Poems of Spiritual Longing and Lyric Suspense
I am ever grateful for Charles Wright, one of the most inspiring colleagues a poet could ask for in the University of Virginia’s MFA Program or anywhere, and as an invaluable opportunity to observe the keen awareness of how voice works in poetry. His mix of serious, self-ironic, high-brow/low-brow, Whitmanesque inclusiveness and Dickinsonian vision and wit is a marvel. Like no other voice, his has continually found ways to take the whole range of linguistic possibilities in and create something utterly distinct. Charles Wright has written some of the most beautiful and moving poems searching for spiritual sustenance where one wouldn’t expect to find it—the via negativa mapped out along the dim starlight and dust of the real world. “Out of intense and personal experience, to express a general truth” is what T.S. Eliot said of W.B. Yeats’ later work—“retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol… so that in speaking as a particular man” he is speaking for all of us. Indeed the use of the first person plural is threaded throughout Charles’ work, a voice speaking with and for all of us.
When awarding Wright the honor of 20th Poet Laureate, Consultant in Poetry for the U.S. Library of Congress, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington called Charles Wright “a master of the meditative, image-driven lyric… for almost fifty years his poems have reckoned with what he calls ‘language, landscape and the idea of God.” Upon receiving the award, Wright said, “Everything I write almost always starts with something I see… I’m a visual poet, and images seemed to be what were natural to me when I started out.” Of his more recent work he said, “I became really obsessed by the landscape in my backyard, because I was always trying to see what was behind it. There really isn’t anything behind it but what you imagine and make up. But I, of course, had the idea that what’s behind it is the invisible landscape that gives this landscape its being. So that goes back to the idea of God, I guess.” He described poetry as “concentrated attention on things, whether they be physical or intellectual.”
Probably his most famous poem is the remarkable, eerie “Homage to Paul Cezanne,” from his fourth book, The Southern Cross. The poem’s homage comes in Wright’s use of repetition. There seem to be references to Cezanne with the many blues coming in over & over, and the particular lines:
The dead are a cadmium blue.
We spread them with palette knives in broad blocks and planes.
We layer them stroke by stroke
In steps and ascending mass, in verticals raised from the earth.
We choose, and layer them in,
Blue and a blue and a breath,
Circle and smudge, crossbeak and buttonhook,
We layer them in. We squint and terrace them in line by line.
The images of that passage, and the “sky with cloudy panes” and “cypress twists” that follow, call Cezanne images to mind, but beyond that, all the repetitions throughout the poem—repetitions of words, phrases, images and sentence shapes that create a palpable sense of space in which the dead are present with us everywhere, always— seem to honor the ways Cezanne used repetition of color and shape to create a space for us (and perhaps the dead, who “Like us, they refract themselves. Like us,/ They keep on saying the same thing, trying to get it right.”)—a space to enter, as the poem creates one.
In his later work, like the poems of Littlefoot, he creates psalms—of water-glints and cloud-wisps and post-it notes, rosary beads of car lights on the Interstate—timeless and immediate songs of longing and release. Indeed, in his address at the Library of Congress he said, “Poetry has been very important to me in the sense that it focuses my longing about things, and my questions about things.” And his poems have done this for his readers. Along with, and perhaps tied to, spiritual longing, lyric suspense has been an essential aspect of Charles Wright’s work. In Scar Tissue, his fourteenth book, the poem “Ghost Days” is an example.
Ghost Days
Labyrinthine, Byzantine,
memory’s gold-ground mosaics
Still spill us and drop us short.
Who was the sixth guy in the Fiat 500
With Giancarlo, Pamela, the two drunken carabinieri and me
That New Year’s Eve around 3 a.m.
Circling the Colosseum
and circling the Colosseum?
And what year was it ten inches of snow descended
Like papal grace on Rome, and all the small macchine
Crashed on the Tiber’s retaining wall?
What year was that?
The pieces clear and occlude like a retinal bleed.
And where are you now, Giancarlo,
my first Italian friend,
Mad marinaio of the Via Margutta, where are you?
Like a black blot in a troubled eye,
you fall into place, then fall out
From the eyeball’s golden dome.
How high you hung there once in our fast-faltering younger
days.
How high we all hung,
artificial objects in artificial skies,
Our little world like a little S. Apollinaire in Classe,
Weedy and grass-gripped outside,
white and glare-gold within,
Our saints with their wings missing,
But shining, nevertheless,
as darkness gathers the darkness, and holds it
tight.
The sentences move in and out of Italian settings, shifting time frame and perspective, raising questions about how memory alters the past. Images of Italian art are used to illuminate the concerns of particular people. Wright raises our expectations, curiosities and fears by again using patterns of repetition (word, phrase, idea, image, sentence structuring, handling of foreground and background, changing of verb tense, point of view)—various linguistic effects to set up a reader’s anticipation about whether or not expectations will be fulfilled.
That book’s title, Scar Tissue, is a metaphor for what the poems do in myriad ways: mark something indelible that, even as we perceive it, is dissolving into its own negative, which is a positive: pain transformed into healing. Not an easy healing though—more and more the “we” of his poems seems to perfectly cross the definite, palpable business of living (even the names of the living—Giancarlo, Pamela, Zeke Cleek, Amos Many Wounds…)—with the wind, “who’s heard it before, and crumples our pages.” A particular past-tense moment, of Kingsport or Mantova or Montana—backhoe and taillights, olive leaves, belt buckle—getting picked up by the infinite, refracted through the shatterings of memory, then gathered back by the darkness again. Charles’ poems are gorgeous, unsettling, reassuring in their exact requirements of truth, and they remind us of what we didn’t know we knew and where we didn’t know we came from—the “Sodbuster’s Saloon and Hall of Fame”—to “S. Apollinaire in Classe,/ Weedy and grass-gripped outside, white and glare-gold within,/ Our saints with their wings missing,/ But shining, nevertheless, as darkness gathers the darkness, and holds it tight.”
