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Chickamauga: Poems
This volume, Wright's eleventh book of poetry, is a vivid, contemplative, far-reaching, yet wholly plain-spoken collection of moments appearing as lenses through which to see the world beyond our moments. Chickamauga is also a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry--a testament to the flexible music of the long line Wright has made his own. As a reviewer in Library Journal "Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and contemplatio, Wright spins one lovely lyric after another on such elemental subjects as sky, trees, birds, months, and seasons. But the real subject is the thinking process itself and the mysterious alchemy of 'The world is a language we never quite understand.'"
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 1995
5 people are currently reading
130 people want to read
About the author
Charles Wright
246 books110 followersCharles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac.
From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”
From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 11, 2007
Quoting Lao Tzu in the opening poem of Chickamauga, Wright writes, “Everything comes from something, / only something comes from nothing.” In a subsequent poem “Reading Lao Tzu Again in the New Year,” Wright notes, in a Stevensian manner, that birds, “Whistle at something unseen, one black note and one interval. / We’re placed between now and not-now.” It is in this interim that the world fine tunes itself and becomes like a “large rock balanced upon a small rock.” It is a poem that exemplifies his notion of the relationship between identity and landscape and how emptiness, inflection and equilibrium are a part of that equation.
A spiritual equipoise exists in Wright’s writing in which each addition has a subtraction, and yet, it isn’t a matter of canceling out what exists, but more a readjustment gesture—a yoking together of contradictions, and it is these contradictions that animate the poem, often written in a declarative intimacy, and moving quickly from despondency to delight and back again. Like Zen Buddhism or Taoism, everything in Wright’s poems has a counterpoint—a “clockwise and counterclockwise”; a “flame and counterflame”; “its good eye and its bad eye”. Every binary is cross-stitched together, responding antiphonally to one another.
A continual measurement occurs in Wright’s writing, although his lengthy, fluid lines seem to belie it. His poems tend to unspool across the page and then are reeled back in, often using chiasmic structures. A constant catch and release methodology. Wright’s use of a dropped long line in his later work suits his meditative, elegiac style of writing. The indentation of lines seems more organic because the eye drops in tiers, instead of continually being forced back to the left margin—a cascading effect that creates a fluidity to the poem and easily enfolds a collection of images, homages, histories, and allusions. It moves quickly, like a river gathering leaves and allows for the inclusion of voluminous information and riffs.
There is the illusion of luxuriance as in his recurrent image of orchards; yet, the orchard itself is a carefully constructed rectilinear plot produced to yield the most fruit—a mathematical grid over the lush nature of landscape. According to Wright, life is a mathematical equation. Wright’s orchards become metaphorical frames, in which the world occurs and knowledge is both formed and dissolved. For Wright, landscape becomes a means to recover the self. The orchards become paintings, concerned with the measurement of time, in which one can walk through; decay captured, not by brushstrokes, but by words.
Reading Wright is like flying over the earth and noticing that it is demarcated into squares and rectangles—human’s calculation of nature. Yet, as one enters the landscape, as one would move closer to a painting, the lines become less visible, and the sense of containment dissolves. Wright’s poems encompass the moment in which presence becomes absence, when the self becomes other, when identity becomes identities, when landscape and self are interpenetrated, the moment when the line begins to dissolve so that the everything is caught in the equidistance or “the cross-gaps” of history and memory, faith and disbelief, nature and city.
It is in this interstitial moment, in the “half-dark,” or in the “cross-gap between flesh and abstraction,” that one has the vantage point of observing what is not there as well as what is. It is these interims where silence, light and stillness exist that the Taoist act of emptying the self becomes an apotrope against darkness. Though the darkness itself is neither positive nor negative, but an ambi-(valent) state. Wright’s methodology is an attempt to realign the world so that everything is back in balance, and he seems most interested in the impossible task of measuring what can’t be measured—of calculating the void.
A spiritual equipoise exists in Wright’s writing in which each addition has a subtraction, and yet, it isn’t a matter of canceling out what exists, but more a readjustment gesture—a yoking together of contradictions, and it is these contradictions that animate the poem, often written in a declarative intimacy, and moving quickly from despondency to delight and back again. Like Zen Buddhism or Taoism, everything in Wright’s poems has a counterpoint—a “clockwise and counterclockwise”; a “flame and counterflame”; “its good eye and its bad eye”. Every binary is cross-stitched together, responding antiphonally to one another.
A continual measurement occurs in Wright’s writing, although his lengthy, fluid lines seem to belie it. His poems tend to unspool across the page and then are reeled back in, often using chiasmic structures. A constant catch and release methodology. Wright’s use of a dropped long line in his later work suits his meditative, elegiac style of writing. The indentation of lines seems more organic because the eye drops in tiers, instead of continually being forced back to the left margin—a cascading effect that creates a fluidity to the poem and easily enfolds a collection of images, homages, histories, and allusions. It moves quickly, like a river gathering leaves and allows for the inclusion of voluminous information and riffs.
There is the illusion of luxuriance as in his recurrent image of orchards; yet, the orchard itself is a carefully constructed rectilinear plot produced to yield the most fruit—a mathematical grid over the lush nature of landscape. According to Wright, life is a mathematical equation. Wright’s orchards become metaphorical frames, in which the world occurs and knowledge is both formed and dissolved. For Wright, landscape becomes a means to recover the self. The orchards become paintings, concerned with the measurement of time, in which one can walk through; decay captured, not by brushstrokes, but by words.
Reading Wright is like flying over the earth and noticing that it is demarcated into squares and rectangles—human’s calculation of nature. Yet, as one enters the landscape, as one would move closer to a painting, the lines become less visible, and the sense of containment dissolves. Wright’s poems encompass the moment in which presence becomes absence, when the self becomes other, when identity becomes identities, when landscape and self are interpenetrated, the moment when the line begins to dissolve so that the everything is caught in the equidistance or “the cross-gaps” of history and memory, faith and disbelief, nature and city.
It is in this interstitial moment, in the “half-dark,” or in the “cross-gap between flesh and abstraction,” that one has the vantage point of observing what is not there as well as what is. It is these interims where silence, light and stillness exist that the Taoist act of emptying the self becomes an apotrope against darkness. Though the darkness itself is neither positive nor negative, but an ambi-(valent) state. Wright’s methodology is an attempt to realign the world so that everything is back in balance, and he seems most interested in the impossible task of measuring what can’t be measured—of calculating the void.
August 29, 2008
Sometimes, Charles just really hits the spot.
Read
July 30, 2023Charles Wright is so damn good
April 24, 2020
** 3.5 stars **
A few months back, I read a lengthy collection of selected poems by Charles Wright called Bye-and-Bye, which I enjoyed quite a bit more than Chickamauga (1995). As a collection, Chickamauga is fine and definitely representative of Wright's poetic style: the poems typically include musings on nature, language, memory, and human finitude. My expectations were probably too high after previously enjoying Bye-and-Bye so much. Don't get me wrong, the poems here are good, and I liked the collection as a whole; I just didn't love it like I was hoping.
Here's a particularly great poem from Chickamauga that will also give you a sense of Wright's style and themes:
Yard Work
I think that someone will remember us in another time,
Sappho once said--more or less--
Her words caught
Between the tongue's tip and the first edge of the invisible.
I hope so, myself now caught
Between the edge of the landscape and the absolute,
Which is the same place, and the same sound,
That she made.
Meanwhile, let's stick to business.
Everything else does, the landscape, the absolute, the invisible.
My job is yard work--
I take this inchworm, for instance, and move it from here to there.
A few months back, I read a lengthy collection of selected poems by Charles Wright called Bye-and-Bye, which I enjoyed quite a bit more than Chickamauga (1995). As a collection, Chickamauga is fine and definitely representative of Wright's poetic style: the poems typically include musings on nature, language, memory, and human finitude. My expectations were probably too high after previously enjoying Bye-and-Bye so much. Don't get me wrong, the poems here are good, and I liked the collection as a whole; I just didn't love it like I was hoping.
Here's a particularly great poem from Chickamauga that will also give you a sense of Wright's style and themes:
Yard Work
I think that someone will remember us in another time,
Sappho once said--more or less--
Her words caught
Between the tongue's tip and the first edge of the invisible.
I hope so, myself now caught
Between the edge of the landscape and the absolute,
Which is the same place, and the same sound,
That she made.
Meanwhile, let's stick to business.
Everything else does, the landscape, the absolute, the invisible.
My job is yard work--
I take this inchworm, for instance, and move it from here to there.
August 22, 2023
A collection truly grounded in place. While knowing that these poems were written decades ago, they also feel as if pulled from another time and I can't help but feel the pull of those years as Wright describes the fluff of a cloud or the caress of a breeze.
September 8, 2024
Where is it written, the season's decrease diminishes me?
Should we long for stillness,
a hush for the trivial body
Washed in the colors of paradise,
Dirt-colored water-colored match-flame-and-wind-colored?
As one who has never understood the void,
should I
Give counsel to the darkness, honor the condor's wing?
Should we keep on bowing to
an inch of this and an inch of that?
-- "Under the Nine Trees in January"
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.
-- "After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard"
After it's over, after the last gaze has shut down,
Will I have become
The landscape I've looked at and walked through
Or the road that took me there
or the time it took to arrive?
-- "Sprung Narratives"
Oil-rag American sky,
August night wind rummaging back and forth in the pines,
Stars falling beyond the Yukon --
chrome-vanishing stars,
Insistent inside the heart's Arctic --
Unbroken code,
this life that is handed us
-- "Tom Strand and the Angel of Death"
How strange to have a name, any name, on this poor earth.
-- "As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into Light"
Like migrating birds, our own lives drift away from us.
How small they become in the blank sky, how colorful,
On their way to wherever they please.
We keep our eyes on the ground,
on the wasp and pinch bug,
As the years grind by and the seasons churn, north and south.
-- "Watching the Equinox Arrive in Charlottesville, September 1992"
All things are found in all things,
Wind in the peach trees, time's dust:
It's in light that light exists.
All flesh, at last, comes to you.
-- "Paesaggio Notturno"
Should we long for stillness,
a hush for the trivial body
Washed in the colors of paradise,
Dirt-colored water-colored match-flame-and-wind-colored?
As one who has never understood the void,
should I
Give counsel to the darkness, honor the condor's wing?
Should we keep on bowing to
an inch of this and an inch of that?
-- "Under the Nine Trees in January"
Out of the caves of their locked beings,
fluorescent shapes
Roll the darkness aside as they rise to enter the real world.
-- "Easter 1989"
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.
-- "After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard"
Noon in the early September rain,
A cicada whines,
his voice
Starting to drown through the rainy world,
No ripple of wind,
no sound but the song of black wings,
No song but the song of his black wings.
Such emptiness at the heart,
such emptiness at the heart of being,
Fills us in ways we can't lay claim to,
Ways immense and without names,
husk burning like amber
On tree bark, cicada wind-bodied,
Leaves beginning to rustle now
in the dark tree of the self.
-- "Cicada"
After it's over, after the last gaze has shut down,
Will I have become
The landscape I've looked at and walked through
Or the road that took me there
or the time it took to arrive?
-- "Sprung Narratives"
Memories never lie still.
They circle the landscape
Like hawks on the wind,
Turning and widening, their centers cut loose and disappearing,
Tiny cracks in the mind's sky,
Sheenlines, afterglint.
The world is small and blue.
These are the lights we look for.
-- "Lines on Seeing a Photograph for the First Time in Thirty Years"
Oil-rag American sky,
August night wind rummaging back and forth in the pines,
Stars falling beyond the Yukon --
chrome-vanishing stars,
Insistent inside the heart's Arctic --
Unbroken code,
this life that is handed us
-- "Tom Strand and the Angel of Death"
We'd like to fly away ourselves, pushed
Or pulled, into or out of our own bodies,
into or out of the sky's mouth.
We'd like to disappear into a windfall of light.
-- "East of the Blue Ridge, Our Tombs Are in the Dove's Throat"
How strange to have a name, any name, on this poor earth.
-- "As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into Light"
It's that time again,
time of relief, time of sorrow
The earth is afflicted by.
We feel it ourselves, a bright uncertainty of what's to come
Swelling our own skins with sweet renewal, a kind of disease
That holds our affections dear
and asks us to love it.
-- "Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn"
Like migrating birds, our own lives drift away from us.
How small they become in the blank sky, how colorful,
On their way to wherever they please.
We keep our eyes on the ground,
on the wasp and pinch bug,
As the years grind by and the seasons churn, north and south.
-- "Watching the Equinox Arrive in Charlottesville, September 1992"
How vast the clouds are, how vast as they troll and pass by.
Splendid and once-removed, like lives, they never come back.
Does anyone think of them?
Everything's golden from where I lie.
Even the void
Beyond the void the clouds cross.
Even the knowledge that everything's fire,
and nothing ever comes back.
-- "Waiting for Tu Fu"
All things are found in all things,
Wind in the peach trees, time's dust:
It's in light that light exists.
All flesh, at last, comes to you.
-- "Paesaggio Notturno"
I like to sit and look up
At the mythic history of Western civilization,
Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac.
I'd like to be able to name them, say what's what and how who got where,
Curry the physics of metamorphosis and its endgame,
But I've spent my life knowing nothing.
-- "Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night"
October 22, 2023
In the realm of the written word, it is the case that thought, image, and rhythm will always want to dance in a delicate ballet. "Chickamauga" emerges as a testament to the power of such choreographed poetics. As usual with Charles Wright, the reader is embarked on a journey; and yet here we encounter not only a voyage through the landscapes of memory and the vistas of the mind, but we deal with an exploration of the spiritual balance that exists within the written word. But not as mere ars poetica: each poem is a lens, a window into a world beyond our moments, a world where the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary, where the mundane becomes the profound. They are not merely words on a page; they are living, breathing entities, each with its own heartbeat, its own rhythm. They are echoes of thoughts, shadows of memories, whispers of the soul—embodied contradictions yoking together opposites as contrapuntal interplays of lightness and darkness, presence and absence. The long, fluid lines that characterize the poems are not merely stylistic choices; they are to be seen as rivers that carry the reader through the landscape of the poem. They are the threads that weave together the tapestry of such a delicate ballet (thought, image, and rhythm) through a well-strung choreographed poetics, creating a work that is both intricate and expansive, both intimate and universal.
___ excerpts:
"The poem is a code with no message:
The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath,
Absolute, incommunicado,
unhoused and peregrine."
(Chickamauga)
"Desire discriminates and language discriminates:
They form no part of the essence of all things:
each word
Is a failure, each object
We name and place
leads us anoter step away from the light."
(Reading Lao Tzu again in the New Year)
"If truth is made and not found,
what an amazing world
We live in, more secret than ever
And beautiful of access.
Goodbye, old exits, goodbye, old entrances, the way
Out is the way in at last..."
(Reading Rorty and Paul Celan one morning in early June)
___ excerpts:
"The poem is a code with no message:
The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath,
Absolute, incommunicado,
unhoused and peregrine."
(Chickamauga)
"Desire discriminates and language discriminates:
They form no part of the essence of all things:
each word
Is a failure, each object
We name and place
leads us anoter step away from the light."
(Reading Lao Tzu again in the New Year)
"If truth is made and not found,
what an amazing world
We live in, more secret than ever
And beautiful of access.
Goodbye, old exits, goodbye, old entrances, the way
Out is the way in at last..."
(Reading Rorty and Paul Celan one morning in early June)
February 16, 2017
"Illustrious and unknown / is what we should wish for ourselves,
Fading the way this landscape fades
Into its anonymity / and various selves,
So undefinable, so dumb."
"We are our final vocabulary, / and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There's only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things."
Fading the way this landscape fades
Into its anonymity / and various selves,
So undefinable, so dumb."
"We are our final vocabulary, / and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There's only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things."
August 5, 2016
I like his loose style and subjects, particularly how he describes landscapes.
Some of the poems in here were too long for his style to be sustained. He really shines in the short poems, in my opinion.
Some of the poems in here were too long for his style to be sustained. He really shines in the short poems, in my opinion.
August 7, 2007
His best book. Subtly blends all of his strengths (thought, image, rhythm) into crystal clear poems.
March 4, 2008
This is one of the few poetry books I still read; each poem triggers something different with each reading. Wright possesses a great ability to interpose landscape with memory.
April 21, 2010
I just didn't buy it.
May 4, 2013
Wicked good! Highly recommended.
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June 30, 2017811.54 W949h 1995
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