next charles wright the 20th poet laureate of the united states delivered his reading in washington d.c.. this event is just under one hour. >> please welcome to the library

of congress dr. james h. billington. [applause] >> good evening and welcome to the library of congress. this year in her search for the next poet laureate of united states library of congress reached out to 50 nominators from around the country, critics scholars editors and our past poet laureates. we received 76 recommended names. everett threw packets of poems and poetry collections to experience their diverse talents with vision and range. but no matter whose work i was reading through i found myself returning to the poetry of charles wright. tonight i am delighted publicly to celebrate his appointment to

the nation's only federally funded position for literature. this is not the first honor the library has bestowed on mr. wright. in 2008, we awarded him their rebecca johnson abbott national prize in poetry for lifetime achievement and he becomes then the only winner of the lauria chip specifically for lifetime achievement and the 22 year history of the prize as well as the third winner to move on to the lauria chip. after luis wright has also received almost more prices than can be mentioned. the pulitzer prize national award book critics award the prize from the poetry foundation and the international griffin poetry prize among many others. former chancellor of the academy

of american poets wright it is a fellow at the american academy of arts and sciences, member of the american academy of arts and letters and a member of the fellowship of southern writers. it was this part of fellowship that wright recently returned to the library to participate in a reading organized by our previous poet laureate. he was born a pic with tennesean allison charlottesville virginia where he is professor emeritus of creative writing at the university of virginia. his poems often turn to the world of the south where it's grounded in power and imagery that they are just as likely to return to italy where was stationed in the united states army wright famously fell in love with the poetry of ezra pound. his poetry does not fit into the storytelling tradition generally

associated with southern literature but it echoes the spiritually charged syntax of jared manley hopkins and the grand reckoning of dante's divine comedy. as the library -- library of congress for 27 years in the champion of russian literature i honor how wright has dedicated himself to a 30-year project. he named it the appalacian book of the dead and how he has sustained an elemental beauty in poem after poem and gracefully meditative forms. i also appreciate the gravity of his concerns which he states are and i'm quoting in language, landscape and the idea of god as well as his counterbalance of humility and self-deprecating humor.

poems like age of days from wright's nuba cariboo captures this. it ends with these lines that i will read not as eloquently as he will himself. this is an old man's poetry written by someone who spends his life looking for one truth. sorry pal, there isn't one. unless of course the trees and their tone down relatives are part of it, unless the late evenings are clouds vanished along the horizon are part of it, unless the diminishing pinprick of lights stunned in the dark forest are part of it. unless oh my whatever the eye eye makes a consensus on its rough road trace to the heart is part it. then maybe that bright vanishing

might be. i can say with certainty that wright's poetry is a poetry for all ages and all times. for close to half a century it is not only reverted on what it does seem that what it's searched for, whatever truth could be found there. the result is a singular moving and ultimately necessary as anything in our language. please join me in welcoming charles wright the 20th poet laureate consultant in poetry at the library of congress. [applause] [applause] [applause]

>> i can tell i am being called. lights are everywhere. thank you dr. billington. thank you very much for this great honor of being here. and thank you rob cast her for being an inexhaustible for your health and writing that long dam introduction. [laughter] thank all of you all for coming too. i really appreciated. one always at times like this wants to thank one's parents even though they are no longer around because you want to hear them say boy that was close, wasn't it? [laughter]

the poems i'm going to read are pretty much in chronological order and the first one is called ours poetica which i think means the art of poetry. it starts out back here and i care when they lived in california was where i had a little space carved out in the back of the garage where he used to work or i used to tell myself i was working. i like it back here under the green slots of the pepper tree and the aloe vera. i like it because the wind strips down the leaves without a word. i like it because the wind repeats itself and the please

do. i like it because i'm better here, and there surrounded by fetishes and figures of speech, dogs too, dogs to venezuela's tooth, my father's shoe, the dead weight of winter, the in articulation of joy. the spirits are everywhere and once i have been called down from the sky spinning and dancing in the palm of my hand, but was satisfied? i will still have the voices rising out of the ground. the fallen star my blood feeds this business i waste my hard on and nothing stops that. can you hear me back there? no? oh jesus. [laughter] sorry. i thought this was a microphone.

[laughter] can you hear me now? now? no? seriously, you hear me now? tough luck for you. [laughter] this poem is called mt. cariboo at night. mt. cariboo is a mountain up in montana, northwest montana which can be seen from the place we go in the summer. my last book was called caribou which was supposed to have a picture of a mountain on it but they sent me all those horns and i said well it's a nice picture so what the hell, let's use it. [laughter] since the titles of my poems have little to do with the poems and the cover of my book can have little to do with the poems themselves too. there's a little story behind this.

the yak valley in northwest montana is 4000 feet and it really gets cold up there in the winter. this was told to me. i have no idea if it's true but years ago a man named walter smoot died up there and he was one of very early settlers and nobody would bury him. they are disliked him intensely for some reason. so a couple of people, three people i think sat around drinking and said what are we going to do with old walt? i don't know, i hate hate that son of a. finally one guy john phelan said oh hell i will. the son of a. let's go so they went to this little bench which eventually became the cemetery for the area. john started digging and started

straight -- digging and the ground was frozen solid of course. he was digging and digging and i guess the whiskey started to wear off a little bit and he said that's it, i've had it. let's bury him right here. we will bury him seated up so they stuck him in there and put his head down over his knees and put the dirt on top of him and their lies walter smoot to this day. mt. cariboo at night. just north of the act river one man sits bolt upright a little bonnet of dirt and graphs above his head. northwestern montana is hard to even harder still lying down than rising up. i speak to the others they are lodged in their stone which is of blocks and flashes that lie

in the ground and tell them that walter smoot is at ease in his bony dogs under the tamarac. she still holds the nightfall between his knees. work stars drop by drop began an electric pace across the sky. down toward the cadmium waters that carry them back to the dawn they squeeze out a wail. everything on the move. everything flowing and folding back and starting again. a flaking and cresting definite smoot and runyon and august bender still under the black pulps of the earth clouds washing over the tree line mt. cariboo massa been on the rise and taking it in. taking it back to the future we occupied and again ourselves and our children's children smug

pushing mccauley hoods back ready to walk out into the same night in the meadow grass in step and on time. can you hear me back there? i don't think you can, you? is such a a great form. i'm really sorry that you can hear it. i'm serious, you hear me in the last throw? thank you. this is a longer poem, not that long, 41 pages. [laughter] it's called california dreaming which is the last poem i wrote before we left california to come to virginia over 30 years ago. of course the title is from a very famous song by the mamas and the populace from the 60s

called california dreaming. we are not born yet and everything is crystal under our feet. we are not brethren. we are not underlings. we are another nation living by voices that you will never hear caught in the net of splendor of time to come on the earth. we shined in our distant chambers. we are golden. midmorning dust falls off of this -- pacific stuns us to ecstasy. october sun stuck like attack on the eastern drift of the sky, the idea of god on the other body by body wrenched in the sunday prayer dreaming away into the undercoating of the sparks of the west which is our solitude and our joy. i have looked at this rich wretched life for six years now and still don't like it staring

out like good friday among eight cliff of features down to the ocean, a dark wing with ruffled feathers as far out of catalina, fallen from some sky ruffled and laid back by the wind the santa ana that ... hot breath on the neck of everything. what if the soul indeed is outside of the body, a little rainfall of light moistening our every step, prismatic, a puffy acidic. what if inside the body another shape is waiting to come out, white is a quilt, looses a fever and sways in the easy tides. what other anneka in this life, what other latter letter to paradise of the smith handholds of the ribcage?

behind the palm trees the orioles twitter and grieve. the spider froze the honeybee who twitters and grieves around the net and draws it by one leg up to the fishbone fern leaves inside the pepper tree swaddled and soap and turns it again and again until it is shining. some nights when the rock 'n roll band next door has quit playing, the last helicopter has gone back to the marine base, the dark all the way down to within a half-inch of the ground i said outside in the golden lemay of the moon as the town sleeps in the country sleeps like flying confetti around me and wondered just what in "the hill" i'm doing out here. so many thousands of miles away from what i know best. what i know best has nothing to do with point conception or

avalon and along a racer of ocean out there with the landscape and. what i know best is that little thing that sits on the far side of a simile, the like that dislike the lake. today is sweet stuff on the tongue. the question of how we should live our lives in this world will find no answer from us this morning. the ocean pumping its back beneath us shivering out wave after wave. we fall from an cut through and a white scar healed waters. our wetsuits gloss sick as sea seat -- slickest seals. the rise and fall like the sun. the dogsbody extended above the beach november 25 sounds like a valium smog like rust in the

trees. white hooded and fire back eyeballs of waiver is invisibly distance he keeps it up plunges and draws back, plunges and draws back yesterday hung like a porcelain code behind the eyes. existent extremities, the worm creeping out of the harbor. who are these people we pretend to be untouched by the setting sun? they stand less stiffly than we do an handsomer first on the left foot and then the right. just for a moment we see ourselves inside of them peering out and then they go their own way and we go hours back to the window seat above the driveway christmas lights in the pepper trees black madonna gazing out from the alley at this eyes

downcast heavy with weeping and bitterness. her time has come around again. piece by small piece of the world falls away from us like spores from the milkweed pod and everything we have known and everyone we have known is taken away by the winds to forgetfulness. somebody always humming california dreaming. this is called under the nine trees in january. in our backyard in charlottesville at one time there were 21 fruit trees planted by the people who had

fixed the house up before us and sold it to us but apparently one of them had been kind of nasty to the people who are putting the trees and and the landscape and back there so they put all the fruit trees inside coffee cans and planted them. one by one they all died. we went from 21 to nine and then we went down to nonbut i got in there when there were still mind and that's what this poem is about. last night stars on last nights win their west of the mountains now and east of the river. here under the branches of the nine trees how small the world looks. should we lament and winter are shadowed solitude are names

spelled out like snowflakes? where is it written the seasons decrease diminishes me? should be longed for stillness or harsh for the trivial body washed in the colors of paradise dirt watercolored match winning? is as one who has never understood the void should i give counsel to the darkness under the condors winged? should we keep on going to an end to this and an inch of that? the world is a handkerchief. today i sprinted across my knee. tomorrow they will forward it into my breast pocket, white on my dark suit. if i have a suit. i hope to be buried in levi's.

this poem is called jesuit gra grays. my wife and i were in ireland in 1995 in dublin and our friend, the dear mr. love it seamus heaney took us out to see the grave of gerard manley hopkins who i was a great admirer of and still am, the jesuit priest and poet. being a joe so it society is unprepossessing. they have the three most recent graves in a long list of all the people from the order from the time back on marble.

when i got back to seamus' how's it all going's wife marie you won't believe what seamus did for us. he drove us all the way up to the cemetery to see hopkins' gray. she said sure, he does that for everybody. [laughter] so there you go. midsummer irish overcast oatmeal sky. the jesuit pit hundreds of names in the gravel and grass was dirt. just dirt with small stones. how strict, how self-effacing. not suited for you however from the bird of paradise whose plummy jaffar wonders are not faceless. whatever you might have hoped for once.

double dublin three july, 1995. for those who would rise to meet their work that burkas scaffolding. sacrifice is the cause of ruin. the absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin thus the legends instruct us. north wind through the flat leaves limbs of the sheltering trees, three desperate mouth than the small squaring enclosure. souls have been hidden. p. gerard hopkins 28 july, 18448 june, 1889, age 44. and then the next name and then the next soldiers of misfortune, lock stepped into his dark dissolved.

histories hand-me-downs. whatever rises comes together they say. they say. and one last poem. i have tried to pick poems. all my books seem to be one long poem that just run together. i try to pick out poems that are maybe part of that flow but can stand individually as well. this one is called american twilight. of course the long meditation is where all the power lies so tough luck for you guys. american twilight. why do i love the sound of children's voices in unknown

games so much on a summer's night? lightning bugs lifting have we out of the dry grass like alien spacecraft looking for higher ground. darkness beginning to sift like coffee grains over the neighborhood. they ball being kicked, serves build bill from traffic along the bypass, american twilight. venus just lived in the third heaven. time takes between okay lets go and this earth is not my home. what do i care about? whatever happens will happen with or without -- with or without this. in the first play of the heaven and the moon a little light, half-light over charlottesville. trees reshape themselves and the swallows disappear along with the sprinklers that do the wave.

nevertheless it's still summer. the cicada pumps their boxes and the jack russell terrier start buzzing their heads off and someone somewhere is putting his first foot and have a second down on the other side, no hand to help him no time to wedge its wheel. this is called relics. relics. i've got to close relics. paolo bootsy wasn't italian rider who had a wonderful book called journey to the land of the flies about sicily and i

enjoyed reading him immensely when i was in italy. after a time it makes such little difference what anyone writes. relics it seems are always stronger than the thing itself. semento saints blood transcendent architecture but was possible say once upon a time. the dogwood has bloomed, the penguins and the white ones in splotches across the desert like clowns perhaps. mock clouds and a lot -- mock heaven. a faint odor of something unworldly or otherworldly lingering in the darkness and then not. as though some st. had passed by the side yard.

the odor of paradise, odor of heaven the faithful say. what is this odor like someone who had small but was asked on once. he had no answer. he said, it doesn't resemble any flour or any bloom or spice on this earth. i would know how to describe it. lingering as the dark comes on. one of these fragrant saints with the continues who walked in the rain without an umbrella and still stayed dry. a miraculous gift. ..

>> listen for us in the dark hours, listen for us in our need. this is a poem called "body and soul," dedicated to coleman hawkins, saxophone player who, it is said i've been told, recorded the first free form jazz record of this particular song in 1939. this poem is free tomorrow --

form too. the world's body is not our body, although we'd have it so. our body's not infinite, although this afternoon under the underwater slant shine of sunlight and cloud shadow, it almost seems that way in the wind; a wind ca comes from the world away with its sweet breath and tart tong, heaven- tongue. small change for the hand. i used to think the power of words was inexhaustible, that how he said the world was how it was and how it would be. i used to imagine that word sway and word thunder would silence the silence and all that. that words were the word, that language could lead us

inexplicably to grace as though it were geographical. i used to think these things when i was young. i still do. some poems exist still on the other side of our lives and shine out, but we'll never see them. they are unutterable in a language without an alphabet, unseen, world long bone music. too bad. we'd know them by heart if we could summon them out many -- in our winds. too bad. listening hard. clouds, of course, are everywhere and blue sky in between. blue sky. then what comes after the blue. our lives, it turns out, are still lives, glass bottles and fruit, dead animals, flowers,

the edges of this and that which drop off most often to indeterminate vacancy. we're beautiful and hung up to dry. outside the frame mountains are moving, rivers flash. a crowd scrum bled sky, field patches nudge up to come for us. a train crosses a trestle. across the room someone gets up and rearranges the things. in substantial smoke, our words leave no smudge or mark. and like our purloined selves, they will not rise from the dead. unlike our whimpers and prayers, they lie low and disappear. this word, that word, all fall down. how far from heaven the stars

are. hour the heart -- how far the heart from the page. we don't know what counts. it's as simple as that, isn't it? we just don't know what counts. mid winter in charlottesville, packed down, crumbs snow flecked across the backyard and gone on the sun's tongue. these are the four lessons i have learned, one from martha graham, the others from here and there. walk as though you've been given one brown eye and one blue. think as though you thought best with somebody else's brain. write as though you had in hand the last pencil on earth. pray as though you are praying with somebody else's soul.

and then because i can't stop, this is called "body and soul ii." [laughter] also dedicated to coleman hawkins, and you know the rest of it. the structure of landscape is infinitesimal, like the structure of music; seamless, invisible. even the rain has larger sutures. what holds the landscape together and what holds music together is faith, it appears. faith of the eye, faith of the ear. nothing like that in language, however. clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms blown by the wind. april and anything's possible. here is the story of swansung. a buddhist monk, he went to

southern india and back on horseback, on camelback, on elephantback and on foot. 10,000 miles it took him from 629 to 645. mountains and deserts in search of the truth, the heart of the heart of reality, the law that would help him escape it and all its attendant and inescapable suffering. and he found it. these days i look at things, not through them, and sit down low as far away from sky as i can get. the reef of the weeping cherry furnishes coral. the neighbor a's back porch lights grow like athem inmies -- athem them innies. this is a half hour; half light,

half dark when everything starts to shine out and aphorisms skulk in the trees, their wings folded, their heads bowed. every true poem is a spark and aspires to the condition of the original fire arising out of the 'em the citiness. emptiness. it is that same emptiness it wants to reignite. it is that same engendering it wants to be re- engendered by. shooting stars. april's identical, celestial, wordless burning down. its light is the light we commune by. its destinations our own, its hope is the hope we live with. wang wei, on the other hand, before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate just east of the east end of the southern mountains and lived there off and on for the rest of his life.

he never traveled the rand scape, but -- the landscape, but stayed inside it. a part of nature himself, he thought. and who would say no to someone so bound up in solitude and failure, he thought, and suffering? afternoon the color of cream of wheat, a small doll lop of butter lazily at the western edge. getting too old and lazy to write poems, i watch the snow fall from the apple trees. landscape, as wang wei said, sharpens the soft edges of isolation. don't just do something, sit there. and so i have. so i have. the seasons curling around me like smoke, gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound. i'm going to make it the business of mine to write one poem without the word "cloud" in

it. [laughter] i probably won't succeed. [laughter] oh, god. this poem is an elegy from my brother-in-law, tim mcintyre, who died at the age of 42 or 43, about 20 years ago. he was a brilliant young man, the funniest guy i ever met in my life. he was an actor, a musician. he could do anything, especially try and take cocaine, unfortunately. and this is, the last line of the poem is the last line of a song of his called "it's a long way." some saddleed coke-copying, bad-boozing blues. front porch of the first cabin with luke. july, most likely, and damp. both of us wearing rubber boots.

just out of the photograph beyond the toe of my left foot, the railing where tim and i one afternoon carved our poor initials while working on verses for his song, "stockman's bar again, boys. t both song and singer are gone now and the railing too. we all sang in the chorus back in l.a. in the recording studio. holly and i and bill myers and kelly and johnny rubenstein. this joyful music so long ago, before the coke crash and the whiskey blows. sun-soured montana day dreams. los angeles in its dark mood, so soft on the neck. my still, i'm working on it. my still. billy mitchell's just come by. minute stole his tools -- somebody stole has tools. leland -- [inaudible]

shot an elk. sweet dan kelly's on his cat, watch out and back away. snuff my bruns is feeding squirrels in crash's buck and hay. big john -- [inaudible] got outside a half a fifth of gin, and we've all gone and gotten drunk in stockman's bar again. dead frequency, slick. over and out. it's mostly a matter of what kind of noise you make. american hot wax, for instance, and stand by your man, george jones typecasting, for sure. music, always music. keyboard and guitar, violin, anything with a string. your band was called fun zone. you up front, upon. on drums -- ponch on drums, johnmy r. at the piano and others until the lights went out. renaissance boy with coke up your nose and marijuana in your eye.

we loved you the best we could, but nobody loved you enough. except ms. whiskey. you roll in your sweet baby's arms now as once you said you would and lay your body down in your meadow, in the mountains all alone. this is called "bedtime story." the generator hums like a distant dong and zeke. it's early evening and time, like the dog it is, is hungry for food and will be fed, don't doubt it, will be fed, my small one. the forest begins to gather its silences in. the meadow regroups and hunkers down for its cleft feet.

something is wringing the rag of sunlight inexorably out and hanging. something is making the reeds bend and cover their heads. something is licking the shadows up and stringing the blank spaces along, filling them in. something is inching its way into our hearts, scratching its blue nails against the wall there. should we let it in? should we greet it as it deserves, hands on our ears, mouths open? or should we bring it a chair to sit on and offer it meat? should we turn on the raid? should we -- radio? should he clap our hands and dance the something dance, the welcoming something dance? i think we should, love. i think we should.

time will tell. time was when time was not, and the world an uncut lawn ready for sizing. we looked and took the job in hand, birds burst from our fingers, cities appeared and small towns in the interim. we loved them all. in distant countries tides nibbled our two feet on pebbly shores with their soft teeth and langous tongues. words formed and flew from our fingers. we listened and loved them all. now fin tuesday looms like antimatter; not this and not that. and everywhere like a presence one bumps into, oblivious, unwittingly. excuse me, i beg your pardon. but time has no pardon to beg and no excuses.

the wind in the meadow grasses, the wind through the rocks bends and breaks whatever it touches and never the same wind in the same spot, but it's still the wind and blows in its one direction, northwest to southeast, an ointment upon the skin. a little saliva, time with its murderous gums and pale, windowless throat. its mouth pressed to our mouths, pushing the breath in, pulling it out. i don't think i had a cloud in that. i'm not sure. [laughter] this one's called "get up and let a working man lay down." a line from a song by a lot of people.

lester -- [inaudible] scrubbs is where i got it from. the kingdom of minutiae, the tight place where most of us live is the kingdom of the saved, those who exist between the cracks, those just under the details. when the hand comes down, the wing white hand, we are the heads of hair and finger bones yanked out of the shoes. we are the rapture's children. as i said once, i i can just see all the doors of the houses of the episcopalians coming out and saying, where the hell did everybody go? what are those shoes doing out will? [laughter] i'm an episcopalian, so -- [laughter] where'd everybody go? with hearts sitting on the platform waiting for the robert e. lee -- that's a great title. the poem's not so good, but when -- [laughter] when you get to the point that

your titles are more interesting than your poems, you know you should have laid your pencil down. [laughter] city on the -- horace had a farm outside of rome and spent all his time there are, most of his time there. 70 years and what's left or better still, what's gone before? a couple of lines, a day or two out in the cold, and all those books, those half-baked books, sweet yeast for the yellow dust. like you, i'm sane and live at the edges of things. countryside flooded with light, sundown, the chaos of future mornings just over the ridge but not here yet. i shall be released.

there's a consolation beyond nomenclature of what has passed or is about to pass, though i don't know what it is. but someone somewhere must, and this is addressed to him. come on, long eyes, crack the book. thumb through the pages and stop at the one with the golden script. breathe deeply and lay it on me, that character with the luminous half-life. and one last one here. when the horses gallop away from us, it's a good thing. i always find it strange, though i shouldn't, how creatures don't care for us the way we care for them. horses, for instance, and chipmunks and any bird you'd name. empathy's only a one way street. [laughter] and that's all right, i've come to believe.

it sets us up for ultimate things and penultimate ones as well. it's a good lesson to have. in your pocket when the call comes to call. i've got three or four more here. a short one. this one's called "grace ii" which presupposes a "grace i" which, in fact, exists. [laughter] somewhere back there in the half baked books of yellow dust. [laughter] it's true the as prayings of youth burn -- aspirations of youth burn down through the years. tonight only memories are my company and my grace. how nice if they could outlive us, but they can't or won't. no indian summer for us. it's rough, and it's growing

dark; the sunset pulling the full moon up by its long fingernails. it's better this way. the unforgiven are pure as are the unremembered. i love twos and threes and fours. actually, i went on up to six several times. this is called "sentences ii." last chapter, last verse. everything's brown now in the golden field, the threshing floor of the past is past. the mountain men of the future lie cusped in their little boxes. the sun backs down over the ridgeline at five after seven. the landscape puts on its black mask and settles into its sleeplessness. the fish will transpose it, half of themselves, half of the order

10,000 miles away at the end of the darkening stream. to live a pure life, to live a true life is to live the life of an insect. and two more, if i can find -- oh, yes. "shadow and smoke." i attribute this thing to che guevara, but it seems to me it's got to be a japanese coin from at least two or three thousand years ago. live your life as a though you are already dead, che guevara declared. okay, let's see how that works. [laughter] not much different as far as i can see, the earth the same paradise it's always wanted to be, heaven as far away as

before, the clouds the same old move obligates -- movable gates since time began. there is no circle. there is no sentiment to be broken. there are only the songs of young men and the songs of old men hoping for something else wise. disabuse them in their ignorance, lord. tell them the shadows are already gone, the smoke already cleared. tell them that life is never a metaphor. and the poem i always close my readings with -- i've never read it before in my life. [laughter] but it seems like i should because it's called "lullaby." i've said what i had to say as melodiously as it was given to me. i've said what i had to say as

far down as i could go. i've been everywhere i wanted to but jerusalem which doesn't exist, so i guess it's time to depart, time to go, time to meet those you've never met, time to say good night. grant us silence, grant us no reply, grant us shadows and their cohorts, stealth across the sky. thank you all very much. [applause]

[applause] [applause] >> jimmy duranty, thank you. [laughter] >> is there a nonfiction book or author you'd like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail to