|
|
Featured Poet |
4
September 2004 |
|
Charles
Wright
|
|
And
now it's my turn, same river, same hard-rock
landscape
Shifting to past behind me.
What makes us leave what we love best?
What is it inside us that keeps erasing
itself
When we need it most,
That sends us into uncertainty for its own
sake
And holds us flush there
until we begin to love it
And have to begin again?
What is it within our own lives we decline
to live
Whenever we find it,
making our days unendurable,
And nights almost visionless?
I still don't know yet, but I do it.
from A Journal of the Year of
the Ox
|
|
The
Year of the Ox in question is 1985, which was
(as he notes in the course of the poem) Charles
Wright's fiftieth year. It would be wrong to call
A Journal of the Year of the Ox Wright's
masterpiece, (or even one of his many masterpieces),
for this writer's entire oeuvre, like no other
since that of Jorge Guillén, forms a single
and continuous enquiry into a set of individual
preoccupations and quotidian data that leads -
by a process that we can only call alchemy - to
a provisional understanding (as well as to a gradual
and informed affirmation) of the given world.
The artistic tradition to which Wright chooses
to belong includes the Chinese Taoist poets and
a number of key Italian masters, especially Eugenio
Montale, Dino Campana and the painter Giorgio
Morandi. His underlying concerns are philosophical
(or spiritual, for those who refuse to be squeamish
about the word) and this is why he remains so
deeply rooted in the everyday, even when meditating
upon the nature of the soul: |
| |
What if the soul
indeed is outside the body,
a little rainfall of light
Moistening our every step, prismatic, apotheosizic?
What if inside the body another shape is waiting
to come out,
White as a quilt, loose as a fever,
and sways in the easy tides there?
What other anagoge in this life but the self?
What other ladder to Paradise
but the smooth handholds of the rib cage?
High in the palm tree the orioles twitter and
grieve.
We twitter and grieve, the spider twirls the honey
bee,
Who twitters and grieves, around in her net,
then draws it by one leg
Up to the fishbone fern leaves inside the pepper
tree
swaddled in silk
And turns it again and again until it is shining.
from California
Dreaming
|
It
is tempting to say nothing about Charles Wright,
to let the poems speak for themselves. No other
body of work in the latter half of the twentieth
century (and more recently, with A Short History
of the Shadow and Buffalo Yoga,
the twenty-first) is better equipped to do so.
One thing that should be said, however, is that
Wright's work requires both careful and repeated
reading. In an age when too many writers seem
content to squeeze out instant consumables, Wright
gives us poems that are intellectually and spiritually
demanding, subtly well-wrought, and difficult
in the very best sense of the word.
|
|
|
|
|