Introducing “C.D. Wright in Context”

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The question I had when I began the process for this cluster, "C.D. Wright in Context," at its heart had to do with influence, but not exclusively in the way that the poet herself is famous for it. I wanted to situate Wright's work in that contentious nexus of poetics from which it arose: How did she do it? C.D. Wright's influence as a poet, teacher, and rural cipher runs deep in now generations of poets, both in the U.S., the U.K., and further abroad, and in my own and in many of the contributors to this cluster's view, is singularly difficult to quantify—and the extent of her achievements, this cluster shows, is only just coming into broader critical view. Her passing, which at this time of this publication is a few months shy of a decade ago, was a catalyzing and for many, cataclysmic loss for American poetry. It's not uncommon for those devoted readers and scholars of her work, myself included, to lament that we never got to meet her, or for those who did to begin discussion of her work with remembrance, bound up in the tender strata of a poet's becoming. That inclination, a kind of desire for intellectual or interpersonal contact, is a common part of the nature of what it is to read her: a peculiar species of parasocial, or imagined, proximity appears. For all its variance between the read, felt, studied, or imagined, one could even call it an ongoing prosimetric relation between poet and audience.

What I mean to emphasize is this enmeshed mode of readerly, social, and pedagogic relation to C.D. Wright's work is coextensive with her own poetic production as she forged a path of evolutionary ethical and intermedia experimentation in U.S. poetry for five decades, and that the essays in this long-in-the-making cluster, which range from an assessment of Wright's success in academic institutions (Amish Trivedi), to clothing's affective presences (Rachel Trousdale), to her consistently leftist, recombinant ethical engagements, whether through "prison and parataxis" (Olivia Milroy Evans), "medium-close" filmic distance (Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth), or the persistence of whiteness and racialization (Christopher Spaide) in her work, create an interpretative context not quite expressive of its value as an historical index of American poetics as I'd first expected, but one that is the make and measure of her work as situated in our current context in 2025. It is a vantage that allows scholars included here, and others elsewhere and going forward, to glimpse something of the how the present is processed in poetry, not least in the means and methods through which we begin this work of critical assessment of Wright's poetry and essays. As Kelly Hoffer determines, in her essay linking Wright to the visual grammar of Modernism, "her pages . . . offer a view into this world."

Wright's reception is best read, as Stephanie Burt shows, as rooted in Allen Grossman's notion of "hermeneutic friends," and in her cluster essay "Words Appeared / By Which She Wanted to Live: C.D. Wright's Realism," Burt enumerates how such "commonality" links Wright's work to nineteenth-century realist paradigms, most notably George Eliot. Here, Burt extends and refines her standing inquiry into Wright's status as a major poet. And the same time, Wright's context can also be best read by way of poetry itself, and in this cluster you'll find Carolyn Bergonzo's "Deep River Pedagogy," a poem whose details evoke the intimate context of having been Wright's student which begins with the opening couplet, itself staging openness: "You ready yourself/for the restless transmission." The same can be said for this cluster, itself a "restless transmission" that has been long in the making. I am grateful to all the contributors for their grace throughout our extended dialogue. May there be swift and robust developments in the burgeoning field of C.D. Wright studies.

Alicia Wright (Bluesky: @aliciawright.bsky.social; @aliciaawwright) is the author of You're Called By the Same Sound (Thirdhand Books, 2025) and A Coin, A Moth, A Literary Journal, an essay chapbook forthcoming from DoubleCross Press. Her poetry appears in the Paris Review, Chicago Review, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, West Branch, and jubilat, among others. Essays and reviews appear in Full Stop, Los Angeles Review of Books, and on the Ploughshares blog. She is the editor of this cluster, "C.D. Wright in Context." Alicia is the editor of Annulet and publisher of Annulet Editions, and she currently works as Managing Editor of The Iowa Review. She also hosts the poetry reading series Normie Creep in the Sacred Grove.

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