Spending Time with Mr. Wright
A friend of mine, a few years ago, told me that he’d taken to reading poetry in the morning. “It has replaced,” he said, “the habit of prayer.” In the current poetic landscape there’s precious little to make one feel prayerful, but for a meditative conduit to the actual, to imaginary gardens with real toads in them, one could do worse than be a reader of Charles Wright.
Re-reading “Reading Rorty and Paul Celan One Morning in Early June” on my front porch in early July
What Wright gets right is the balance between observation and mediation. The poems at once see what’s right before the eye and see through that to how the seeing (and the I that sees) is conditioned by the saying of it. “We are,” he writes in “Tennessee Line,” “our final vocabulary / and how we use it.” They are comfortable with their own intelligence, with philosophical resonance and reference, with allusion to a wide range of literary and artistic influences and antecedents. At the same time, though, the poems often survey a down-home terrain (Wright’s town, his neighborhood, his yard, his past). I look up from the book to see the rabbit that’s taken up residence under the hydrangea browsing in clover by the front walk. He doesn’t mention Williams much, but his attention to attention is like the Williams of “Spring and All” or “To Have Done Nothing.” Giorgio Morandi is a touchstone and a suggestive key, painting the same collection of bottles and boxes over and over again, intent on the constellation of shapes. Wright returns to the plum trees and dogwoods out back, finding in them, in his re-presentation of them, time and change, “entropy and decay” as he has it in “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” “Music and landscape; music, landscape and sentences.”
Thinking about “Disjecta Membra” when awakened early by birds
outside my window
“Late at night,” he writes, “we feel, / insensate, immaculata, / The cold, coercive touch of nothing.” He doesn’t often mention Stevens, either, but Wright both has a mind of winter and has been cold a long time. He sees the nothing that is. At times he takes a Zen stance toward flux and impermanence, at times an existential posture that’s Augustine filtered through Beckett (as in “October II”: “Do not despair – one of the thieves was saved; do not presume — / one of the thieves was damned, / Wrote Beckett, quoting St. Augustine”). Either way, he is interested in limning the impression nothing leaves in the fabric of the lived, whether “Extinction shouldering . . . in from my dreamscape” as “unfingerprintable dread” (“Meditation on Summer and Shapelessness”) or, in “Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn,” “suit coats left out overnight / On a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket, / Silk handkerchief limp with dew, / sleeves in a slow dance with the wind.” What Wright gets right is the way the gaps inspire: “Poetry’s what’s left between the lines,” he writes in “Poem Almost Wholly in My Own Manner,” a “strange speech and a hard language.”
