[caption id="" align="alignright” width="329" caption="Charles Wright (photo by Ashley Twiggs on Web site of C-Ville)”][/caption]
Charles Wright, who turned 75 this year, is arguably the most significant, original poet writing in America. One of a generation of luminous heavy-hitters (Gary Snyder, Mark Strand, Fanny and Susan Howe, Mary Oliver, Jay Wright, and Charles Simic, to name just a few), some of whom, like Sylvia Plath and Ted Berrigan, are no longer alive to grace us with the benefit of their long apprenticeship and vision, Wright continues to create, in a replete range of tonal, stylistic, and thematic registers, poems of prescient, metaphysical beauty, continuously refreshing his practice with inimitable mojo and lyricism.
Charles, a master teacher who for decades guided generations of students through the writing programs of UC Irvine and the University of Virginia, is famous for saying that each poet has just five or so poems to write and must keep finding ways to get as close as possible to telling the truth in and about them. A jones for light—for “heavenly hurt”—God hunger—what Wright has coined “negative spirituality”—is one of the “five or so” poems Wright has spent a lifetime writing. In an interview with Thomas Gardner in Gardner’s A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson, Charles, speaking of his own work in relation to Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain slant of light” (what Wright calls “the ur-poem in my unconscious”), says that this transumptive light “remains, as Pound said of something else, ‘in the mind indestructible.’ It’s that moment when illumination seems possible. It never actually happens, at least not so far, but its possibility is the illumination, I guess, that one is looking for. And when one comes to terms with that, one comes to terms with everything.”
Charles’s many books yield an abundance of light/sky imagery, both diurnal and nocturnal. This random sampling evinces both rapt perception and an immense desire for transport in and beyond language:
How the hills, for instance, at dawn in Kingsport
In late December in 1962 were black
against a sky
The color of pale fish blood and water that ran to white
(from “The Southern Cross”)
Deep dusk and lightning bugs
alphabetize on the east wall,
The carapace of the sky blue-ribbed and buzzing
Somehow outside it all,
Trees dissolving against the night’s job,
houses melting in air . . .
(from “Yard Journal”)
How small the stars of tonight, bandannaed by moonlight,
How few and far between –
Disordered and drained, like highlights in Dante’s death mask.
Or a sequined dress from the forties
— hubba-hubba—
Some sequins missing, some sequins inalterably in place. . . .
(from “Star Turn II”)
There’s nothing out there but light,
the would-be artist said,
As usual just half-right:
There’s also a touch of darkness, everyone knows, on both sides
of both horizons . . . .
(from “Lives of the Artists”)
Charles’s “Matins” opens, “Sunlight like Vaseline in the trees, smear and shine, smear and shine.” “Why Vaseline?” a student once asked after a reading. In his characteristically understated way (when queried by reporters how it felt to win the Pulitzer Prize, for example, Wright quipped, “beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, I guess”), Charles replied that he’d just plain run out of other ways to describe the sky.
But there’s nothing tired or self-parodic about this trying to get it right, repeatedly, moving as near as one can to what’s at the abyss of articulation. Wright has called himself a “God-fearing agnostic,” and this restive going-after the enlightenment behind the light, the dark within the light, whatever’s at the edge or prow of night, is a flood subject for him. Wright keeps looking and re-looking, questioning intently as he goes, pulling in details from pop culture (“a turkey buzzard logs on to the evening sky” or “We’ve been here for years, / Fog-rags and rain and sun spurts, / Beforeworlds behind us, slow light spots like Jimmy Durante’s fade-out / Hopscotching across the meadow grass” from “North”), with shout-outs and samplings from philosophy, semiotics, phenomenology, visual art, music, and other poets (Wang Wei, Plotinus, Rothko, Cezanne, Morandi, Bishop, Miles Davis, St. Chrysostom), all the while paying a profound attention to the quotidian and the natural world, especially his own backyard (“all landscape,” Wright has written, “is autobiographical”).
Highly regarded as a poet’s poet, Wright has sustenance to offer anyone looking to believe in the salvific motions of language at its most intense and interrogated, particularly in a world that often seems obdurate, mysterious, bereft of meaning (one thinks of Wallace Stevens in his “Adagia”—“It is the belief and not the god that counts.”) Possibility, as Wright says, is the illumination. In “Black Zodiac,” Wright addresses all poets, petitioners, language-wielders seeking connection:
Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards,
What letters will we illuminate?
Above us, the atmosphere,
The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call.
Above us, the great constellations sidle and wince,
The letters undarken and come forth,
Your X and my Y.
The letters undarken and they come forth.
That Wright has offered his slant, decades-long questing after this epiphanic brilliance is a crucial, consequential gift to American letters.
Lisa Russ Spaar is a professor of English and poetry writing at the University of Virginia. Her poetry books include Satin Cash (Persea Books, 2008), All That Mighty Heart (University of Virginia Press, 2008), and Blue Venus (Persea Books, 2004). For Arts & Academe, she selects and comments on Monday’s poems, and writes a monthly column about poetry.