The Essential C. D. Wright is a collection of excerpted works by Carolyn D. Wright – “C. D.” professionally, Carolyn to some friends. Wright was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2016 when she passed suddenly in her sleep at age 67, after developing thrombosis during a long flight. A laundry list of acclaimed poets gathered later that year to grieve their friend and the books she would never write. Four scholarships were founded in her honor to support poets. Ben Lerner praised her legacy in The New Yorker. Her husband Forrest Gander’s “collection of elegies for Wright” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. As a woman and poet, she was well-loved.
Admiration and love for Wright continue to flow through generations of poets’ dedications and acknowledgements pages. She was cited as a “vital encourager and interlocutor” by Couplets poet Maggie Millner and considered a “stunning contemporary” in the absence of “poetry ancestors from the Deep South” by Judas Goat poet Gabrielle Bates. Wright’s three decades on faculty at Brown University positioned her to encourage and train many poets directly, but she was also a source of inspiration for Southern poets, for Nebraskans, for Ozark natives, for women poets, and for those writing in a documentary poetry tradition (though the only “locating label” Wright claimed was “American poet”).
Wright’s influence was “critically important” to the early growth of Copper Canyon Press, who were able to crowdfund $25,000 from her enthusiastic connections, admirers, and supporters in 2024 in order to publish The Essential Works of C. D. Wright. Copper Canyon’s Executive Editor/Editor in Chief Michael Wiegers served as co-editor of this collection. Wiegers knew Wright’s poetic and editorial process well: the two worked through the “hurt and complication” and “thousands of pages” of Frank Stanford’s literary estate together to produce What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford with Copper Canyon Press in 2014.
Forrest Gander, Wright’s closest companion in life as well as in writing, has continued to polish and promote Wright’s posthumous works since 2016. The Essential C. D. Wright appears to be the last of these works, as it begins with a selection of unpublished poems and drafts. Gander co-edited with Wiegers and wrote this collection’s preface, “A Tiny Introduction to The Essential C.D. Wright.”
A review of The Essential C. D. Wright is less a review of Wright’s work than it is a reflection on Wiegers’ and Gander’s editorial choices. There can be no doubt that the right team took charge of this project, and that it was a labor of love. As an editor of longform works by Frank Stanford and as a steward of W. S. Merwin’s legacy, Wiegers already knew the challenge of boiling down a longform poet’s work to its essence. It is admirable and necessary for a project like this to condense C. D. Wright’s voluminous career of writing to a single volume. However, one must acknowledge there are losses. My only objection is that these losses go unmarked; cuts to original manuscripts are not noted or otherwise annotated in this new collection-as-concentrate.
To understand the distance between the excerpts of The Essential C. D. Wright and Wright’s own creations, one must compare her works as originally published with their condensed counterparts in this new volume. Take One Big Self: An Investigation, which was initially released as a photobook with Deborah Luster’s photography and C. D. Wright’s text in 2003 by Twin Palms Publishers. Copper Canyon Press later released a poetry-only edition of the work in 2007. This mature work of Wright’s sprawls gloriously from page to page. While some of her juvenilia and earlier works are easily divided into page-sized, titled pieces (such as Alla Breve Loving, published in 1976), One Big Self and Wright’s later works resist, and are inevitably diluted by editorial reduction.
One Big Self: An Investigation documents poet C. D. Wright’s visits and research on the history of three Louisiana prisons. As in many of Wright’s mature works, beginning with Deepstep Come Shining (1998), Wright embeds sharp and disembodied lines into pages of repeated or near-repeated phrases which serve as connective tissue for this book-length work. (Forrest Gander compares this interconnected weave of words to “Indra’s net” in his introduction.) No one story or conversation from Wright’s prison visits is related in order or at length in One Big Self. However, Wright’s research and site visits are the full fabric of the work. Wright lifts concrete language from billboards, posted signs in the prison, observations, found dialogue, and financial reports (as in “Dialing Dungeons for Dollars,” one of my favorite semi-found poems, which does not appear in this collection).
There is always an ethical method to Wright’s formal approach, but it is especially visible in her longer works. Wright developed new forms and vocabularies to suit the needs of these individual projects. In Deepstep Come Shining, she develops vocabularies on the theme of blindness: eyes and onions, Gloucester of King Lear, and the question whether “you know where you are.” In One Big Self, Wright’s choice to not indicate individual speakers defuses the hierarchy among poet, guards, and prisoners for her reader. (Not so in One With Others, where speakers are described clearly if often anonymously.) The nameless murmuration of the verse in One Big Self conjures the “he-said-she-said” prison panopticon in architectural, Acmeist form. Strong phrases move something like narrative along its rails while repeated phrases ring ominously: “a woman’s hand will close your eyes”; “That’s hard”; demands to “count” different objects and ideas to pass time; dogs and coffins; a “wrong answer button” installed by God. Each phrase is itself, as well as a callback to earlier instances of itself in a collected work.
Because The Essential C. D. Wright does not show or describe its cuts page-by-page, reading this new collection-as-concentrate as a fan of Wright is like reading a Reader’s Digest edition of a favorite book, or eating sugar-free ice cream – you notice what’s missing in the texture, even as the condensed version hits all the high points of the “plot.” Lines from One Big Self about how “the radio ministry says g-o-d has / a wrong-answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off . . .” are preserved as callback for her later one-line poem, “Dear Errant Kid”:
Remember the almighty finger on the wrong-answer button.
A third occurrence of this line, however – connective tissue on a page beginning “Dear night dear shade dear executioner” – was removed by the editors. Two-thirds of a thought is not nothing. Still, reading the One Big Self: An Investigation section of The Essential C. D. Wright is not the same experience as reading the collection on its own.
It is also not the same experience as reading it in the new and selected work collection which C. D. Wright was able to gather and edit in her own lifetime, Steal Away, published in 2003. Wiegers and Gander seem to have reapproached Wright’s work from a new starting line, rather than drawing from decisions made previously in Steal Away.
I acknowledge the smallness of my critique. It requires skill and bravery to cut a well-loved poet’s original works to ribbons and yet still succeed in capturing their essence (The Essential, if you will) in a smaller frame. Wiegers and Gander reduce some of Wright’s book-length collections to twenty-five pages or less, a significant reduction. My criticism is petty in the same way that it would be petty for a theatre critic to moan that their favorite line has been cut from a particular production of Hamlet, a play which is both a) easy to find in paperback by those inclined, and b) nearly impossible to present as a cohesive experience for your average theatregoer without tough choices. If a few of my favorite lines and threads are missing from this tribute collection, it is still true that a poet who should be better-known will be better-known as a result of this herculean effort of editing.
But still, but still… I have to say that a stronger indication of where cuts have been made and how, perhaps with the addition of a co-editor’s note from Michael Wiegers discussing the rationale for editorial decisions, would have strengthened my confidence in this collection. As a passionate reader, I want to know that a casual reader would understand that this collection of Wright’s work is deeply excerpted, a taste tester.
All in all, The Essential C. D. Wright is a commendable effort by two committed, thoughtful editors. Nonetheless, it is not a substitute for the full glory of C. D. Wright’s Shallcross, One With Others, nor for Wright’s other irreplaceable, grounded, ethical contributions to contemporary longform poetry.
POETRY
The Essential C. D. Wright
By C.D. Wright, eds. Forrest Gander and Michael Wiegers
Copper Canyon Press
Published May 13, 2025
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