Poet David Wright

15 March 2011

Paul Plays a Bourrée

A Bach poem published over at Wunderkammer.

06 May 2010

Political Poem

Today the garden gives up
one white crocus, its delicate
petaled head, and one bleeding
heart from the liberal earth,
from the compost and soil
your small hands have conserved.

Ten Years in the City

My glorious colleagues, especially Tiffany Kriner and David Hooker, threw the finest party I have ever attended on Tues. night. A house full of art, amazing food, and fine people it was a farewell bash for my final week at Wheaton College
Dubbed an "Ekphrastic Celebration" it truly was a conversation of art with art. Even the food conversed with various poems, including a fig tart that responded to a fig tree poem I wrote a number of years back, as well as a lovely tableau of bread and pottery that referred to a poem about Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus

A requisite reference to sweater vests occurred in these dainty finger sandwiches.

Friend and colleague Brett Foster wrote a lovely, funny, generous vilanelle, which he read movingly after I had been given the gift of my friends' generous attentions as I read poems. The poems I read including one or two from each year I was at Wheaton, 9 years. Several have asked for me to put those pieces somewhere. This seems like a fitting spot. Some are links, others I have posted whole. Not each poem is, in my judgment, the best, but each one represents a significant kind of encounter with my colleagues, with students, and with the subjects that have marked my time at Wheaton.

2001
Explaining the Nude Scene
Silence, 11 September 2001

2002
After Bach's Air in G, Transcribed for Flute
Reasons to Avoid the Woods (After Reading the Inferno, Again)

2003
A Selfish Sonnet of Thanksgiving
Four Ways to Read a Footnote (Poem grew from a challenge given to me by former colleague Keith Jones whome I miss very much.)

2004
Inerrancy (after Jorie Graham)
Bach’s Pentecostal Fugue for Electric Organ, Choir, and Tambourine

2005
Confessions (Remembering a trip to Baylor with Steve and Christina)

2006
Sestina for Bach’s Mama
Political Poem

2007

So Here's the Thing (responding to Mark Lewis' brilliant all-female production of Hamlet)
The Devil Wears a Sweater Vest

2008
After David Hooker

David made many, many beautiful cups for this gathering, and each one of us got to take one home.
Meeting the Relatively Famous Songwriter/Pop Star at Lunch

2009
Several Heads
The Pacifist Boxer Enters the Gym

2010
Agnosis of the Order of the Djembe, after Kazim Ali

Thanks to Christine and Stephanie for documenting the party. More photos to come.

14 March 2010

Allusive Poems

Translations IV
The Three Graces Unite and After Myth
Four Ways to Read a Footnote
Pathetique, after John Ruskin

Blind Willie's Wife

Broke bottlenecks for him, told him, tune to open D,
told him, Willie quit growling that gruff, fake bass,
let your sweet tenor take off and ride.

She would harmonize, then break him another
bottleneck , grind it down quick on a cement stair,
leave little glints of glass dust on his shoes.

She knew his hands, way he thumbed the bass line,
knew his voice and how he couldn't keep from crying,
how, together, they'd give over to gospel,

slide right up the string, Lord, right up the string,
smooth as Willie's finger in a bit of broken glass.

—David Wright, from A Liturgy for Stones

Blind Willie Johnson

Ars Poetica

Invoking an Elliptical Muse
Old Women in Eliot Poems

Watching Ella Trips in Her Seventies

You can believe when Ella trips,
moving on stage, she'll never get up,
this old woman with her broken hip,
her arm crooked like the handle of a cup.

Moving on stage, she'll never get up
to the top of her range again. Again,
her arm crooked like the handle of a cup,
she arcs her neck, eyes closed, no strain

to the top of her range again, again,
beyond, within this body she has left.
She arcs her neck, eyes closed, no strain
and here's the songbook she's kept

beyond, within this body she has left.
She mimics Bird, and you think of his death,
and here's the songbook she's kept,
phrases like bursts of her own breath.

She mimics Bird, and you think of his death,
This old woman and her broken, hip
phrases like bursts of her own breath.
You can believe, when Ella trips.

David Wright, originally published in The Mid-America Poetry Review. 5.2. 151