What do you think?
Rate this book
The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990
This important book--shot through with reflections on, explorations of, and hymns to both our natural and spiritual realms--features the three poetry collections Charles Wright published during the 1980 The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), and Zone Journals (1988).
- GenresPoetry
240 pages, Paperback
First published October 23, 1990
About the author
Charles Wright
234 books113 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.”
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 6, 2011
The heart of this volume is made up of long journal-like dated entries in free verse. Deliciously absorbing and meditative, they concern themselves with landscapes and the natural world, with ideas, memory, and autobiography. I think of poetry as a kind of wisdom. I get the idea Wright dedicates his poetry to this purpose. His type of extended meditation lends itself to slow, reflective reading. These poems won't be hurried. It'll take years to digest what Wright's saying here, and I like that about the poems, that they're slow to reveal themselves, like haze burning away from a muted morning to become brightness and vibrant color. As a teenager discovering poetry, I cut my teeth (broke some, too) on Eliot and have continued reading him my whole life. I think with Charles Wright I've found a poet I can read with the same devotion and reward that revisits to The Waste Land and Four Quartets have always afforded me. As Eliot accompanied my youth Wright may look over my seniority. I believe I can stand in the middle of his poetry and see new revelations.
February 15, 2025
Just, brilliant.
Read
December 20, 2019“What makes us leave what we love best? / What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself / When we need it most, / That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake / And holds us flush there / until we begin to love it / And have to begin again? / What is it within our own lives we decline to live / Whenever we find it, / making our days unendurable, / And nights almost visionless? / I still don’t know yet, but I do it.”
June 29, 2019
How fitting is that beautiful impressionist painting on the cover? I think part of what makes these poems so ideal is Wright's completely unique use of syntax which helps the reader feel simultaneously placed and transcended in the landscape of America. I just adore these poems and think they echo and transform America's traditions in poetry. With Charles Wright I feel allowed to be in the world and of the world, while also being part of the magic of perfect imagery and transcendent beauty. I have so many favorite poems in The World of 10,000 Things but am struck most when Wright discussess death. For years I’ve made notes about wanting to write death as a place, death as rooms, and the dead as coming back to us and the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the dead. But nothing comes close to what he writes in “Homage to Paul Cezanne” and “The Southern Cross,” “Composition in Grey and Pink,” and really so many others. These poems feel like the point of poetry writing to me. That striving for greatness and the perfect image to awaken our subconscious. They scare me too, because I can’t imagine my mind arriving to or writing imagery so profound.
I’m struck perhaps most by how he uses the sentence and lineation, and the line in a flat-out way. This is the hardest thing to learn about poetry for me, balancing, creating clarity, and speaking directly to the reader. This is something I didn’t understand about poetry for years and years, and I just can’t get over how awakened to it I feel now, in part because of reading these poems. The balance of this is what makes his poetry so poignant when meditating on the world and illustrating the universality of experience.
I’m struck perhaps most by how he uses the sentence and lineation, and the line in a flat-out way. This is the hardest thing to learn about poetry for me, balancing, creating clarity, and speaking directly to the reader. This is something I didn’t understand about poetry for years and years, and I just can’t get over how awakened to it I feel now, in part because of reading these poems. The balance of this is what makes his poetry so poignant when meditating on the world and illustrating the universality of experience.
March 1, 2011
I'm not much of a poetry reader, but I've always wanted to be, so I'm glad I had a chance to dig into this book of selected poems by Charles Wright. Wright explores his fascination and fear of death, his close observations of nature, the act of writing, the cycle of seasons, his experiences in Italy and his family and friends into a powerful collection of poetry. The poems range in length from half a page to forty pages, and while most are in free verse, there is a lot of experimentation with form, repetition, and the sounds of the words. I found it meditative to linger over this book for three months, and now I'm excited to find another set of poems to chew on.
April 1, 2010
An extraordinary book of selected poems. Each piece has something to offer, at least for this reader. Here is a poet the writes lines that burrow into your mind and carry you somewhere else, often without you realizing you want to go there.
November 8, 2009
Not a huge Wright fan I guess. Some poems are good but I wouldn't recommend it to the average reader.
November 6, 2013
I should make it a point to re-read this collection of poetry once a month.
September 11, 2024
It's noon in the medlar tree, the sun
Sifting its glitter across the powdery stems.
It doesn't believe in God
And still is absolved.
It doesn't believe in God
And seems to get by, going from here to there.
-- "Holy Thursday"
The transfiguration will start like this, I think,
breathless,
Quick blade through the trees,
Something with red colors falling away from my hands,
The air beginning to go cold...
And when it does
I'll rise from this tired body, a blood-knot of light,
Ready to take the darkness in.
-- Or for the wind to come
And carry me, bone by bone, through the sky,
Its wafer a burn on my tongue,
its wine deep forgetfulness.
-- "October"
The life of this world is wind.
Windblown we come, and windblown we go away.
All that we look on is windfall.
All we remember is wind.
-- "The Southern Cross"
I want to sit by the bank of the river,
in the shade of the evergreen tree,
And look in the face of whatever,
the whatever that's waiting for me.
-- "The Other Side of the River"
All year I have sung in vain,
Like a face breaking up in the font of holy water,
not hungry, not pure of heart.
All years as my body, sweet pilgrimage,
moved from the dark to the dark.
What true advice the cicada leaves.
-- "Three Poems for the New Year"
Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude.
They start here, they finish here
No matter how high they rise --
my judgment is that I know this
And never love anything hard enough
That would stamp me
and sink suddenly into bliss.
-- "Night Journal"
I'd rather be elsewhere, like water
hugging the undergrowth,
Uncovering rocks and small windfall
Under the laurel and maple wood.
I'd rather be loose fire
Licking the edges of all things but the absolute
Whos murmur retoggles me.
I'd rather me memory, touching the undersides
Of all I ever touched once in the natural world.
-- "Bicoastal Journal"
Out of our own mouths we are sentenced,
we who put our trust in visible things.
Soon enough we will forget the world.
And soon enough the world will forget us.
The breath of our lives, passing from this one to that one,
Is what the wind says, its single word
being the earth's delight.
-- "Last Journal"
Sifting its glitter across the powdery stems.
It doesn't believe in God
And still is absolved.
It doesn't believe in God
And seems to get by, going from here to there.
-- "Holy Thursday"
The transfiguration will start like this, I think,
breathless,
Quick blade through the trees,
Something with red colors falling away from my hands,
The air beginning to go cold...
And when it does
I'll rise from this tired body, a blood-knot of light,
Ready to take the darkness in.
-- Or for the wind to come
And carry me, bone by bone, through the sky,
Its wafer a burn on my tongue,
its wine deep forgetfulness.
-- "October"
The life of this world is wind.
Windblown we come, and windblown we go away.
All that we look on is windfall.
All we remember is wind.
-- "The Southern Cross"
I want to sit by the bank of the river,
in the shade of the evergreen tree,
And look in the face of whatever,
the whatever that's waiting for me.
-- "The Other Side of the River"
All year I have sung in vain,
Like a face breaking up in the font of holy water,
not hungry, not pure of heart.
All years as my body, sweet pilgrimage,
moved from the dark to the dark.
What true advice the cicada leaves.
-- "Three Poems for the New Year"
Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude.
They start here, they finish here
No matter how high they rise --
my judgment is that I know this
And never love anything hard enough
That would stamp me
and sink suddenly into bliss.
-- "Night Journal"
I'd rather be elsewhere, like water
hugging the undergrowth,
Uncovering rocks and small windfall
Under the laurel and maple wood.
I'd rather be loose fire
Licking the edges of all things but the absolute
Whos murmur retoggles me.
I'd rather me memory, touching the undersides
Of all I ever touched once in the natural world.
-- "Bicoastal Journal"
Out of our own mouths we are sentenced,
we who put our trust in visible things.
Soon enough we will forget the world.
And soon enough the world will forget us.
The breath of our lives, passing from this one to that one,
Is what the wind says, its single word
being the earth's delight.
-- "Last Journal"
June 29, 2023
Poetry collection by US poet laureate while he was on faculty at UVA-- I found that the poems, including several about Dante and one about UVA, pick up steam chronologically.
Here are two of my favorite quotes:
"That all beauty depends upon disappearance,/ The bitten edges of things,/ the gradual sliding away/ Into tissue and memory,/ the uncertainty/ And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,/ and their frayed loveliness."
"The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart."
Here are two of my favorite quotes:
"That all beauty depends upon disappearance,/ The bitten edges of things,/ the gradual sliding away/ Into tissue and memory,/ the uncertainty/ And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,/ and their frayed loveliness."
"The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart."
January 27, 2023
Truly there was some moments where it all crystallises and produces true beauty – but the journal format moves in waves of repetition to hone in on the target – too much repetition and similarity in what seems like wasted words for me. It's like the poetry didn't know what it was aiming for until it reached it – which is fine – but I'm not surely I really needed to experience all the times where it didn't reach it – where it was foundering with blind fingers.
November 23, 2019
Poems about ( no! not about , but are, poems that are themselves) nature, the limits of language. Yet through writing on these limits, using language as a tool, stirring experiences are launched. So much to share from this wonderful collection . This calls me: “ Love what you don’t understand stand yet, and bring it to you.”
December 24, 2022
Four and a half stars.
There are half a dozen poems here that might feature amongst the best poems of the century. There are no poor poems. Some of the poems suffer very slightly against the poet's even better later poems on similar themes. He is one of the 20th Century's greatest poets and this collection is proof of the case.
There are half a dozen poems here that might feature amongst the best poems of the century. There are no poor poems. Some of the poems suffer very slightly against the poet's even better later poems on similar themes. He is one of the 20th Century's greatest poets and this collection is proof of the case.
January 20, 2021
If you're receptive to these they will be excellent poems, but I was seldom receptive.
Want to Read
May 19, 2025Cutting is for Homage to Paul Cezanne
By Charles Wright
By Charles Wright
January 18, 2024
ten thousand cuts, a world beyond the prospects of a devouring chronos
Dwelling in Wright's world of ten thousand things one irremediably finds one's self traversed through landscapes both minutely familiar and infinitely expansive; landscapes that are visible, i.e. the text itself, yet constantly pointing towards the invisible, the unattainable, the unspoken, towards "something infinite behind everything." Notwithstanding, the potency of his 'imaginarium' thrives on the metaphysical and the abstract denounced from within a careful attentiveness to the visible word. "Looming and phosphorescent against the dark," [the] words are given contour by that invisible ingraining in itself a longing for the absolute.
Yes, Wright's poems are characterized by their visionary quality, yet they are grounded in a reality that is often stark and devoid of easy answers or resolutions. His poems emerge from sitting still and listening hard, whilst the relation he harbors with uncertainty and chance is as much infrangible as it is rooted in the vividness of specific moments and locations—to reach beyond; the mark of contemplation is tensed between what is said and what is left unsaid, i.e. exploring the unspoken whereby its confession begets sacrilege, yet wherefrom poetry summons its puissance. In the words of Alain Badiou, “every poem brings a power into language, the power of eternally fastening the disappearance of what presents itself..." and further still, a "power of producing presence itself.” Thus, Wright as a poet must be at odds with Chronos, i.e. linear time: "Time is the villain in most tales, and here, too..." To the extent that it brings Wright to ponder over Aion, i.e. eternal time; or further, how to gain access to its eternal light, in as much as he can ask: "What language does light speak?"
Epiphania (ἐπιφάνεια), literally 'to bring light upon', as a preservation of presence, its un-setting free, is where the poetic resides. Once the poetic commences from an awakening of the language, grasping at the threads of concentration by means of a kairotic sensibility, one is granted entrance to a plane of transcendent immanence embossed within and throughout a language under pressure. Kairotic sensibility suggests here yet another notion of time, Kairos, i.e. an advantageous time—a window of time during which action is most opportune. Here, in this window of time, under intense energy of conception and differentiation, the unspoken presses itself against the limits of its un-setting free. Here, the unspoken invents its domestication.
Inversely to a Nietzschean ingenium, where Kairos is terrorized at the sight of 500 hands trying to catch him, Wright's genius befriends and sees in Kairos a most trusted ally. Implying a certain temporal standstill, Kairos, severing Chronos' linear proclivity, lets Aion cast its light onto Wright's landscapes and gifts us poetry. The World of Ten Thousand Things is a thus but a world of ten thousand cuts, a world beyond the prospects of a devouring Chronos.
__
Last Journal
Out of our own mouths we are sentenced,
we who put our trust in visible things.
Soon enough we will forget the world.
And soon enough the world will forget us.
The breath of our lives,
passing from this one to that one,
Is what the wind says,
its single word being the earth’s delight.
Lust of the tongue,
lust of the eye,
out of our own mouths we are sentenced …
Dwelling in Wright's world of ten thousand things one irremediably finds one's self traversed through landscapes both minutely familiar and infinitely expansive; landscapes that are visible, i.e. the text itself, yet constantly pointing towards the invisible, the unattainable, the unspoken, towards "something infinite behind everything." Notwithstanding, the potency of his 'imaginarium' thrives on the metaphysical and the abstract denounced from within a careful attentiveness to the visible word. "Looming and phosphorescent against the dark," [the] words are given contour by that invisible ingraining in itself a longing for the absolute.
Yes, Wright's poems are characterized by their visionary quality, yet they are grounded in a reality that is often stark and devoid of easy answers or resolutions. His poems emerge from sitting still and listening hard, whilst the relation he harbors with uncertainty and chance is as much infrangible as it is rooted in the vividness of specific moments and locations—to reach beyond; the mark of contemplation is tensed between what is said and what is left unsaid, i.e. exploring the unspoken whereby its confession begets sacrilege, yet wherefrom poetry summons its puissance. In the words of Alain Badiou, “every poem brings a power into language, the power of eternally fastening the disappearance of what presents itself..." and further still, a "power of producing presence itself.” Thus, Wright as a poet must be at odds with Chronos, i.e. linear time: "Time is the villain in most tales, and here, too..." To the extent that it brings Wright to ponder over Aion, i.e. eternal time; or further, how to gain access to its eternal light, in as much as he can ask: "What language does light speak?"
Epiphania (ἐπιφάνεια), literally 'to bring light upon', as a preservation of presence, its un-setting free, is where the poetic resides. Once the poetic commences from an awakening of the language, grasping at the threads of concentration by means of a kairotic sensibility, one is granted entrance to a plane of transcendent immanence embossed within and throughout a language under pressure. Kairotic sensibility suggests here yet another notion of time, Kairos, i.e. an advantageous time—a window of time during which action is most opportune. Here, in this window of time, under intense energy of conception and differentiation, the unspoken presses itself against the limits of its un-setting free. Here, the unspoken invents its domestication.
Inversely to a Nietzschean ingenium, where Kairos is terrorized at the sight of 500 hands trying to catch him, Wright's genius befriends and sees in Kairos a most trusted ally. Implying a certain temporal standstill, Kairos, severing Chronos' linear proclivity, lets Aion cast its light onto Wright's landscapes and gifts us poetry. The World of Ten Thousand Things is a thus but a world of ten thousand cuts, a world beyond the prospects of a devouring Chronos.
__
Last Journal
Out of our own mouths we are sentenced,
we who put our trust in visible things.
Soon enough we will forget the world.
And soon enough the world will forget us.
The breath of our lives,
passing from this one to that one,
Is what the wind says,
its single word being the earth’s delight.
Lust of the tongue,
lust of the eye,
out of our own mouths we are sentenced …
February 15, 2009
There is nothing not to love about this collection.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews