From "C.D. Wright in Conversation with Kent Johnson":
As to my own aesthetic associations / affiliations / sympathies: I have never belonged to a notable element of writers who identified with one another partly because I come from Arkansas, specifically that part of Arkansas known for its resistance-to-joining, a non-urban environment where readily identifiable groups and sub-groups are less likely to form. The last known poetry clan in my part of the country was the Agrarians. I was not of that generation, gender or class.
Moving around the country — especially to San Francisco — exposed me to the differences that were becoming loudly pronounced in the late seventies. An old friend of mine in New York had mailed me the first issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine before I moved West, but I did not grasp the arguments while in Arkansas. I suppose I was happily ignorant of the aesthetic differences which divide poets.
Everything for me was, and probably still is, personal. If I was somewhat paralyzed by the fractious nature of poetics in San Francisco, from the sidelines, I can admit I was also stimulated by the fray. I realized I could not name my own point of view much less put a fine point on it. Still, I think it might have been more depressing for poets who were from the city and not included. I could opt for the position that I had never “tried out.”
The theoretically-driven San Francisco poets who were in cahoots with poets in New York and conversant with European vanguard movements — they provided me with a need to become critically aware of my back-home ways; sharpened me to a degree. I’m grateful for the exposure, the education. I am indebted to particular poets’ work from that point in time, but I am not an intellectual in the sense that qualifies or requires me to belong to a manifestoed-group. And of course one comes to take some pride in one's own outsider status.
(read the whole here)
***
