“Words appeared / by which she wanted to live”: C. D. Wright’s Realism

Nobody needs to prove, in 2025, that C. D. Wright was an influential poet, or a beloved teacher, or someone who continues to be read and studied today. Few American poets of her cohort have a more varied fan base; few poems have more direct imitators than "Personals," and few modern projects more heirs than her book-length works of poetry mixed with journalism. As with all major poets, we can know they matter without exhausting the reasons why. And right now I want to make an unfashionable, even a Victorian, argument — at least, one I have not seen before — as to why she stands out.

Most critical arguments about modern poems take one of three positions regarding the ethical. Maybe it's strictly speaking irrelevant — we react to poems as aesthetic objects, as structures of feeling, or as shows of technique. Maybe it's relevant at a high level of abstraction, because poems represent versions of persons, "hermeneutic friends," in Allen Grossman's locution (which Wright quoted), and so any effective poem can help us be better by making us new friends.1 And maybe — a position associated with the Language School, with other American avant-gardes, and with Wright's own left politics — poems do ethical work by subverting, making readers question what we thought we knew, challenging the capitalist or quietudinous normalcies of expository prose.

Wright's poems can hold up under all three paradigms, though they will generate different lists of hits. If you want versions of persons, start with String Light (1991). If you want subversions, challenges to an existing order, One Big Self (2003/2007). Yet Wright's poems pursue another version of the ethical: reading the poetry of C. D. Wright can literally make you a better person, by modeling the emotional connection, the awareness of how we resemble — and therefore influence — other people, that earlier writers named as sympathy, and considered a precondition for goodness in a secular cosmos.

In other words: Wright's poems pursue a nineteenth century goal, strongly associated with George Eliot, a writer (so far as I know) not ever discussed in conjunction with Wright or with her closest peers. Wright stands nearly alone in her cohort in achieving this goal through late twentieth century, poetry-specific means.  Her poems encourage and prepare their readers explicitly for open alertness, for generosity toward real people and connections among them, for the respect towards difference and the extension of sympathy that Eliot put forward as a goal for novelistic realism. And the poems do so without the kinds of closure that support — in novels and in other kinds of poems — character and incident: Wright's poems go out of their way to tell you that they will never tell you the whole story, that the whole of any character can never be known. Her poems offer not only the sympathy but the examples of openness, of reserved judgment, that might help us not only care for other people, but defend them, and defend ourselves too.

Discussions of novelistic realism often begin with Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), whose famous seventeenth chapter sets out Eliot's moral and narrative goals. "These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love."2 Wright's poems have their own "these people," a distinctive cast including Wright herself, all with rough edges. They also exemplify what our era has learned to call self-care: you cannot tolerate, much less, love others, the poems imply, until you recognize what makes you lovable too. The books set examples readers can — and often should! — try to follow. And they set those examples not least when they describe abject, shameful or just bizarre aspects of the self. We all (her work says) have bodies, and shameful moments, and tangled histories, and bizarre quirks, like hers, whether or not we hail (as Wright did, as the people in Adam Bede do) from places considered backward or exotic by outsiders.

When a character in a Wright poem makes what looks like a bad or a sad decision, her verse sets out to make it comprehensible. Consider, from String Light, "Why Ralph Refuses to Dance":

The poem sets out explicitly into "the difficult task of knowing another soul," a task that — as the self-interruptions imply — can never be finished.4 Even-numbered lines tell a story about superstition and memory: odd-numbered lines give excuses. Put together, they show us some — but not all — that we might want to know to feel for Ralph.

In "Personals," of course, we feel for the poet herself, who presents a figure we might want to meet — one we might even want to date in a world where this poem were a personal ad, like the ones newspapers used to run. No such world exists: instead, this figure will be our hermeneutic friend, her quirks never exhausted and never predictable:

The poet is teasing us, as well as making fun of the all too perfect (and boring) personal ads newspapers used to run. Instead, she seems to be (half in pentameter!) modeling self-acceptance. Maybe if we hang out with her we can learn to accept ourselves too.

String Light, the most rural of her books, the one most committed to her Arkansas, also contains the strangest of her self-portraits: "Self-Portrait on Rocky Mount" begins "I am the goat." She continues, speaking for many goats: "Our flesh is not widely loved. Yet our younger, under parts make fine gloves."6 Kid gloves, for especially delicate handling. Wright-as-goat invites us to notice her vulnerable parts, and to admire her awkward self-presentation. We might join her: we might try being goats too, and "live on next-to-nothing."7

The sympathy Wright extends to herself, and to goats, goes out to the characters she knew growing up: "Lou Vindie," and "Truman," and "the loudmouths and goiters/ and dogs with the mange," "each and every one . . . doing their utmost," "their naturally suspicious part."8 We can like them even if they suspect — or dislike — us. We may even learn the sources — in scarcity, in isolation — for their blameless, persistent suspicion.

Just Whistle (1993) and books to follow would extend the same kind of acceptance, toleration and love to the human body, with its drives and sensations and orifices. It is tempting to say "starting with the poet's own body," since that book, and Wright's subsequent poems about sex and sexuality, feel so intimate, so personal. Just Whistle makes that claim inaccurate: it is a book about "the body," some body, maybe your body, especially if you were assigned female at birth, "the body not dead but dormant, like a cave that has stopped growing," "unable to plug the wound," the "wound" being birth, but also the psychic trauma of difficult romance, and perhaps grief, and perhaps the damage done by patriarchy, which tells us that our secretions, effluvia, and vulnerability should give us shame.9

They should not, and Just Whistle works with "the body" in the same way that String Light — and Adam Bede, and One Big Self — will work with other people. Wright's writings help us treat our own and other bodies generously, as lovable with all their flaws, especially when they are abject, confined, or neglected. In this sense these writings work at absolute cross-purposes with the so-called confessional poets that Wright said she loathed. "Poetry is like food, one of my first teachers remarked, freeing me to dislike Rocky Mountain oysters and Robert Lowell," she quipped.10 Rocky Mountain oysters are bull testicles. Both the food and the poet represent cishet masculinity taken to an American extreme. (Wright was known to quote David Antin: "if Robert Lowell is a poet I don't want to be one.")11

The problem with poetry like Lowell's — or rather like the Lowell that poets of her background were brought up to imagine — is not just the patriarchy but the boasting: Lowell's most famous poems implied that he was special, his flaws were special, his shame was extreme and set him apart. Wright's shameful, shocking, apparently ugly, or (slightly later) hot and sexy poems set out to do the opposite. She sets out to touch and console, with the body's consent: "the body scaled and riddled with mistakes, to help the crumbling, hacky, runny body, the stiff, fitful body, the dumb, anachronistic body, the teratogentic, totally gnarled, hobbled body," a body perhaps startlingly like our own.12 The resulting poems are what she called odes, "fertile poetic construction[s]" whose "trademark is openness."13

These odes' self-acceptance may help us accept others. Wright's work can also travel in the reverse direction, so that we accept our bodies because we accept what other people have to haul around. The poems say to lovers and potential lovers that nothing human is alien. "Poem with a Dart of Color" follows a rural woman who chooses to isolate herself, "stopped getting the bottled/ water then the paper cut off/ the phone stopped buying/ sunflower seeds."14 She's apparently stopped using subject pronouns too. And she would not even feed her last regular visitors, the songbirds. But the songbirds would not leave her: "the goldfinch/ was back inspecting/ her afflicted face/ through the unwashed glass" (notice the chime: afflictions merit inspections)/ Let us be the goldfinch, the poems say, "inspecting" one another with kindness; let us see ourselves in the poet who will not smooth out or disguise or reverse her mixed and spontaneous reactions to the seasons, a few pages on: "Ah spring how it made her/ want to walk backwards/ or stick a fork in her side."15

All Wright's mature books also incorporate humor; it's part of her sense of commonality, and part of her range of vernaculars. If pain sends us out of ourselves, and isolates us (being, as Elaine Scarry famously suggested, incommunicable), humor lets us stay in the moment, and come together. But grief—and the anticipation of grief: what if we let someone down? what if they leave us—give us something in common too: here Wright follows not only Eliot but Eliot's usual model, William Wordsworth, whom Wright (unusually among poets with her stylistic pedigree) quotes, in Wright's poem "From the Obscure Lives of Poets":

Wright is quoting the same Wordsworthian passage from "Resolution and Independence" that Lewis Carroll mocked: the poem wants us to know where it comes from and what it wants to do. Wright, like Wordsworth, will teach us kindness by showing us how she, too, proceeds despite her flaws, her hollow places. "I try to herd the worst feelings / I ever felt the worst thoughts / The very worst under one / Warped sheet of metal," she writes near the end of ShallCross.17 Note the verb "herd," with its callback to earlier pastoral: our worst parts cannot be eliminated and need not be hidden, but rather gathered together, kept safe, even tamed.

That kind of herding, too, was George Eliot's goal: "things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome," she wrote in Adam Bede, and Eliotic realism can help us love these unhandsome things. Indeed, to learn that "human nature is lovable," we absolutely must get to know "people more or less commonplace and vulgar."18 Not only people but their experiences and, apparently, their body parts. Wright's other precursor here is another nineteenth-century figure: Walt Whitman, for whom "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," who wrote "I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms."

In speaking of Eliot's aims as a novelist I am speaking about something all her critics see, something that represents George Eliot 101. Carolyn Burdett's 2020 summary represents a consensus: "Denouncing rigid and rules-based philosophical and religious systems, Eliot championed particularity, grafting the moral task of close attentive responsiveness to others onto or into literary realism. Sympathy is the methodology of Eliot's realism as well as its intended moral outcome."19 The "rigid systems" Wright herself rejects include closed forms, genre boundaries (as between reported nonfiction and lyric), as well as the literal bounds and walls of the carceral state.

Rigid systems, whether in politics or in linguistic composition, would not leave room enough for particular people. Eliot drove home that particularity through her intricate plots, not an option that C. D. Wright's poetry could or would take. Wright differs, too, from more conventional, anecdote-based poets of her era, even at their most memorable (Robert Hass, for example, or Larry Levis): she does not give the full narrative arc for any of the characters she creates. (In this she follows the West Coast poets among whom she briefly lived, poets devoted to — in the title of Lyn Hejinian's famous essay — "The Rejection of Closure.") We never learn the full story: we see the beginning, or the middle, or the end.  There's more to any figure Wright depicts that the poem can say, and the syntactic leaps and fallings-short and sudden changes signal that "more"; the open space, the white space, in her long poems (especially One Big Self) work the same way. What Eliot does with long interwoven plots, where there's always another thread to pull, Wright does with fragmentation and interruption.

Meanwhile, Wright engages us with all these people we can pity, and tolerate, and love, and never entirely predict. Wright poetically represents all five senses in her efforts to produce connection, with a particular emphasis on whatever feels vulnerable. Her final collection of short poems begins with an imaginary, impossible, "photograph . . . in which everyone is seen// touching everyone else." She then invites us to stand by her as she gives thanks: "Thanks to those // who exposed the hairy buff eggs // of my anxieties, their pupae of little // hypocrisies."20 Who took this photograph? Just "my friend, the wedding photographer," ready "to break the frame."21

Wright's poems often break frames: the frame around the self-sufficient anecdote, and the frame around the supposedly private, as distinct from public life. Her twenty-first century books find a language for kindness that becomes political, able to extend itself towards strangers, especially toward the incarcerated. It also examines her son, whose odyssey through Mexico gives a through-line to Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008), not only showing us how to look after one another, but also looking after him. That effort — strenuous, only partly successful — shows up as exemplary, but also comic, absurd:

To save anyone, to save everyone, to save ourselves, we first have to get out of bed. Again, self-care becomes a precondition for other care:

Wright does not simply, to quote Adam Zagajewski's now too often quoted poem, "try to praise the mutilated world": instead she finds tools of style — prismatic word-hoards, unexpected intimacies, exciting bits mashed together, quoted speech — that give pleasure to what would seem to be shameful or private in ourselves. We might describe perhaps her most well-known collection, One Big Self, with its interview slices and its photographic backstory, as a trawl through unsatisfying, inadequate, ways to describe its incarcerated people. Each way proves, as Wright shows, moving but insufficient. People are always more than they show, always worthier than they first seem, just as fingerprints are always odder and harder to categorize, so that the very attempt to classify ends in comedy: "you've got your plain loops, plain arches, tented arches, twin loops, lateral pocket loops, central pocket loops, whorls and your accidentals."24 How much more so human beings.

An uncommonly allegorical ode poem from Tremble (1997) invites us to find such looping pleasure in one another. The unpunctuated syntax, sometimes hesitant and sometimes vaultingly confident, benefits from extended quotation:

This poem of married love is also a poem of mutual care, where people tend each other as shepherds tend flocks: that care is "seminal . . . nay, labial," anti-patriarchal, even when it includes men.26 And it is a care (again, George Eliot stands approvingly in the background) that looks like, but is not, an appeal to religion, with its echo of a hymn, like the moment in One Big Self where "transfiguration sets in."27

Wright's sex poems and her domestic poems, and her poems about prisoners and her poems about rural life, have a great deal in common: they highlight the awkward, the erroneous, the supposedly shameful, the unhandsome. Not beauty in a smooth, rule-bound line, but the moment (for example) when a poet who naps at her desk makes, as "everyone makes / orthographic errors / while her face slept in her hand."28 They even borrow props from George Eliot's favorite Dutch still life paintings: Wright's poems give herself, and her "girl friends," "transfers to the real world / where the fish smell like fish and the cheese like cheese."29

Wright's point is not just to make the fish fishy, the cheese cheesy; it is, rather to share that experience, and to extend it to the inexhaustible lives of other people, as well as to the bodies that we must cart around for ourselves. That kind of extension, if we can learn from it, can make us kinder too: and it extends not just from fish and cheese to human bodies but to the places where those bodies live, and the roads between them, outward to the ways that — as George Eliot put it — "there is no private life that has not been determined by a wider public life," the more so for "lives . . . rooted in the common earth, having to endure all the ordinary chances."30

And yet Wright had her doubts. "Crying helps / Crying doesn't help," she wrote, flailing, towards the end of Rising Falling Hovering.31 Rising Falling Hovering is about her son but also about being alive, and about being in Mexico, while the United States under George W. Bush was bombing Iraq, killing so many people. That kind of public life — or public death — overseas might make the intimacies of Wright's poems seem pointless: "The true number of Iraqi dead to remain officially unknown. . . . The mind braying at the mind // A prescription for revulsion left in a taxi."32 Rising Falling Hovering incorporates horrified Mexican headlines: "BÁRBARO ATAQUE: MÁS DE MIL BOMBAS CAYERON EN LA CAPITAL,"33 even while Wright pursues her "all-American forgettery."34 Poems might as well be recycled, or tossed in with trash, "our badly decomposed affairs. . . . carted off / every other Wednesday," while the true language, "the writing in the trees," the language of nature telling us how to live, "remains illegible."35

Against the machinations of empire, what can a local realist, or a chronicler of leaky bodies, do? She can do something: she can set an example, not least with how her language invites us in. "All choice of words is slang."36 All of Wright is in this sense slang: all her language reflects living users. Much of it tries not to sound like standard English even when it comes nowhere near local color, and some of it purposely veers beyond English, as in the "retablo" poems that she would publish only in their bilingual forms. Wright concludes One with Others, after even the endnotes and bibliography, with an italicized prayer for multilingual inclusion: "I want people of twenty seven languages walking back and forth saying to one / another hello brother how's the fishing / and when they reach their destination I don't want them to forget if it was bad."37

Gathering, mingling, people for this imaginary fishing trip is like gathering favorite writers, and even like gathering appellations for them, as in the title for Wright's second collection of expository and critical prose, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. That book, with its jaw breaking title, cut up what would otherwise have been admiring essays on the poets Brenda Hillman, George Oppen, Jean Valentine, Robert Creeley, and William Carlos Williams, interspersing those pieces with other kinds of essayistic prose, as if to model (like Eliot's plots) interconnectedness and interdependence. Sometimes it almost seems to paraphrase Whitman, to translate his own nineteenth century generosity (backed by his physical-culture mysticism) into her terms. "I love the filthy ones for their descriptive talent as well as transgressive nature. I love the dirty ones more than the minced . . . I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations . . . The nomenclatures within nomenclatures."38

So did Whitman, in "A Song for Occupations," and with Whitman Wright values the words so much because she values their users, "all else giving place to men and women like you."39 Like Whitman — but more thoroughly — Wright focuses on, as a test of human value and solidarity, those convicted of crimes: "the crimes are not the sum of the criminal any more than anyone is entirely separable from their acts."40 "NO ONE NO BODY IS BAD FOREVER," in a phrase that One Big Self repeats.41 Incarcerated people's lives in Wright are sympathetic, baffling, "discordant," full of pieces we could not predict that do not fit together, liable to restart or worthy of starting over, as Wright's lines about them repeatedly start over, or else shift from speaker to speaker: at one point One Big Self compares these lives to the Game of Life, though real life does not play by rigid rules, and we can do only so much to restart it:

Fried pickles! No one could have predicted that.

If you followed debates among American poets and critics in the 2000s, you may have seen Wright brought forward as an example of what Rachel Greenwald Smith calls "compromise aesthetics." In making stylistic innovations serve acceptable, mainstream, liberal ends, to adhere to compromise aesthetics means "failing to provoke, to unmoor, to demand the impossible."43 As Smith notes, It is the art of poetry associated, early in its career, with Fence magazine (and Wright supported Fence early on). For Smith, compromise aesthetics produces art whose commitments to liberal individualist goals makes it appalling, or counterproductive, in our own time. "Literature," Smith writes, "has long been imagined to be able to alter its readers by compelling empathy," connecting individuals,, and for Smith, this is never enough: we need to see structural problems, and thus to see whole new parts of other people's lifeworlds (rather than just what we already share with them).44 This kind of compromise aesthetics might well describe the anecdote-based, rhetorical poetics of, say, a Levis or a Pinsky. It is not what Wright does, however: especially in her longer works, she tries instead "to encompass more and more complexity," rather than merely "registering the specificity of individual emotion." For Smith, this is "not the same thing as compromise"; instead it "helps us commit to the urgency of protecting, caring for, and enabling our friends": it sees not like-minded individuals alone but the ties among them, and the forces at play.45 It shows not just one figure but, so to speak, One with Others, or even One Big Self.

Among the poets singled out for praise throughout The Poet, the Lion, William Carlos Williams represents Wright's realist goals: Williams, a pediatrician and an OB/GYN, "dealt . . . with individuals in real and current need."46 Thus, "Like Whitman, he would gradually come to a great human understanding, an apprehension that eluded a number of his peers."47 Wright almost certainly means, by "his peers," not only Williams's bete noire T. S. Eliot but such other modernist stalwarts as Stein, Pound, and Loy, whose work we are told to celebrate for its disruption, subversion, and upsetting the apple cart of poetic expectation. For Wright. However, these cannot be final goals. Instead, "poets in our day will have to draw down against our latent subversiveness and punch through the dream hole to that opening where listening is possible and violence is not inevitable."48 "Punching" is a means, and "listening" an end.

Despite her acknowledged inability to end the prison-industrial complex, Wright would remain committed to the ethical projects associated with realism, to the demonstration and indeed the encouragement, even the enticement, of sympathy, with herself and with others. Consider this, from George Eliot:"We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little — might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument . . . to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness."49

Then consider the heroism of V., also known as Margaret Kaelin McHugh, the hero of One with Others. A high school teacher who raised five children, loved Yeats, and drank to excess, V. became one of few white adults in Big Tree, Arkansas to side with African-American marchers in the 1969 Arkansas March Against Fear.50 One with Others is at once a prose poem reacting to segregation, a record of how things went down in Big Tree, and an oral history of V., whom Wright visited before V.'s death in Manhattan: she was, the poem concludes, "one person of courage . . . with all the flaws and fiends that vex the rest of us."51

One with Others invites us to imitate V., even as it shows her hard life. V. never led a movement or became famous outside the circle of those who had met her as students. V. was "always for the underdog, whether it was a ballgame or a race war."52 V. noticed "the stifled lives of those inflicting the harm, the lives of witting and of unwitting ignorance, and those who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them."53 Wright would have us — as V. would have us — understand even these stifled life courses: "In Big Tree / People are reading their Bibles in bed / Their laces hang by their walking shoes."54 (Why would you hang up shoelaces? To make them last.) Again Wright wants to take us there through all the senses, especially the most intimacies of touch, taste, and smell, "the long-lingering olfaction of home, whether from the faint cut of walnuts spoiled in the grass or a sour work shift on a rotted railing. When the ones who are from here come home in the evening . . . the barbecued night they smell is theirs."55 Detail leads to sympathy leads to a kinder understanding of human connection, leading, perhaps, to action, like V.'s.

One with Others is not a novel, not a memoir, so much as it is a poem incorporating narrative history: sometimes it even breaks into verse. It must be a prose poem, to turn to Steven Monte's delightful definition, because it's not really anything else. Nonetheless One with Others follows an Eliotic, novelistic blueprint: pick someone otherwise invisible to public history, at a moment of great political change, in an obscure place, and follow them until we can feel our way into their milieu and their choices, so that we might make more generous choices ourselves. Learning to feel means learning to feel for her, but also learning to know one's own limits, as she learned from the march's leader, Sweet Willie Wine, "one thing the white folks are going to have to learn — / white folks don't pick the leaders / for the black folks no more."56

Part of the Eliotic project, too, involves learning that we can never know everything, that our knowledge is partial, that sometimes we cannot or must not lead. "Just to act," says one of the figures in One with Others,"That was the glorious thing."57 We cannot be sure — and that is part of the point — whether that speaker is Wright or V. or the March leader Sweet Willie Wine. Yet they can act together, if something or someone can bring them to sympathy, despite their rough patches.

C.D. Wright sang — so to speak — anyway, and so can we: one of the less expository prose segments in One with Others doubles as a kind of manifesto for the emotional and the aural effects (so many of them about echo, quotation, and repetition) that Wright had at that point created for 25 years. Wright quotes her neighbor, a philosopher she identifies only as Harry, saying "we want to feel and transmit"; "when a blackbird calls in the marsh all sound back and if one note is missing all take notice. This is the solidarity we are born to."58 Self-centeredness, failure to listen as blackbirds listen, represents a mere, perhaps a temporary, falling away from the mutual support to which poems — those hermeneutic friends — can pull us back, as they did for the poet Jean Valentine, who "never forgets her friends," not even "her exes."59 Wright's poems, too, leave nobody behind. As for the social world they attempt to model, the life we attempt to share with one another, and the inner lives that support it, "the world is not ineluctably finished // though the watchfires have been doused."60 We can light them again, or (since watchfires get doused at sunrise) break camp and move into that daytime world. We can put both feet on the floor, as Wright learned to do, even when traveling. We do not have to hang up our shoes, even if, in dog years, we too are up there.

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Stephanie Burt (Bluesky: @notquitehydepark.bsky.social, Instagram: @notquitehydepark) is the Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. Her most recent books of cultural and literary criticism are Taylor's Version: The Musical and Poetic Genius of Taylor Swift (Basic Books) and Super Gay Poems (Harvard UP), both published in 2025.

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