Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil - Softcover

Wright, C.D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556592167 ISBN 13: 9781556592164

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2005

Synopsis

C. D. Wright takes her title from a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before having had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder.

Cooling Time is a new type of book, an unruly vigil that is an interconnected memoir-poem-essay about contemporary American poetry. Ever focused on possibilities, Wright demonstrates that “the search for models becomes a search for alternatives,” and thereby defines the terms by which poets can chart their own course.

These are some of the things I have touched in my life that are forbidden: paintings behind velvet ropes, electric fencing, a vault in an office, gun in a drawer, my brother’s folding money, the poet’s anus, the black holes in his heart—where his life went out of him.

Tell me, what is the long stretch of road for if not to sort out the reasons why we are here and why we do what we do, from why we are not in the other lane doing what others do.

Poetry is like food remarked one of my first teachers, freeing me to dislike Rocky Mountain Oysters and Robert Lowell. The menu is vast, the list of things I don’t want in my mouth relatively short.

C.D. Wright, author of nine books of poetry, teaches at Brown University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with poet Forrest Gander.

About this title

About the Author

C.D. Wright (1949-2016) taught at Brown University for decades and published over a dozen works of poetry and prose, including One With Others, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a National Book Award; One Big Self: An Investigation; and Rising Falling Hovering. Among her many honors are the Griffin International Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Reviews

A determined and idiosyncratic book of critical thoughts—and not a "poet's memoir" à la Nick Flynn or Katy Lederer—Wright's latest offers criticism, speculation, and personal recollection, most of it divided into self-sufficient prose units, from one sentence to several pages in length. Though she teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island, Wright, who won a MacArthur genius grant this year, hails from the Ozarks, as both her matter and manner often remind us: "I poetry... I also arkansas," she writes; "sometimes these verbs coalesce. Sometimes they trot off in opposite directions." Though some paragraphs, many of which are culled from previously published essays, offer sharply remembered scenes, Wright (Steal Away) focuses less on the major events in her life than on the writers whose work has mattered to her, some famous (Gertrude Stein), some not (Besmilr Brigham). Readers in the know will decode information about Wright's poet-partner Forrest Gander. The longest memoiristic passage concerns an English teacher; another pokes fun at American poets' habit of joining rival schools, and another describes a car trip through the American Southeast, with its "Landscape of big dogs, big melons, big-car longings and dreams big as distant capitals." Readers who seek not autobiography but cogent thoughts, ideas, quotable claims about the state of the art (or about the state of Arkansas) will find themselves delighted.
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Newly designated as a MacArthur "genius," Wright presents a saucy ars poetica, a set of flinty prose poems about the art of poetry in general, and her Arkansas-bred aesthetic in particular. Poetry about poetry might sound deadly, but it is, in fact, a supple tradition used to broach a spectrum of personal and social concerns, beginning with the forces that induced one to become a poet in the first place. Wright writes, "Of the choices revealed to me, crime and art were the only ones with any sex appeal," hence her calling as a poet who ponders art and the art of being, crime and crimes against art. As her subtitle implies, poetry has a precarious hold on life in America, so she musters her case and defends her beloved practice with a bravura pastiche of memoir, poetry, criticism, and sass. Along the way she pays scintillating tribute to writers (Gertrude Stein), painters (Georgia O'Keeffe), and musicians (Miles Davis), expresses resistance to and appreciation of the academy, and doesn't neglect the landscape or love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556592167
• ISBN 13: 9781556592164
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144