Oblivion Banjo, Charles Wright (Collected poems)
"How are we capable of so much love / for things that must fall away?"
A typical Charles Wright poem begins with an observation of the world outside his study window (this is how I imagine it happening; there are plenty of exceptions)...
"In the skylight it's Sunday, / A little aura between the slats of the Venetian blinds"
("Reading Rorty and Paul Celan One Morning in Early June")
"Back yard, dry flower half-border, unpeopled landscape"
("Disjecta Membra")
"A misty rain, no wind from the west, / Clouds close as smoke to the ground"
("A Field Guide to the Birds of the Upper Yaak")
Scene set, Wright deftly, with remarkable economy of diction and almost preternatural insight into the connections that bind him--us--to the world, moves to place himself, at that moment, into the slice of time and place he has described:
"If I were a T'ang poet, someone would bid farewell / At this point, or pluck a lute string, / or knock on a hermit's door. / I'm not, and there's no one here."
These lines follow "A misty rain..." and, once the poet has come to inhabit the scene, he gently leads the reader to the trope that Wright handles better than anyone--he finds a way to make the natural world, the world he inhabits, merge with what he is thinking and feeling. This act of union isn't the romantic's or transcendentalist's use of nature as a mirror or a metaphor for the self but the mystic's conviction that the soul is one entity, connected to all things, including to God. I have no information about Wright's religious views--I don't want autobiographical information clouding my reading of his poems--but he is, I believe, the most deeply spiritual poet of our moment.
I love taking long walks in the winter. The streets are mostly deserted and the bare branches of the elms and cottonwoods that surround my neighborhood are especially lovely when etched against what is (right at this moment) a sky of astonishing blue--not a whisper of a cloud, no contrails, just emptiness. Wright is a fine companion on such walks, and I might carry a line with me for company:
"It's blue immensity that taught me about subtraction, / Those luminous fingerprints/ left by the dark, their whorls / Locked in the stations of the pilgrim sun." ("6 August 1984," from one Zone Journals).
Or, from yesterday's walk, a single line:
"Landscape's a lever of transcendence--" ("Apologia Pro Vita Sua")
I would guess that Wright is not for everyone: he's vague about certain things, evocative rather than descriptive. He's relentlessly serious, or at least never frivolous. He's never witty or ironic; he's not a "language poet" but a poet who conveys in poem after poem the limitations of language, the loose fit between words and thoughts.
His poems have a halting structure: they aren't easy to memorize; lines run on as descriptions grow dense ("Dogwood insidious in its constellations of part-charred cross points"). And, as I said, he's a spiritual thinker, and has more in common with Gerard Manley Hopkins than Wordsworth or Keats. It often feels as if he's looking past or through the lovely hills of central Virginia (he lives in Charlottesville) toward a New Jerusalem of the imagination. Yes, I do believe he is a great spiritual writer, our Rilke, our Hopkins.
Oblivion Banjo--over 700 pages of poetry, without any intervening prose introductions or commentaries, or even a word from Wright--contains wonders.
Here's one of them:
"Lives of the Saints"
I.
A loose knot in a short rope,
My life keeps sliding out from under me, intact but
Diminishing,
its pattern becoming patternless,
The blue abyss of everyday air
Breathing it in and breathing it out,
in little clouds like smoke,
In little wind strings and threads.
Everything the pencil says is erasable,
Unlike our voices, whose words are black and permanent,
Smudging our lives like coal dust,
unlike our memories,
Etched like a skyline against the mind,
Unlike our unretrievable deeds...
The pencil spills everything, and then takes everything back....
The pleasure of a big book like this one is that the reader can follow the trajectory of the poet's career. In Wright's case, from Hard Freight published in 1973 to Caribou, published in 2014. That's a long time to keep at poetry, and Wright has been remarkably consistent: in formal commitments, in themes, in high seriousness. There's a melancholy strain of frustrated understanding that runs through all of his books. He works in poem after poem to put what he feels into words, and, more often than not, he gives up and ends one of his meditations with a line that sounds Japanese in its simplicity and durability: "When the body is old, the heart becomes older still," "Everything moves toward its self-appointed end." (both from Littlefoot, a poetic journal).
It's a joy to read Wright in any season, but winter feels especially appropriate a time to take stock, to look around more carefully, and to think about why we love so deeply the things that must fall away.
George Ovitt (6 January 2019)
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