barrett - Appalachian EP (2025) Hi-Res

If you were a student in the Hopkins Writing Seminars and were arrested for urinating in public after a night of heavy Barth it is possible that your restitution would include hosting a monthly poetry forum at a youth hostel as a form of community service. You might hold forth on a different poet each month until your time was served. One Sunday afternoon, Yeats. On another, Berryman.

Sooner or later the conversation would turn to poet Charles Wright who recently became our nation’s poet laureate. Or rather, poetry consultant, which title is more in keeping with a Federal city full of consultants. Perhaps you would begin the story this way: Charles Wright was born in Tennessee where alcohol and poetry go hand in hand. You might add that Jack Daniel, Andrew Jackson, and Charles Wright are the Bermuda Triangle of long-windedness