Goldberg Variations
Charles Wyatt
Walter Pater's famous maxim that all art aspires to the condition of music is given rapturous embodiment in Charles Wyatt's Goldberg-Variations. Ekphrastic poetry might be enjoying a surprising renaissance, but Wyatt is the inheritor of an even rarer practice, call it auresis, or aural mimesis, that is poetry which imitates the pitch, rhythm and dynamics of music. Listen closely, for enthralling the ear and stimulating the mind, Goldberg-Variations is a major concerto of a book, demonstrating the proximity of our art forms and the sheer universe of delight they can provoke within us. —Ravi Shankar, 2014 contest judge
Charles Wyatt is the author of two collections of short fiction, Listening to Mozart and Swan of Tuonela; a novella, Falling Stones: The Spirit Autobiography of S. M. Jones; and three poetry chapbooks, A Girl Sleeping, Myomancy, and Angelicus ex Machina. He is the recipient of the 2010 Chad Walsh Prize and the Writers at Work 2013 Fellowship in Poetry. He is also a recipient of the R. V. Cassil Fellowship in fiction by the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and an Individual Artist Literary Fellowship in fiction from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He was principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony for twenty-five years.
