”I Will Finish this Poem”: Charles Wright’s “East of the Blue Ridge” Conversations with the Chinese Poets

This presentation addresses how the presence of Chinese poetry in the work of Charles Wright demonstrates both diversity within Appalachian culture and a deep fundamental unity between the two cultures. Wright’s “Appalachian Book of the Dead,” which I take to mean the book he is creating every time he writes a poem, depends upon poets such as Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Han Shan, and Li Po to internationalize an Appalachian outlook and demonstrate that American mountain residents are not alien from the Asian. In fact, many Chinese (Taoist) ecological ideas parallel to the old Appalachian ways—the healing powers of the earth for example. Wright works to reconceive Appalachian provincialism as forward-looking By acknowledging some eighth-century Chinese poets, who were nurtured by similar mountain geographies, Wright offers resources to residents of Appalachia for answering Tu Fu’s frightening question: “Where is my life going in the isolate outlands?” Lin Yutang asserts about the philosopher Mingliaotse in the epigraph to Wright’s Country Music: “Being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it.” Wright has said, “My landscapes have always been imaginary, invented and reconstructed. I look and I impose and then I decompose them and then I recompose them.” He decomposes and recomposes Appalachian landscape by coming at it from an unexpected, revitalizing Shan Shui angle.