate, professors' public successes beyond the walls of the academy must be more and increasingly greater. This degradation, this slow collapse of the system, leads to further disavowal, both by those on the outside but also on the inside, of the academy's role in the field of poetry, and calls into question the legitimacy of the system from the ground up. Consider, for example, how much traction Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? got in the 1990s — even as he is someone who has benefitted greatly by being on the "inside." If we observe that it is also a collapsing system, we might ask: what power did it ever have to grant money, positions, or prestige?

Here is a simple example of what I mean: until the publication of her third book, Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues (1981), Wright had not published with a large press. This third collection was her first with a university press, and it coincided with her first employment by a higher education institution, San Francisco State University. This is not to suggest the path was easy, but that capital accumulated beyond the university could be readily exchanged within the university marketplace — a path that forty years later is still mostly obscured for even the most qualified of candidates. The success Wright had appears a novelty now, a relic of a bygone era, both for the academy but also the field of poetry's role within it.

While the changes in the university world are worthy of discussion in the context of Wright's career, as many of the neoliberal and structural changes to higher education began and came to fruition during the forty-year period that comprises Wright's time within it, it is important to consider the broader role of how different parts of poetry publishing, academia, and award and prize-granting bodies function together to form a semi-cohesive field (as ever, in the Bourdieusian approach to the word, the space in which agents act and all forms of capital converge) of poetry. Wright's career exists within this broader context, and certainly her career is not unique in its merger of poetry world and academic world, enmeshed with different fields of capital accumulation and exchange. Libbie Rifkin's Career Moves provides some of the roadmap to my approach to this idea, and I adopt her methodology for taking a broader view of these operations by using Bourdieu:

Describing the various semi-autonomous cultures of competition out of which art is produced, Bourdieu achieves a panoptic perspective, capable of articulating the "refractive" relations between even the most isolated of struggles. But he does not exempt himself from the dynamic he describes. By locating the battle over the rules and norms of each segment of the cultural field at their various cones, Bourdieu not only offers the possibility for some degree of generalization, but also builds into his theory an understanding of the way theory distorts its object.5

I want to take a moment and address that while John Guillory's work on capital and canon formation is vital to my work broadly, Bourdieu defamiliarizes the approach to academic systems and position-takings vs Guillory, who would make more literary sense were this work headed in that particular direction. And pace Bourdieu, then, I want to suggest that each such "segment" of the field of poetry, at present, came to center around higher education and positions, and that Wright's career both in the field of poetry, between publishing, grants, awards, readings, invited lectures, awards both large and small, is an example of how someone might secure their place in their field through higher education, the economy in which all the accumulation of those poetry objects finds its literal and symbolic valuation.6 If we understand Wright's particular prominence within the field, we can also understand its emergent enterprise of prestige and cultural production of capital from the emergence of neoliberalism until today.

Symbolic capital accumulated in arenas outside the university, like grants from arts foundations, has potential value in others, like independent or corporate presses. This network of symbolic capital dispersal is also dependent on the field of publishing both inside and outside the university system. Symbolic capital, or a shared language of value within the field of poetry,  affirms its own circulation between these prestige-granting organs.

Wright's publishing record shows how valuation and success increase in tandem. From her first two books on Lost Roads Press, a regional micropress run by Frank Stanford before his death (and subsequently by Wright herself), to her third book (mentioned above) on a west coast university press, Wright's publications steadily tracked with her visibility and moved into the academically-valued world of university presses. Next, the publication of her fourth book — Further Adventures with You by Carnegie Mellon — not only transferred the success of those previous books by awarding further capital, but also demonstrates what Bourdieu calls "position-taking."7 Based on this ascent, Wright then got the gig at Brown University which solidified her as established academic poet, and conferred a professional valuation which she would have for the rest of her life. Wright entered into a positive feedback loop of compounded literary value: multiple poetry books' success led to academic employment, and that position's value led to further publication and steps up in the visibility of presses she published with, including the University of Georgia Press and, ultimately, Copper Canyon Press, which is among the largest independent publishers in the poetry business. Wright could then reinvest that dual economic and symbolic capital elsewhere, through teaching, writing literary criticism, or publishing in order to expand and further sustain her presence in the field. She was surprisingly good at this kind of gamesmanship.

Bourdieu uses a couple of terms to cover these motions in The Forms of Capital, such as conversion and transformation, but what I call transferability feels most appropriate. Like Bourdieu's habitus, the word "transfer" itself is etymologically imbued with the idea of carrying forward, of holding something, but here, capital is moved from one place to another. Bourdieu likens habitus to the scientific "principle of the conservation of energy," in which "profits in one area are necessarily paid for by the costs in another." There are "equivalences," Bourdieu adds, based on the "widest sense" of labor-time ("Forms"), stemming from Marx, who writes that "exchange-values" must "be mutually replaceable or of identical magnitude."8 Capital in a new form, dispersed as a result of capital acquired in a different form, must be equivalent in value. In order for a poet to access transferable capital in the literary realm, the symbolic capital achieved by the publication of a book must be matched in the economic capital handed out by the prize winnings the book and poet achieve. Again, Guillory's work would be a wonderful addition to this analysis.

If the concept of capital and ensuring its circulation is a way of measuring the power within social relations, how forms of capital are accumulated, transferred, compounded, and re-transferred is useful in considering the role that capital plays in keeping individual agents, presses and journals, and prize-granting institutions within the field and its various arms. As capital is transferred, even if some loss occurs (a book doesn't sell as much as anticipated), the new form of acquired capital is reinvested by agent or organization in order to ultimately earn more capital, which allows for the ability to continue engaging in the field. Throughout Wright's career, she firmly follows this pattern of investment, accumulation, and reinvestment — of taking what is earned in one realm and having the vision to reapply it elsewhere. It's a mutually reinforcing process through which she built the Brown M.F.A. program into one of the most competitive in the United States. Each form of literary labor — a book, a graduate program — is designed as an investment by organizations to bring challengers into a field that must, in order to be justified, reproduce itself into the future. Bourdieu notes that "from a narrowly economic standpoint, this effort is bound to be seen as pure wastage, but in terms of the logic of social exchanges, it is a solid investment, the profits of which will appear, in the long run, in monetary or other form."9 When focusing on one career, precisely how such capital is transferred, and the mechanisms of how that distribution happens becomes a bit more apparent. It is easy to see an analogy between what we might consider "the poetry family" and Bourdieu's more general "family," as both exist in the same struggle of trying to find agents to whom to hand the keys of the future, of figuring out how to pass down accumulated forms of capital in careful but perhaps risky ways, and how any field must find a way to not only survive, but remain relevant into a future. While capital's transferability is crucial in understanding social relations that are based on that capital, what becomes difficult is imagining what a field or society without those power dynamics looks like.

I do not want to romanticize or over-idealize the program era's codified pathway for writers to become academics. What we begin to see take shape once Wright is hired at Brown is a different career trajectory — one that was ultimately a successful bridge between academic world and poetry world. Wright's move to Brown, the publishing of her previously mentioned fourth book, Further Adventures with You (Carnegie-Mellon University Press 1986), her next in 1991 (String Light, from the University of Georgia Press), and the birth of her and Forrest Gander's son Brecht all occurred while no doubt beginning and maintaining an academic career and all that entails in terms of time, energy, politicking, and general labor.

A more interesting phase, I feel, begins in the mid to late 1990s for Wright, a point at which Copper Canyon became the home for all of Wright's future and posthumous books. There are artists of all stripes who, when they become the establishment — and, for example, serve as judges of contests that anoint upcoming artists (Bourdieu would remind us here of the challenge/establishment dynamic, but I will not bore you) — grow stale. They have the thing that they do and we have grown accustomed to being able to identify who they are and what kind of work they will produce. They become, in short, a brand. I fear naming poets who, once they have their awards and have settled into a press, tenure, and the establishment's comforts have gotten boring, but I imagine a few come to your mind, too.

Wright, however, is not one of these poets. Once Copper Canyon started regularly publishing her, once she knew where she was, Wright's work all but exploded in its challenge to how we understand poetry and poets. She continued the work of anthropologists, of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and viewed her work as bearing witness to a place and time that was slowly being lost to the modern world. There is, it turns out, a kind of underwritten freedom when one can settle in as an artist, when one knows that there will be another book, when the symbolic and economic forms of capital are collected enough where the transferability of capital allows for a room of ones own, as it were — or perhaps in Bourdieusian terms — a settled position within the field. For Wright, this assurance suggested an answer to the question of Well, now what?

In Wright's mid-career collections — I draw the line from Further Adventures With You in 1986 to just before 1998's Deepstep Come Shining — we see a poet who has all career aspects securely firing together: an academic career, a poetry career, an accumulation of prizes, awards, and publications, all of it flourishing. Students apply to go study at Brown to work with Wright, and the university is supportive of her work. There is even the 2004 MacArthur Genius Grant and (after 2013), a named professorship. But we also see an artist who turned the institution of higher education into a method by which to push the creative boundaries of her own work. Will we ever really see it again? Can a poet starting now ever hope for the kind of security that Wright had?

I realize this essay has not had any real quotes from Wright, who never really had the chance, it seems, to consider her own career in this light, at least in any publicly available form. We talked poetry careers and academia on more than a few occasions (my last email from her about my Ph.D. included making fun of me for working so hard on non-poem writing things), but I never got the chance to ask her in any formal way about her life and career. And while a great reading of her work as it exists on the page is a necessary and vital discussion, leaving out the context of that career risks overly romanticizing the life and labor of a poet who in fact came to master her craft as well as the mechanics of academic spaces.

Poetry careers, such as they are, exist even now as kind of a hybrid — even as higher education struggles to maintain its own levels of value to a society that no longer views these institutions as the arbiters of knowledge and culture. But still, there remains a bit of what Wright experienced throughout her career: the ability to generate value (both symbolic and economic) beyond the university space that still has meaning when brought within institutions. With these transfers and valuations, we can still hope for a bit of what Wright had — some freedom and some space in which to do our best work.

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Amish Trivedi (@amishtrivedi.bsky.social) is the author of three books of poetry, and has poems in American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, and forthcoming in Georgia Review. He is an assistant professor at the University of Delaware.

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