Read for Yourself Why Charles Wright Is the Next Poet Laureate

By Colleen Curry June 12, 2014

Charles Wright has been named the Poet Laureate by the US Library of Congress (Library of Congress)

Charles Wright is the country's next poet laureate, charged with increasing the nation's awareness and appreciation for poetry, the Library of Congress announced today.

Here is a short poem from Wright called "Clear Night" from the Poetry Foundation.

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.

Moon-fingers lay down their same routine

On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.

Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.

I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.

I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.

I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says "What?" to me.

And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say "What?" to me.

And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.

And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

"Clear Night" from "Country Music, Selected Early Poems," copyright 1982 by Charles Wright and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.

Wright will take up the post from Natasha Trethewey, who was U.S. poet laureate for two years. Famous laureates have included Charles Simic, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams.

The poet receives a stipend of $35,000 from a private endowment and participates in a poetry series in Washington, D.C., along with giving a lecture and reading of his or her own work.

Laureates of the past have focused on their own projects, including poetry workshops for women at the Library of Congress, poetry for elementary school students, bringing poetry to public places such as airports and hotel rooms, and distributing a poem for every day to American high schools, according to the Library of Congress.

Wright, 78, is a retired professor at the University of Virginia who told the New York Times he was "honored," "flattered" and "confused" to be chosen.

"I really don't know what I'm supposed to do," Wright, 78, told the Times. "But as soon as I find out, I'll do it."

Wright has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize four times and won the prize once, in 1998, for "Black Zodiac."