Carolyne Wright studied at Seattle University and New York University, and has masters and doctoral degrees in English and Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has three books and three chapbooks of poetry published, including "Premonitions of an Uneasy Guest" (AWP Award Series) and "From a White Woman's Journal" (Water Mark); a collection of essays, "A Choice of Fidelities: Lectures and Readings from a Writer's Life"; and three volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali. A new collection, "Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire," won the 1999 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize (selected by Yusef Komunyakaa), and was published by Lynx House Press in 2000.
Wright is working on an investigative memoir of her experiences in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, "The Road to Isla Negra," which has received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award from "International Quarterly." She spent four years in Calcutta and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers for an anthology in progress. These translations, for which Wright has received a Witter Bynner Foundation Grant and a NEA Grant in Translation, include "The Game in Reverse: Poems of Taslima Nasrin" (George Braziller), the dissident Bangladeshi writer living in exile with a price on her head. Another volume of translations from Chilean Spanish, "In Order to Talk with the Dead: Selected Poems of Jorge Teillier" (University of Texas Press), received the American Literary Translators' Association Award. In 1999, she returned to Chile for the first time since the Allende years.
Wright has received awards for her writing from the Poetry Society of America and the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has been a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has held visiting creative writing posts at Radcliffe, Emory University, the University of Wyoming, Sweet Briar College, Ashland University, the University of Miami, and Oklahoma State University. For 2000-2001, she is Writer in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond.
Message to César Vallejo
Caught in the cross-wind
of my desires, I'm here
to stay: New Orleans,
Crescent City along the river
that still moves underground
to take the dead in its arms.
Where moss creeps down
ropes on the hanging trees,
and the children of mixed blood
carefully whiten the faces
in the photo albums. I hear
the blues through a grillework door:
I can't go on this way.
Vallejo, you would understand
how a lover's memory of home
opens the shuttered windows,
and know why he still paces off
outlines of the auction block.
How we don't owe any explanation
for where we don't belong.
I read your exile's life again.
Those months in the Chicama Valley
you watched Indians come back at dusk
from the sugarfields for the day's
handful of rice, the sweat of alcohol
on credit, your first poems
burning the plantation storehouse
to the ground. Trujillo's jail
and España falling on its thorns.
Even then you knew
how border towns are everywhere
and the passport that opens them
a switchblade through melons.
No more excuses, you would say.
No listening for the lover's key
in the lock, breath like mosquito netting
I've wrapped myself in.
Suitcases are too easy,
the army blanket from Da Nang
at the foot of the bed
another reason not to stay.
You never went home to Huamachuco.
What you knew Good Friday,
1938, crying those last words
from your bed: "I want to go
to Spain!" as Franco's troops
swept down the Ebro Valley to the sea.
César, I'm staying.
I, whose people starved
during the York enclosures
and burned at the stake
in Zürich, know how often my name
was written in the logbooks
of slaveships. I cancel
the exit visas I thought
my life depended on.
(Celia Wagner Award, Poetry Society of America. Originally published in the "Black Warrior Review")
KZ
"Arbeit Macht Frei"
--Motto over the entrance
of every Nazi concentration camp
We walk in under the empty tower, snow
falling on barbed-wire nets where the bodies
of suicides hung for days. We follow signs
to the treeless square, where the scythe blade, hunger,
had its orders, and some lasted hours in the cold
when all-night roll calls were as long as winter.
We've come here deliberately in winter,
field stubble black against the glare of snow.
Our faces go colorless in wind, cold
the final sentence of their bodies
whose only identity by then was hunger.
The old gate with its hated grillework sign
walled off, we take snapshots to sign
and send home, to show we've done right by winter.
We've eaten nothing, to stand inside their hunger.
We count, recount crimes committed in snow--
those who sheltered their dying fellows' bodies
from the work details, the transport trains, the cold.
Before the afternoon is gone, the cold
goes deep, troops into surrendered land. Signs
direct us to one final site, where bodies
slid into brick-kiln furnaces all winter
or piled on iron stretchers in the snow
like a plague year's random harvest. What hunger
can we claim? Those who had no rest from hunger
stepped into the ovens, knowing already the cold
at the heart of the flame. They made no peace with snow.
For them no quiet midnight sign
from on high--what pilgrims seek at the bottom of winter--
only the ebbing measure of their lives. Their bodies
are shadows now, ashing the footprints of everybody
who walks here, ciphers carrying the place of hunger
for us, who journey so easily in winter.
Who is made free by the merciless work of cold?
What we repeat when we can't read the signs--
the story of our own tracks breaking off in snow.
Snow has covered the final account of their bodies
but we must learn the signs: they hungered,
they were cold, and in Dachau it was always winter.
(Gustav Davidson Award, Poetry Society of America. Originally published in "Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust," Texas Tech UP)*
