The Poem of the Week is Charles Wright’s “Nostalgia,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2001 issue (Volume II, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. This poem later was included in Wright’s collection, A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).Charles Wright is the author of 18 books of poetry. He received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995 for Chickamauga, and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for Black Zodiac. His translations of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm and Other Poems (1978) won the PEN Translation Prize. He also has authored two books of commentary on poetry, Halflife (1988) and Quarter Notes (1995).
Earlier this month Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Charles Wright’s book-length poem, Littlefoot, and he received the international award of Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. Wright is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he is the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia. An extended essay on Charles Wright’s work appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and a review of Scar Tissue (2006) is included in “One Poet’s Notes” (3/2/07).
Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.
2 comments:
Wright’s “Nostalgia” turns on an extended metaphysical conceit: nostalgia as a wave. It hits us when we least expect it, it breaks up and re forms and foams and, after its “dog teeth” have grabbed us and held on, smoothes out the debris on the shore. We take pleasure in nostalgic moments because they create a sense that the past was better than the present. And we take pleasure as well, according to Wright, in the surprise afforded by the shadow of nostalgia’s wave. Some say that as we grow older nostalgia will outweigh whatever “living existence” we place on the scales of our hearts––the second conceit. But this is a moment the poet, favoring the reality of the present over the idealizing of the past, prays will never arrive. Nostalgia is really the impetus for memory, which Wright is forever honoring. Memory is the mental repository of the past. As the future is unknown and the present is always fleeting, the rear view mirror is all we have.
Thanks, very much, Robert.
I appreciate these observations on "Nostalgia" and Wright's poetry.
--Ed
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