January 22, 2013 Yale University today announced that Charles Wright, a native of Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, has won the 2013 Bollingen Prize for his poetry collection, Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems. The prize, one of the most prestigious given poets, is awarded every other year and carries a stipend of $150,000.
“A poet of remarkable scope and ambition, Wright’s lyrics are like verbal scroll paintings, considering a vast landscape but exploring every aspect in exquisite detail, a stylistic combination that properly figures both the significance and insignificance of the human,” noted a Yale press release. “In poems that render the poignancy of moving time, the constancy of the landscape, and the mystery of the invisible, Wright binds the secular and the sacred in language charged with urgency and grace.”
Wright, who now teaches at the University of Virginia, has already won virtually every significant poetry award there is: the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin Prize, the American Book Award in Poetry, and The Los Angeles Times Book Award.
To read Chapter 16‘s review of Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems, click here. To read “On the Night of the First Snow, Thinking About Tennessee,” a poem from Charles Wright’s collection Sestets and reprinted by permission at Chapter 16, click here.
For more updates on Tennessee authors, please visit Chapter 16’s News & Notes page, here.
