What great news this morning: March 12, 2014 Carolina Wren Press is pleased to announce the winner of the 2014 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series contest: Goldberg – Variations by Charles Wyatt. Goldberg – Variations was chosen from a field of more than 200 entries by Ravi Shankar, poet and editor of Drunken Boat. Of the work, Ravi Shankar has written: “Water Pater’s famous maxim that all art aspires to the condition of music is given rapturous embodiment in Charles Wyatt’s Goldberg – Variations, alluding to perhaps the most triumphant piece of harpsichord music ever composed, Johann Sebastian Bach’s orchestration of two arias and a set of 30 variations. Both Bach’s acoustical magnum opus and Wyatt’s sonorous verbal accomplishment create harmony using a ground bass line melodically elaborated in the progression of a sequence, demonstrating that, as in genetics, there is no original form, but only a recursive set of variations. Ekphrastic poetry might be enjoying a surprising renaissance but Wyatt is the inheritor of an even rarer practice, call it aural mimesis until we coin a catchier term, poetry that imitates music, a lineage we can trace at least as far back as Langston Hughes’ accommodation of the blues into verse, if not much earlier in some of our most ancient folk poetry. Beyond the title sequence, the Goldberg – Variations enthralls the ear and stimulates the mind, exploring such subjects as myomancy, divination using the movement of mice and revivifying such verbal artifacts as Shakespeare’s skainsmate and the higgling pig. Wyatt’s other long sequences “Emily Poems” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens” are meditations on lines from Stevens and Dickinson, uncanny and inventive as finely crafted homages. A poet who can verge from phosphorescence to the blue guitar, from “All the satin in paradise / smooths this thought, / statue learning, the hard earth/ waiting—“ to “And up with its roots, hey ho. / And off with its prolific leaves, / Why should we say the wind knows a tree, / blind wind, blundering, entangled/ in its own brash and billowing song?” is someone to watch closely and listen to even closer. A major concerto of a book, Charles Wyatt’s Goldberg – Variations demonstrates the proximity of our art forms and the sheer universe of delight they can provoke within us.” Charles Wyatt is the author of two collections of short fiction, (Listening to Mozart, University of Iowa Press, Swan of Tuonela, Hanging Loose Press), a novella (Falling Stones; the Spirit Autobiography of S.M. Jones, Texas Review Press), and two poetry chapbooks (A Girl Sleeping, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Series, Myomancy, Finishing Line Press). He is the recipient of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s 2010 Chad Walsh Prize and the Writers at Work 2013 Fellowship in Poetry. He has served as visiting writer at Binghamton University, Denison University, The University of Central Oklahoma, Purdue University, and Oberlin College. He currently teaches in the Low Residency Program of the University of Nebraska and the Writing Program of UCLA Extension. Before this, he was principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony for 25 years.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:37:56 +0000
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