The
Third Decade of Charles Wright's Poetry Publications
~EDWARD BYRNE~
TIME
AND AGAIN: CHARLES WRIGHT'S NEGATIVE BLUE:
SELECTED LATER POEMS
. . . year after year,
decade
by decade, Charles Wright has had a pencil in hand,
a piece of paper in front
of
him, as he's scribbled some of the most graceful
sentences and elegant
lines in
contemporary poetry, producing a bounty
of poems as durable as
diamond,
each with the dazzling light of reflection
as if from the cut and
polished
surface of a diamond's facet. Thankfully,
four decades after he
came to
his senses, as he puts it, with the discovery
of his poetic skill,
Wright continues
this ritual of reporting on the world
around him.
What do I want my poems to do?
I want them to sing and to tell the story of my life.
÷ Charles Wright
In
an essay
accompanying the announcement of Charles Wright as the winner of the
1996
Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his collection of poems, Chickamauga,
Philip Levine, who served as judge along with Yusef Komunyakaa and
Laurie
Sheck, commented: "Has any other American poet been writing as
beautifully
and daringly over the past twenty-five years as Charles Wright?
Possibly.
But I cannnot imagine who it would be."
At the
time of Chickamauga's
publication, one already would have found difficulty in disputing
Levine's
assertion or doubting Charles Wright's position among the select
handful
of America's finest living poets. After all, Chickamauga
was
the first book of poems written by Wright since completion of a
magnificent
collection, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990,
containing his second trilogy of books. The first trilogy had
been
gathered to acclaim in Country Music: Selected Early Poems
(1982),
winner of the National Book Award. And now, this new work
signaled
the initial stage of the third trilogy in that ambitious project
planned
three decades before by Wright. In 1994, as he was writing Chickamauga,
Wright categorized his three projects: "The ultimate end of the first
trilogy, Hard
Freight, Bloodlines, and China Trace, seems to be a matter
of
subject matter to me. The project in The World of the Ten
Thousand
Things seemed more technical, pushing toward that conversational
language.
. . . I hope the poems I'm doing now, and the ones I'll do later,
will somehow fuse those two approaches."
Charles
Wright
had already secured a reputation as a verbal musician in his lyric
poems,
as a master of the shorter forms of meditative or autobiographical
poems,
and as one whose layers of artful lines appear to present the landscape
almost with the vivid colors and carefully placed shapes seen in
compositions
by those painters who have served as models for Wright over the years
and
to whom he often pays homage in his poetry, particularly Paul
Cézanne:
"My poems are put together in tonal blocks, in tonal units that work
off
one another. Vide Cézanne's use of color and form. I
try to do that in sound patterns within the line, in the line within
the
stanza, and the stanza within the poem. Tonal units of measure,
tonal
rhythms in time."
In
addition,
although Wright seems to wish to dismiss the uniqueness of his poems in
extended form ("All my long poems are short poems in disguise."),
Wright
had demonstrated his ability to apply his skills to a more expansive
canvas
in stunning longer poems like the closing title poem of The
Southern
Cross (1981) or as in "A Journal of the Year of the Ox," the
forty-page
centerpiece in Zone Journals (1988). Indeed, one easily
could
have believed Wright had fully explored over the years the ever-present
themes of landscape, self, poetry, death, and a search for the
spiritual,
or as he has described his own poetic obsessions: "There are three
things,
basically, that I write about ÷ language, landscape, and the
idea of God."
Despite
Philip
Levine's praise for the poetry in Chickamauga, no one would
have
been faulted for questioning whether Wright could continue to capture,
perhaps even more completely, the intricate interplay of these themes,
while maintaining the level of originality and energy thus far
witnessed
in volume after volume, and few could have foreseen the extent to which
Wright's poems would exceed expectations in Black Zodiac
(1997),
the masterpiece follow-up book to Chickamauga.
As well
as any
significant single collection in contemporary American poetry, Black
Zodiac displayed this poet at a peak of performance few ever
reach.
Consequently, Black Zodiac garnered the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry
and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Yet, rather than rest
on
his laurels, Wright immediately released Appalachia (1998), the
final book of his third trilogy. As might be expected, the
overriding
theme of this collection was the reaffirmation of life's value, while
offering
an acknowledgment of death in its elegiac tone, which has been combined
with the distinct impression of an artistic journey coming to closure
÷
the traveler (poet or reader) enriched and enlightened by the trip, now
content but sorrowful at its ending. "I've been doing a kind of
spiritual
autobiography over the years, trying to make sense of one's life,"
Wright
has commented about his three-decade endeavour.
Therefore, it
seems fitting that Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems, the
compilation
of the three collections comprising Wright's third trilogy, perhaps the
most inquisitive and meditative of all with its constant questioning of
the self's embrace of life and acceptance of death, is released in the
year 2000 ÷ the chronological closing of one century, one
millennium, and
the beginning of another:
What have you done with your life,
you've asked me, as you've asked yourself,
What has it come to,
Carrying us like a barge toward the century's end
And sheer drop-off into millennial history?
["Waiting for Tu Fu"]
During
a 1992
interview, when discussing the direction of his poetry as he was
beginning
the third trilogy of collections, Wright stated: "I think I'll go back
to shorter things. I don't know how short ÷ what I'm doing
now is
sixteen lines or less, but that's just one section. Then maybe
I'll
write, if I'm lucky, some one- or two-page poems, something like
that.
But no more forty-page poems, no more book-length poems. I've
done
that. I'd like to marry Emily and Walt again; I'd like to get the
long line in the shorter poem, if I can." Such thinking even
appears
in the poems themselves. As is often the case in the
autobiographical
stanzas of Wright's poetry, he directly comments upon his
intentions:
"Sit still and lengthen your lines, / Shorten your poems and listen to
what the darkness says / With its mouthful of cold air" ("Sprung
Narratives").
Although
there
is a bit of playfulness in Wright's comment about marrying Dickinson
with
Whitman, something many American poets have been attempting to some
extent
for the past century, one of the marvels of Wright's later poetry is
that
it does just that. As many modern and contemporary poets have
recognized
over the decades, Dickinson and Whitman, even though neither of the two
ever married or had children, are the figurative mother and father of
American
poetry and its practitioners. A large percentage of American
poetry
since the beginning of the twentieth century presents evidence of
traits
inherited from these two great influences, though the best of this
poetry
is often seen as derived indirectly or as resembling a combination of
the
two. In his criticism, Harold Bloom has correctly concluded:
"Like
Whitman, Dickinson is the most dangerous of direct influences."
Bloom
also suggests each of these two innovators has a poetic style that
appears
deceptively easy for readers to grasp and for writers to imitate, but
"Whitman
stays ahead of us by nuance and by metaphoric evasiveness.
Dickinson
waits for us, perpetually up the road from our tardiness, because very
few of us can emulate her by rethinking everything through for
ourselves."
In one of the most beautiful passages from "A Journal of the Year of
the
Ox," Wright recounts a visit to Emily Dickinson's home. He writes:
I liked the boxwood and evergreens
And the wren-like, sherry-eyed figure
I kept thinking I saw there
as the skies started to blossom
And a noiseless noise began to come from the orchard÷
And I sat very still, and listened hard
And thought I heard it again.
Over
the years
much has been made by critics about the debt Charles Wright owes to the
poetry of Ezra Pound. Certainly, a large part of the attention to
this originates in Wright's own essays relating the important influence
of Pound and The Cantos on him. Wright has also repeated
personal
narratives that offer inklings of his indebtedness to Pound, including
an acount of his first serious encounter with poetry. Wright
often
tells of being given a copy of Pound's selected poems when he was in
the
army, stationed in Verona, Italy. He had traveled to where legend
claims the Latin poet, Catullus, had lived in a villa at Sirmione on
Lake
Garda in the Italian Alps.
It's still one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to, or
expect
to go to. Lake Garda in front of you, the Italian Alps on three
sides
of you, the ruined and beautiful villa around you, and I read a poem
that Pound had written about the place, about Sirmione being more
beautiful than Paradise, and my life was changed forever.
There
can be no
question about the crucial affect Pound's poetry had in the awakening
of
Charles Wright as a poet. For this, all of Wright's devoted
readers
surely can be grateful. However, the most significant influence
on
Wright's poetry must be seen as Emily Dickinson. Wright has
acknowledged
her possession of a prominent place in his regard for the pantheon of
past
poets. "I admire and revere and am awed by a good many writers; I
have been in thrall to several. But Emily Dickinson is the only
writer
I've ever read who knows my name, whose work has influenced me at my
heart's
core, whose music is the music of songs I've listened to and remembered
in my very body."
If
readers of
Wright's selected later poems (in fact, those devoted readers will be
pleased
to note the term "selected" may be a bit misleading; few works from the
original volumes are omitted) in this third trilogy "listen hard," they
just might hear echoes of Dickinson's concerns with nature, self, and
the
spiritual; yet, those sounds are filtered through a Whitmanesque line,
often long and richly filled with specific details of local
color.
However, ever since the appearance of The Southern Cross, the
Charles
Wright line, though lengthened like Whitman's, has contained a
distinctive
characteristic, a split level effect that occasionally occurs within
lines
and that Wright explains as "the low-rider," a way "to keep the line
from
breaking under its own weight."
Wright
asserts
this signature line is needed: ". . . my line began to get longer and
more
'conversational' as I tried to push it as far toward prose as I thought
I could and still maintain it as a verse line. So, I began to
break
the line, in order to keep it whole. It is always one line, not
two,
and broken in a particular place to keep the integrity of the single
line
musically." Wright's use of the split line may also be a residue
of Pound's influence on his poetry, and a by-product from "the music of
the lines" in Pound's Cantos that Wright admired so much.
Indeed, Wright has long contended that Pound's "poetic line ends up a
broken
Whitmanian line."
Wright's
poetry
written since initiating the technique of this new "two-step" line, as
well as his comfort with indirect narrative through a layering of
images
(he believes "the best narrative is that which is least in evidence"),
has resulted in a greater freedom for self-expression, with an
accompanying
sense of liberation in personal revelation through imagery, allowing
him
more possibilities for an extended autobiography in lyric. "Using
the dropped line, the 'low rider,' you are able to use both sides of
the
page, use both left- and right-hand margins, and you can carry the long
line on as an imagistic line rather than a rhetorical or discursive
line,"
Wright has explained.
He has
displayed
an even more confident and convincing voice, whether sharing narrative
details in the collage of sections stitched to one another in longer
works
or turning inward in the shorter meditative lyric poems. He has
acknowledged
as much in his comment: "I think a lot of this has to do with the
layering
quality of structure that I started using in 'The Southern Cross,'
which
allowed me not to be so constrained in the way I earlier thought a poem
had to be, so self-contained; therefore, the language was more
self-contained
perhaps. As the formal apparatus opened up, somehow the textures
and the linguistic abilities seemed to be able to loosen a bit and
allow
more things in. . . ."
Indeed,
Wright's
poetry published during the two decades since The Southern Cross
has been uniformly outstanding, and this body of work has achieved a
more
elevated level of reflection upon the past, as well as a more engaging
portrayal of the present and a more compelling vision toward the
future,
firmly establishing Charles Wright's proper position in the continuing
chronicle of American poetry. The latest, perhaps best and most
persuasive,
evidence of this now has been presented in Negative Blue: Selected
Later
Poems, where Wright has determined:
The unexamined life's no different from
the examined life ÷
Unanswerable questions, small talk,
Unprovable theorems, long abandoned arguments ÷
You've got to write it all down.
Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar
Of evening,
you've got to write it down.
["Black Zodiac"]
Throughout the
years, Wright has compared his crafting of poems to the art of
landscape
painting, and his focus on landscape has been consistent. In one
of the finest poems of this third trilogy, "Apologia Pro Vita Sua,"
Wright
reaffirms the primacy of landscape in his work:
Landscape's a lever of transcendence ÷
jack-wedge it here,
Or here, and step back,
Heave, and a light, a little light, will nimbus your going forth. . . .
Wright
previously
has indicated, "my ultimate strength is my contemporary weakness
÷ my subject
(language, landscape, and the idea of God) is not of much interest
now.
But it will be again. How all three configure one's own face is
important
and must be addressed." In another section of the same poem,
again
Wright stakes his claim as an heir of the Romantic philosophy in a line
of poets that begins with Wordsworth and Keats before crossing the
Atlantic
to Dickinson and Whitman.
Journal and landscape
÷ discredited form, discredited subject matter ÷
I tried to resuscitate both, breath and blood,
making them whole again
Through language, strict attention. . . .
Wright's poems
continually exhibit landscape as a metaphor for self. By blending
landscape with a poetry of personal discovery and revelation, Wright
returns
to a prescription for meditative poetry promoted by the early Romantic
poets, but with a differing definition, a further "fusion" of the
relationship
between self and landscape. As Wright views it:
In Keats's letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, the
"egotistical sublime"of Wordsworth is posited against, apparently,
"negative capability." The poetical character, for the most part,
assumes a negative capability when it operates, submerging itself
in whatever it is portraying or explaining. It moves like a
chameleon
through the landscape, assuming persona after persona and is never
"itself." The "I" in Wordsworth, on the other hand, is always
itself,
never a persona, and attracts nothing of the landscape to itself.
When the "I" in Wordsworth walks through a field of daffodils, it is
always Wordsworth, his real self, speaking, an egotistical sublime
(from its pantheistic nature, or aspirations, one assumes). In
our
time,
surely some fusion has occurred, some kind of Egotistical Capability,
where the "I" both is the speaker per se and is, to a lesser degree,
subsumed in the landscape. Or a Negative Sublime.
"All
forms of
landscape are autobiographical," Wright claims in the closing line of
"All
Landscape Is Abstract, and Tends To Repeat Itself." Indeed,
Wright
repeatedly and correctly distinguishes between landscape and nature.
Wright separates the two: "Landscape is something you determine and
dominate;
nature is something that determines and dominates you." Going
even
further, he proposes that "nature is inherently sentimental, landscape
is not." Just as the French Impressionist painters turned away
from
idealized or composite portraits of nature, the historical landscapes
of
their predecessors, instead choosing to use self-expression in
rendering
captured scenes of ordinary landscape heightened only by personal style
or technique ÷ the shapes and density of broken brush strokes,
for example
÷ and enhanced by an angle of light or the intensity of color at
a carefully
selected time of day, Wright's depictions of landscape are not only
reflective
of his personal technique, but also metaphors for reflection, as might
be seen in the following lines from "Stray Paragraphs in February, Year
of the Rat":
A love of landscape's a true affection for regret, I've found,
Forever joined, forever apart,
outside us yet ourselves.
If
Wright has
been criticized for his use of landscape in poems, it apparently has
been
for repetitiveness in his selection of scenery, especially for a
fondness
of the view from his back-yard lawn chair ÷ "my biggest canvas,"
he has
quipped ÷ as in the opening stanzas of the following poems:
We have a bat, one bat, that bug-surfs
our late-summer back yard
Just as fireflies begin
To rise, new souls, toward the August moon.
Flap-limbed, ungathered,
He stumbles unerringly through them,
Exempt as they feint and ascend to their remission ÷
Light, Catharist light;
Brightness to brightness where I sit
on the back brink of my sixth decade,
Virginia moon in the cloud-ragged, cloud-scutted sky,
Bat bug-drawn and swallow-crossed, God's wash.
["Meditation on Summer and Shapelessness"]
I look out at the back yard ÷
sur le motif, as Paul Cézanne would say,
Nondescript blond winter grass,
Boxwood buzz-cut still dormant with shaved sides, black gum tree
And weeping cherry veined and hived against the afternoon sky.
I try to look at landscape as though I weren't there,
but know, wherever I am,
I disturb that place by breathing, by my heart's beating. . . .
["Back Yard Boogie Woogie"]
Or in the closing stanza
of "Sitting
at Dusk in the Back Yard after the Mondrian Retrospective":
Meanwhile, the swallows wheel, the bat wheels, the grackles
begin their business.
It's August.
The countryside
Gathers itself for sacrifice, its slow
fadeout along the invisible,
Leaving the land its architecture of withdrawal,
Black lines and white spaces, an emptiness primed with reds and blues.
Though
such criticism
of the seeming limitation in his choice of landscape may be legitimate,
it could be that it is also overstated, perhaps even the product of a
misunderstanding
of Wright's intentions. Other than in poems illustrating memories
of his childhood in Tennessee or the nearly two decades of living in
California,
one cannot deny that Wright often does not stray too far from the back
yard of his Virginia home for inspiration. Notable exceptions are
the long poems from Zone Journals that chronicled various
journeys,
particularly to places Wright considered sacred in his life as he
approached
his fiftieth birthday, or his poems about travels to Italy in which he
evokes those Italian writers and a culture essential to Wright's
sensitivity,
as well as the sporadic poems nostalgic for the Italian countryside,
where
he first discovered a love for poetry while reading Pound when assigned
by the U.S. Army to Verona in 1959.
Nevertheless,
just as the great Impressionist landscape painters, who reproduced
similar
scenes over and over, had done, Wright always finds a new or nuanced
perspective
to present, even in his own back yard. His belief is that
"what
you have to say ÷ though ultimately all-important ÷ in
most cases will
not be news. How you say it just might be."
Published
excerpts
from Wright's notebooks include a pertinent quote by Claude Monet: "A
painter
can say all he wants to with fruits or flowers, or even clouds."
Like Monet's series with numerous paintings of haystacks or poplars,
each
presented in a differing light and at times drawn from an alternative
angle,
Wright's construction, or perhaps reconstruction, of landscape
through
language in poem after poem never seems less than innovative and
instructive.
Perhaps through another comparison with his favorite landscape painter,
Wright has best described his intentions in presenting landscape:
Cézanne has a way of looking at landscape that I find
particularly
innovative, revolutionary, and pleasing to my spirit. He breaks
down
and reassembles the landscape the way I like to think, when I'm
working at my desk, I break down and reassemble what I'm looking
at and put it back into a poem to recreate it, to reconstruct it.
I like the idea that in fact he is very much of a realist although
up close everything looks abstract. But once you get the right
perspective, he is showing you just what's out there. I like to
think
I'm showing you just what's out there, but as I see it.
Michael Chitwood
has written that Charles Wright has produced "some of the most genuine
spiritual poetry of the last several decades." In an analysis of
his own poetry, Wright concludes: "All my poems seem to be an ongoing
argument
with myself about the unlikelihood of salvation." Nowhere is this
more evident than in the books of his third trilogy. Again and
again,
Wright's descriptive landscapes, sometimes revelatory pieces describing
places of comfort and at other times camouflage for what unknown future
might lie beyond, serve as metaphor for the spiritual understanding he
seeks.
We live in two landscapes, as Augustine might have said,
One that's eternal and divine,
and one that's just the back yard,
Dead leaves and dead grass in November, purple in spring.
["Indian Summer II"]
Wright's "ongoing
argument" is most
apparent in his elegies, such as "Thinking about the Poet Larry Levis
One
Afternoon in Late May":
Rain back again, then back off,
Sunlight suffused like a chest pain across the tree limbs.
God, the gathering night, assumes it.
We haven't a clue as to what counts
In the secret landscape behind the landscape we look at here.
We just don't know what matters. . . .
The landscape is also
ever-present
in the expanding number of other poems about one's own consciousness of
mortality that fill this trilogy:
Out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death.
Our days an uncertainty, a chaos and shapeless,
All that our lives are
blurs down, like a landscape reflected in water.
["Meditation on Form and Measure"]
Although mortality
has been a recurrent theme throughout Wright's writings over the
decades,
the further one reads into the volumes included in Negative Blue:
Selected
Later Poems, the more frequent the appearance of poems directly
about
death ÷ including a series of six poems titled "Appalachian Book
of the
Dead" spread through the last two volumes and a pair of "Opus
Posthumous"
poems.
As
suggested
by the above quote from Wright's elegy to Larry Levis, he has always
viewed
the landscape as a metaphor for the physical world that acts as a
facade
for the spiritual existence hidden beyond. Wright considers the
transition
between life and death: " . . . someone, somewhere, is putting his
first
foot, then the second, / Down on the other side. . ." ("American
Twilight").
He deems an acute awareness of death a way of adding value to life, a
greater
reason for appreciating each day given to us: "One life is all we're
entitled
to, but it's enough" ("With Eddie and Nancy in Arezzo at the
Caffé
Grande"). In fact, in the exquisite closing of "Apologia Pro Vita
Sua" ÷ that masterful poem in which he reviews specific events
or remembers
particular individuals in his life, and as well presents images that
mirror
the natural and cyclical process of life ÷ Wright concludes, in
addition
to all life has to offer, each day we're provided may also be treasured
merely as a temporary stay against death's arrival:
My parents' 60th wedding anniversary
Were they still alive,
5th of June, 1994.
It's hard to imagine, I think, your own children grown older than you
ever were. I can't.
I sit in one of the knock-off Brown-Jordan deck chairs we brought
from California,
Next to the bearded grandson my mother never saw.
Some afternoon, or noon, it will all be over. Not this one.
As in
recent collections
of poems released by others of his generation, such as Mark Strand and
Philip Levine, Wright's numerous poems in this trilogy concerning his
own
mortality demonstrate an increase of spiritual insight or a depth of
wisdom
perhaps even greater than that witnessed in his previous works.
Some
of Wright's poems may be read almost as philosophical essays,
psychological
studies, or theological pieces positing questions of concern for
all:
"What mask is the mask behind the mask / The language wears and the
landscape
wears, I ask myself" ("'It's Turtles All the Way Down'"); "Why do I
care
about this? Whatever happens will happen / With or without us, /
With or without these verbal amulets" ("American Twilight"); "When it
ends,
it ends. What else?" ("After Reading T'ao Ch'ing, I Wander
Untethered
Through the Short Grass"). In one of the few longer poems of this
trilogy and, as previously stated, one of the most powerful, "Apologia
Pro Vita Sua," Wright asks:
What are the determining moments of our lives?
How do we know them?
Are they ends of things or beginnings?
Are we more or less of ourselves once they've come and gone?
In another of the longer
poems, "Sprung
Narratives," Wright poses perhaps the one crucial question in the
trilogy
that sums up a main theme he seems to be trying to examine, for which
he
seeks an answer that may never be attained:
After it's over, after the last gaze has shut down,
Will I have become
The landscape I've looked at and walked through
Or the road that took me there
or the time it took to arrive?
In
these later
poems, to go along with his examination and evaluation of "death,"
Wright
reminds one of past poets like T.S. Eliot or Robert Penn Warren who
through
images and discourse so thoroughly treated the abstract concept of the
passage of "time" in their works, and he appears as focused on the
issue
of "time" and its ramifications as any poet in the last few
decades.
Wright's poems present the paradox of time as both a source of life and
the cause of destruction: "How many times can summer turn to fall in
one
life?" he asks in "Watching the Equinox Arrive in Charlottesville,
September
1992." Wright determines that "time is the Adversary, and
stays
sleepless and wants for nothing" ("Apologia Pro Vita Sua").
Elsewhere
in the same poem, he further proffers a corollary between the dwindling
amount of time one has left in life and the increasing value one should
place on the life we've been given. Wright declares:
Time is the source of all good,
time the engenderer
Of entropy and decay.
Time the destroyer, our only-begetter and advocate.
In his
poetry,
Charles Wright compares time to other life-giving elements, like light
and water, that in excess also may eventually cause destruction.
Wright recognizes the intangible nature of "time," which may give life
like sunlight, but which just as relentlessly as light moves forward
and
inevitably passes us by, leaving behind only lengthening shadows: "Time
and light are the same thing somewhere behind our backs" ("Meditation
on
Form and Measure"). Thus, one of the initial keys to
understanding
life and accepting mortality may be to identify our position in
relation
to "time":
We hang like clouds between heaven and earth,
between something and nothing,
Sometimes with shadows, sometimes without.
["Poem Half in the Manner of Li Ho"]
In a glorious section of
"Cicada,"
Wright presents an extended metaphor for the examination of "time":
If time is water, appearing and disappearing
In one heliotropic cycle,
this rain
That sluices as through an hourglass
Outside the window into the gutter and downspout,
Measures our nature
and moves the body to music.
The book says, however,
time is not body's movement
But memory of body's movement.
Time is not water, but the memory of water:
We measure what isn't there.
We measure the silence.
We measure the emptiness.
Eventually, Wright's
poetry acknowledges
"time," that which may have the power to shape and re-form anything, as
the controlling factor in all of our lives, one that is beyond our
control
and the one element we can never possess, but which always possesses us
÷ until time comes to dispose of us:
Time, like a burning wheel, scorching along the highway side,
Reorganizing, relayering,
turning the tenants out.
["Poem Almost Wholly in My Own Manner"]
Interestingly,
in a selection of his notebooks from the years 1988-1990, and first
published
in 1992, about the time he was beginning this trilogy, Wright includes
a passage by W.H. Auden offering the following evaluation of Vincent
Van
Gogh's artwork: "Perhaps the best label for him as a painter would be
Religious
Realist. A realist because he attached supreme importance to the
incessant study of nature and never composed pictures 'out his head';
religious
because he regarded nature as the sacramental visible sign of a
spiritual
grace which it was his aim as a painter to reveal to others."
Such
a description of Wright, as a "religious realist" among contemporary
poets,
might be equally appropriate and accurate.
Wright
has stated,
"the heart of nature is nature, the heart of landscape is God."
Perhaps
no major contemporary poet has so openly mentioned "God" as often in a
single volume as Wright does in this collection. He has written
that
he believes "the true purpose and result of poetry is a contemplation
of
the divine and its attendant mysteries." In interviews and
autobiographical
pieces, Wright has often spoken of his religious upbringing and
one-time
enthusiastic involvement in the Episcopal Church. Although he
"fled"
from that environment many years ago while still young, Wright feels
"it's
a very strange thing about being raised in a religious
atmosphere.
It alters you completely, one way or the other. It's made me what
I am and I think it's okay. I can argue against it, but it has
given
me a sense of spirituality that I prize." Throughout this book,
Wright
connects the landscape with the spiritual, links nature and mortality
to
a developing understanding and acceptance of God:
How strange to have a name, any name, on this poor earth.
January hunkers down,
the icicle deep in her throat ÷
The days become longer, the nights ground bitter and cold,
Single grain by single grain
Everything flows toward structure,
last ache in the ache for God.
["As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn into Light"]
Wright's explorations
of abstractions such as "time" and "God" are persuasive because they
are
almost always wrapped between lines containing some of the finest
imagery
in contemporary poetry. Wright's greatest gift has always been
his
ability to present impressive images in musical language. As he
sees
the movement in his poems: "My plots do not run narratively or
linearly,
but synaptically, from one nerve spark to another, from one imagistic
spark
to another."
According
to
Wright, even the longer of his poems are not narrative: "I don't even
try
anymore. It's subterranean. It's always under there, like
an
underground river, and it will come up to the surface and then go under
again, come back up, go back down." Wright's poems first draw the
reader in and then pull the reader through transitional experiences,
one
compelling image after another, until the poems end in a final
triumphant
image or an epiphany, perhaps in the shape of a statement filled with
wisdom
in a moment of sudden intuitive understanding earned by the cumulative
effect of its preceding images. Clearly, in his poems, as
Wright's
guidance points out, "narrative does not dictate the image, the image
dictates
the narrative."
In "Miles
Davis
and Elizabeth Bishop Fake the Break," Wright astutely associates his
work
with the graceful music or melodic innovation of Miles Davis, and he
identifies
a dominant characteristic of his poetry in a comment spoken by Bishop
when
summarizing her own poetry:
"It's just description," she said,
"they're all just description."
Meaning her poems . . . Mine, too,
The walleye of morning's glare
lancing the landscape,
The dogwood berries as red as cinnamon drops in the trees,
Sunday, the twenty-ninth of September, 1991.
In
"Disjecta Membra,"
at thirteen pages another of the longer poems in this collection,
Wright
reveals: "The poem uncurls me, corrects me and croons my tune."
Wright
knows the descriptive passage has always been a crucial element in the
music of his poetry, the muscular back beat behind the stated
abstractions
and their more delicate melody, and that together they blend to elicit
an emotional response on the part of his reader:
And so I've tried,
Pretending there's nothing there but description, hoping emotion
shows;
That that's why description's there:
The subject was never smoke,
there's always been a fire.
["Lives of the Saints"]
With a
typically
self-effacing attitude, Charles Wright has commented: "As a writer of
poems,
I've never had anything, really, except a good ear and a bad
memory."
Of course, that "good ear" which allows him to compose the musical
lines
of his poems is undeniably a gift. However, as Wright ironically
suggests, the faultiness or malleability of his memory may be a benefit
as well, especially in its permission, if not its need, for a fair
amount
of reconstruction in the creative process. Some of Wright's
thoughts
on memory are revealing:
Well, it's been a driving force in my work, certainly. It's the
most
reconstructible and reconstitutible thing there is because it's always
out of kilter when you put it down. I mean it's not ever quite
what
you think it was. That's part of its pleasure, to me, because you
think
you can be as accurate, as descriptively accurate, as possible, and, in
fact,
you're reconstituting just by the very act because you never quite
remember
the way it was. No matter how convinced you are, you're almost
always
wrong to some extent. Memory, after a while, is sometimes all
you've
got,
and so it becomes a great, fertile piece of land to work, particularly
if you
are a Southerner and you tend to live in the past or were brought up
by people who lived in the past.
In
Wright's memory,
the turning point in his life happened with that breakthrough
experience
in Italy during his military service in 1959, when he discovered his
desire
to write poetry. "I came to my senses with a pencil in my hand /
And a piece of paper in front of me" ("All Landscape Is Abstract, and
Tends
To Repeat Itself"). The four decades of writing since that moment
have been an ongoing and cumulative effort to describe the world around
him, and in doing so, perhaps to comprehend more fully his position in
that world. With his humility still intact, he defines the
writing
process in a poem borrowing a line from Bob Dylan for its title, "'When
You're Lost in Juarez, in the Rain, and It's Eastertime Too'":
Like a grain of sand added to time,
Like an inch of air added to space,
or a half-inch,
We scribble our little sentences.
Some of them sound okay and some of them sound not so okay.
Indeed, year after
year, decade by decade, Charles Wright has had a pencil in hand, a
piece
of paper in front of him, as he's scribbled some of the most graceful
sentences
and elegant lines in contemporary poetry, producing a bounty of poems
as
durable as diamond, each with the dazzling light of reflection as if
from
the cut and polished surface of a diamond's facet. Thankfully,
four
decades after he came to his senses, as he puts it, with the discovery
of his poetic skill, Wright continues this ritual of reporting on the
world
around him. Fresh evidence of this continuation can be seen in
the
extra section of seven new poems ÷ especially the title poem of
that section,
"North American Bear" ÷ added at the end of Negative Blue:
Selected
Later Poems.
Some of these star fires must surely be ash by now.
I dawdle outside in my back yard,
Humming old songs that no one cares about anymore.
The hat of darkness tilts the night sky
Inch by inch, foot by black foot,
over the Blue Ridge.
How bright the fire of the world was, I think to myself,
Before white hair and the ash of days.
Like
his esteemed
predecessor, Emily Dickinson, whose example he has chosen to follow,
Charles
Wright has never made grand claims about the magnitude of his poetry,
instead
choosing to view his work as little more than an individual's
observations
or one man's insight as he chronicles the events and experiences in his
own life: "I have no public, or social, aspirations in my work.
All
my aspirations are private, a locating and defining out of my own
life.
I wouldn't presume to speak for anyone else." Nevertheless, for a
long time now, Wright's precise poems have spoken to many readers, and
for many of them the exactness of his observations has put into words
the
very emotions they have felt.
In
"Mid-winter
Snowfall in the Piazza Dante," another lovely poem about his memories
of
Italy that appears early in this third trilogy, Wright locates himself
and the reader in a specific landscape ("Verona, late January . . . ")
and an exact time ("It's 1959. It's ten-thirty at night.
I've
been in the country for one week."). Looking back, he recognizes
the distance between then and now, not just chronologically, but in his
own growth and development, as a poet and as an individual: "That was
thirty
years ago. / I've learned a couple of things since then."
Certainly
he has learned his craft as a poet, how to command the language of the
lines and stanzas he scribbles in his notebooks; however, as a result
of
those scribbled stanzas over the decades, he also may have learned a
lesson,
one answer he's been seeking to the questions he raises about
understanding
the world and his place in it, as he concludes: "If there is one secret
to this life, it is this life."
Still,
readers
should be delighted that Charles Wright's desire for an understanding
of
his position in the world around him is not yet sated. In "Sky
Diving,"
the closing poem of Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems,
anchoring
the section containing new poems at the end of the book, Wright offers
another description of the landscape:
Clear night after four days' rain
moon brushed and blanched, three-quarters full.
Arterial pulse of ground lights and constellations.
It is as if Wright
realizes that,
although the life-long project of three trilogies has now come to
fruition,
there is no way he can put aside that passion for landscape in the
language
of poetry he discovered in Verona in 1959:
I've talked about one thing for thirty years,
and said it time and again,
Wind like big sticks in the trees ÷
I mean the still, small point at the point where all things meet;
I mean the form that moves the sun and the other stars.
What a sidereal jones we have!
Immensity fills us
Like moonrise across the night sky, the dark disappears,
Worlds snuff, nothing acquits us,
And still we stand outside and look up,
look up at the heavens and think,
Such sidebars, such extra-celestial drowning pools
To swallow us.
Thankfully, Charles
Wright has decided he still has more "scribbling" to do, he still has
"aspirations,"
and there is more to learn from the repeated "defining" of his own life.
Wright, Charles. Negative
Blue:
Selected Later Poems. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2000. ISBN: 0-374-22020-4 $23.00
© by Edward Byrne
