Wright's paradoxical sentiments come wrapped in gently meandering lines and sentences that seem not to want to end lest they appear to conclude. It would be interesting to get a look at the keyboard where Wright types; I picture his comma key worn down to a nub and the period filmed with dust.In this review of Charles Wright's poetry, Joel Brower describes Wright as "meandering" between Stevens' abstractions and W.C. Williams' insistence on things. It's an excellent analysis of a poet who, frankly, does wander lonely as a cloud and cloudlike too among the littered vale.
What interest me most about Charles Wright's poems are:
1. His use of the line.
Wet days are their own reward for now,
litter's lapse and the pebble's gleam. The qualifying, renaming, appositional structure of what my teacher called the "low rider" line" really is a tic in Wright's writing.
2. Wright's use of the landscape, the still life, although very decorated, dense with description, is lovely, layered, full, and empty, too, of people. I don't know why his landscape's so uninhabited--not static, just fluctuating. This has always bothered me--and I often think it's a flaw in the way I approach poetry--I wonder what am I missing as a reader (lacking in understanding), because I long for
a you, an I, a he to make more frequent appearances in his work? Somebody, nobody, the people show up, in prayerful addresses to a God who's not listening...
Pity the people, Lord, pity their going forth and their coming back,
Pity their sumptuous barricades
against the dark.
Show them the way the dirt works.
Show them its sift, the aftermath and the in-between.Judy Jordan was Wright's student, and she favors his use of description/landscape and his low-riding line in her poetry, but it is a poetry that's peopledelegiacegaic when it's not...
Carolina Ghost Woods , I'm sure isn't better written(and what does that word mean, anyway--better--are we writing against each other?), but for me the church has to have the doors open, the people spilling out or trapped within and not just leaf-lapse and gravel glut in an abandoned parking lot of a sidesaddled church spraddled on its foundation...
Here's Jordan (from
Carolina Ghost Woods, from "Help Me to Salt, Help Me to Sorrow"), first the opening, and then a section in the middle of the poem:
In the moon-fade and the sun's puppy breath,
in the crow's plummeting cry,
in my broken foot and arthritic joints,
memory calls me
to the earth's opening, the graves dug, again, and again
I, always I am left
to turn away
into a bat's wing-brush of air.
------------
With the wet leaves thick on my steps,
the evening sky bruised dull gray to black,
when I've spilt salt and as the saying goes the sorrow and tears,
and the stove is cold so salt won't burn,
tell me my pocket of charms can counter any spell.
Tell me again the reason for my grandfather's fingers
afloat in the Mason jar on the fireplace mantel
between the snuff tin and the bowl of circus peanuts.
What about the teeth in the dresser bureau,
the sliver of back bone I wear around my neck? *_______________________________
There's poetry for me...the human voice, talking to herself, talking to others, talking to me. I feel that Charles Wright is talking up, across and down like a complicated crossword puzzle, and Jordan's calling out...
I highly recommend
Carolina Ghost Woods and
Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance if you want to read poetry that reveals not only a mind, but a heart at work.
_____
* I wish I could figure out how to show in Blogger the way these lines are indented.
