Mark Neely reviews
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You can read a long interview with C.D.Wright |
C.D. Wright has always had a knack for leaving things skillfully unsaid. For more than two decades, she has been making some of the more daring moves in American poetry, often in the strange white spaces between her lines and stanzas. Wright understands that sometimes this silence is ‘quiet as a mirror,’ and can be as illuminating as the surrounding words. While her poetry has continued to evolve, these trademark imaginative leaps have remained, as in these opening lines from ‘Privacy,’ where millions of years seem to pass between the first couplet and the next: The animals are leaving
Wright’s poems have their own sort of sensors, and we are, of course, their guests. They can be fickle hosts, and though there are easy pleasures here, the poems are often stubborn and difficult. But for those willing to work with them, to pay them full attention, there are absolute rewards. Steal Away: selected and new poems is an important event — a chance to examine the first part of a startling career. The volume provides a sampling of poems from Wright’s previously published (full-length) books, including the complete texts of the book-length poem Just Whistle: a valentine, and Tremble. The house is watched, the watchers only planets.
The lives here are those of the people she grew up around, and some of the language — the polite ‘mess’ for example — also sprouts from those roots. But there is a less folksy, more intellectual ancestry here as well. We see the influence of poets like Charles Olsen in the openness of form, and a sentence from Wittgenstein (‘The world is everything that is the case’) functions as the hub the rest of the language whirls around. Some later lines seem to spring from Yeats, especially ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ But the end product is something wholly original, a new and powerful song running over looped samples taken from one woman’s personal and poetic history. Site of their desire: against a long high wall under vapor light
After many funny, quirky, and disturbing entries, ‘Autographs’ ends with the devilish line, ‘P.S.: have a wonderful summer and a wonderful life.’ This sheds light on Wright’s other poems, many of which are psychic yearbooks of one kind or another — lists of wishes and horrors and dreams, always marked up by lovers and ‘relations.’ ‘Remarks on Color,’ from String Light, is another example of the tension between the Whitmanian urge to record everything in sight, and the Southern urge to tell the best possible story, even if many of the ‘facts’ must be left out. It begins: 1. highway patched with blacktop, service station at the crossroads
There are also traces of Whitman in poems like ‘Our Dust,’ where the speaker addresses people of the future. Here Wright tries to define her place among poets. She is modest, but also acknowledges that even in ‘satellite dishes and Peterbilt trucks,’ she is searching for the sublime. ‘I was the poet,’ the Wright-like speaker proclaims: of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch
Near the end of the poem Wright assures her reader that her life ‘doesn’t bear repeating,’ that she was ‘the poet of one life, / one death alone...’ Good poets know this about themselves and their poetic ancestors. One can only be the poet of one’s own life, but at the same time must acknowledge that a large chunk of any poetic life is influence — the borrowing, cheating and stealing that makes up part of any oeuvre. |
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You can read a long excerpt from Deepstep Come Shining in Jacket 15. |
There are some new poems here, but all of them (with the exception of four ‘Girl Friend Poems’) were written as companion pieces for photographs by Wright’s long-time collaborator, Deborah Luster. The photographs aren’t reproduced here, so we’re really only getting half the story. While the new work isn’t the main reason to buy this book, there is enough here from a new project, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, to excite the palate, and some of Luster’s accompanying photographs can be found online. |
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Six photographs from that remarkable series accompany the interview with C.D.Wright in Jacket 15. |
Thankfully, this is a poet still in-progress, so Steal Away is almost certainly only a beginning. C.D. Wright does not stand still. Although she seems to have settled into life in Providence, Rhode Island, her poetry refuses to settle — it ranges around looking for a new ways to see and tell, new subjects to place under its light. As the poet writes, ‘it is / just so sad so creepy so beautiful. / Bless it.’ |
Jacket 22 — May 2003
Contents page This material is copyright © Mark Neely
and Jacket magazine 2003 |