Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon Press, 2005; 108 pages; $15.

FROM THE DUST JACKET:

An unruly paean to American poetry, Cooling Time blurs the divisions between poem, memoir, and essay, while borrowing regularly from the peculiarities and backwaters of the American idiom. The book's title derives from a line of legal defense, unique to Texas courts: if a person kills someone before having time "to cool" after receiving an injury or an insult, he is not guilty of murder. Ever focused on possibilities, C.D. Wright -- who was called "one of America's oddest, best, and most appealing poets" by Publishers Weekly and who just received a MacArthur fellowship -- demonstrates that "the search for models becomes a search for alternatives." Filled with humor, eroticism, and a hypnotic fascination with language, Cooling Time is a prickly love-letter to the life of poetry.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

From Publishers Weekly: 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." ...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.

From Booklist: 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 of love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Daughter of an Arkansas judge and a court-reporter mother, C.D. Wright was born in 1949 in Arkansas. "Brought up in a large, unaestheticized house littered with Congressional Records and stenotype paper by a Chancery judge and the Court's hazel-eyed Reporter, who took down his every word, which was law. Throughout my childhood I was knife-sharp and aquatic in sunlight. I read," Wright wrote in "An Autobiographical Preface." She also wrote, in that same piece, "I aim to carry the smoked ham of my voice to Beulahland. I do not intend to write as though I had not gotten wind of 'this here' or 'that there' semiotic theory, regardless of which if any one theory prevails." Wright is author of nine books of poetry and teaches at Brown University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with poet Forrest Gander and their son, Brecht.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR:

"What do friends call you?"

"C.D. The C's for 'Carolyn. '"

I asked, "If somebody were to say, 'What do you mean by the subtitle to Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil what would you say?"

"I thought it had to do with staying up and being present for what was around, abiding by it, by that sort of old candle of poetry -- being present and trying to explore the genre in my own contemporary time."

"It also seemed to me, after I'd finished the book, as if the subtitle urged other poets to a call to arms. Is that accurate?"

"I don't know if I meant for other people to do the same. I wanted everyone to put their shoulder to the task they saw for themselves. Especially in terms of the language."

Ms. Wright spent her first 17 years in Arkansas's Ozarks. Reading Wright's poems, I've more than once faulted myself for my fondness for what I think of as her "Arkansas poems." I said to her that I saw her as "standing knee deep in her Arkansas experience and language, but as also consciously moving beyond that material."

(In "An Autobiographical Preface," Ms. Wright wrote, "Typically young, American and miserable. Then I moved: Vicksburg, Springfield, Memphis, New York, Atlanta -- going to colleges and working until 1972 when I returned to attend graduate school at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where I stayed until 1979.")

Ms. Wright responded. "Recently I was answering a questionnaire about Southern poetry -- which I found very irritating, actually -- but, you know, you begin wherever you are. I think mobility has been the mark of our lives since World War II. If the writing doesn't reflect that movement or kind of curiosity about what's outside your own drip line, then your creek is going to get wormy. So I think it can very quickly become a very tired identification and a limitation, and I think most serious writers realize that. I like the South, but I like to sit with my back to it."

As a young woman Ms. Wright read little of fellow Southerner Robert Penn Warren. "In fact," said Ms. Wright, "I still haven't read a lot of Robert Penn Warren. When I was in my 20s, I read his book-length poem, 'Audubon.' That's the only thing that has stuck with me of what I read."

Warren was a member of a group of then-young Southern writers who called themselves "the Agrarians" and "the Fugitives." Included in this group were Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Gould Fletcher, and Stark Young. I wondered what influence, if any, these writers had on Ms. Wright's generation.

"Well, not too much. I invested in studying sort of 'The Letters of Arkansas' on a project I worked on called 'The Lost Roads Project.' I came into contact with some of that then because John Gould Fletcher was for part of the time with that movement. But I've always felt rather negative about the Agrarians as a collective body."

"They were racist, weren't they?"

"Very racist."

"Old South."

"Very. Chauvinist, racist -- all of the isms -- all of the bugaboos of their era. I liked the upstarts more, the ones who broke away."

"Who were the 'upstarts'?"

"Well, Fletcher went to Paris, and by the time he came back, he could no longer be identified with that. He had become something of a middlebrow imagist during that time. When he came back he started the Arkansas Folklore Society, and he wrote a history of Arkansas. So he readopted his native state, but with a more worldly perspective, I think, than he would have had if he had followed the Agrarians' line and stayed in the fold. There are people who identify -- whose work is embedded in a region. I respect that. But there has to be more reason for doing that than its being the definition of who you are and what you have to say -- someone like Vance Randolph."

I asked about Randolph, whose name I did not recognize.

"He was a folklorist, and he did volumes of work. He very deliberately mapped out his territory and determined what it would be when he was at Columbia. And that seems different from clinging to a kind of nomenclature that has a lot of bromidic associations and anachronisms and clichés."

"You're daring," I said to Ms. Wright about her work.

"Only on the page. Otherwise, I'm a total chicken."

"That's all you have to be for a reader. The first book of yours I ever owned was Just Whistle."

"That's a raunchy book."

"You've traveled many roads since the time of Just Whistle."

"Well, I've moved a lot. I've been in Rhode Island now for over 20 years. I lived in California, I lived in Mexico, I lived in New York City, I lived in Atlanta; I lived, as you know, a good many years in Arkansas. Movement changes things because it brings a different field of writers into your view."

"You always read widely, so had you stayed in Arkansas, I doubt you would have remained insular as to what you read."

"I'm not sure I would have read. I was exposed to language poetry when I was in Arkansas, in the last year that I was there. But because then in another year I moved to San Francisco, that stuff was very much in the air, and I started picking my way through it. I don't know that I would have done that if I had stayed in Arkansas."

An aspect of Ms. Wright's poems I like is that she is not reluctant to use words that send the reader to the dictionary.

"That's the word-love. I like them big and small and dirty and clean."

Ms. Wright and her husband, also a poet, have one child, a son. I asked how motherhood affected her writing.

"It changed time a lot for me. It made some things seem more urgent, and maybe that urgency got translated into the writing. You certainly can't live a special life and raise a child. You have to live a regular life. If I hadn't had a child, I think I would have lived a little more edgily. I think I'd probably be circling the drain about now too."

"What will you do differently, now that you have a MacArthur?"

"I was able to negotiate for some time from my university and more time than I would have had on the regular sabbatical track. I have a project and I'm at the beginning of it. I sort of have two projects, but one of them I don't know that you can say I've started. So I don't talk about it. It can go up in talk, you know. I do talk about it a little bit, but I haven't talked about it in print. I feel reserved about it, feel protective of it, right now."

"What's it like," I asked, "to live with another poet?"

"That's been rewarding. It's an important point of conversation. It's not incidental to the day job or the night job or anything else. We have a shared library, with duplicates when they're needed. It's been good for me. It's helped me stay the course, and I think it's helped Forrest too. We've challenged each other in an interesting way. It's been a major thing that we share."

"Do you show each other your work before you show it to anyone else?"

"I showed him something I've been working on for eons. Something I had worked on so long I was afraid I'd killed it. It was a long poem, 28, 29 pages or so. It had taken a long time. I had him read it yesterday. If he had been reading it all along I don't think I would have made any progress on it. So it's usually when we feel like we've done our job that we show each other what we've written."

"Do you talk about your work over dinner?"

"Yes. We talk about the work along with talking about whatever it was we ate, you know, foraging in the refrigerator. We don't talk about it at school, and we don't talk about it when we're both reading. It's wherever there's a lull. Usually a meal is a good time."

"The world of American poets," I said, "seems small. Everybody seems to know everybody, and everybody knows everything about each other."

"Pretty much, pretty much. It's a scrappy little world. I think everybody in Hollywood knows each other; I think everybody in any world that's not huge, you do know each other. You either know each other's name or you know each other's work or you know part of each other's story. There are points of intersection all over the map. And then you lose sight of the next generation coming up, if there's not some reason why they come right under your nose. That seems to keep the whole little machine going. And I think poets are more dependent upon community than writers in other genres."

Most poets, I said, have day jobs, and most of those jobs seem to be in academia.

"True. I could probably name three poets who don't."

"James Merrill was one of the last."

"Well, that's understandable. If you were a Burroughs or a Merrill, you didn't have a day job. There are a few poets whose circumstances were such that they did not have an outside job."

"Does everybody ask you about Bill Clinton?"

"Yes, people ask me about Clinton. I got a note from him four or five days ago. It was quite nice. I knew Clinton because he came to the law school when I was briefly in law school and when I was still in Fayetteville. My roommate for that time was a criminal-law teacher who worked in his first administration. We had mutual friends, and we had a few occasions in which we'd be at the same house or would be at the same table. But my crowd was an art crowd, and his crowd was a legal crowd. He's a big reader, Clinton is. A very big reader. Serious reader. Tremendous lucidity there. He went into office very well read. I doubt if he had much time to read once he got in there, except for documents, but he certainly went there with a lot of books at his back."