Commentary on Wright Poem

Due to formatting issues with Blogger, I could not maintain the formatting in the poem and still be able to edit the body text as needed, so they are separate posts.

Here is a little biography on Charles Wright from the Academy of American Poets website:

Charles Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935 and was educated at Davidson College and the University of Iowa. Chickamauga, his eleventh collection of poems, won the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His other books include Buffalo Yoga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004); Negative Blue (2000); Appalachia (1998); Black Zodiac (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990; Zone Journals (1988); Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1983), which won the National Book Award; Hard Freight (1973), which was nominated for the National Book Award; and two volumes of criticism: Halflife (1988) and Quarter Notes (1995). His translation of Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Poems (1978) was awarded the PEN Translation Prize. His many honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He is Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Wright's Zone Journals is, for me, one of the finest books of poetry published in the last 50 years. The lines are associative, not narrative, and move with a kind of fluidity that reflects the liquid nature of the mind.

Wright's is a poetry of "luminous moments," as Edward Hirsch says. A reader gets the sense that Wright is painfully aware of his insignificance before the blank face of God. Here are more of Hirsch's thoughts on Wright:

Charles Wright is a poet of lyric impulses, of what Pound termed "gists and piths." His poems are structured associatively rather than narratively, and he has created a poetics of luminous moments, what Wordsworth called "spots of time," Joyce termed "epiphanies," Virginia Woolf labeled "moments of being." Such moments, fleeting and atemporal, rupture narrative and loosen bonds of continuity and consequence. They mark and isolate the self, transporting it to another realm, weakening its boundaries. They are inchoate and asocial--defying language, destroying time. Thus they have to be seized and contained, described and dramatized in words, reintegrated back into temporal experience. The epiphanic mode creates linguistic demands upon the poet, and Wright has responded to these demands conclusively. Over the years his work has become larger and more inclusive, with narrative overtones rather than undertones, though from the beginning he has written a poetry of flashes and jump-starts, of radiance glimpsed and noted down--transcribed, transfigured.

There is a definite Christian influence in Wright's work, but it is balanced by a reverence for the Eastern religions and their focus on being in the present moment. Wright struggles often with staying in the present. His poems become filters through which he remembers things past in order to make sense of the present. The poem posted above ends with a reminder to himself to just sit in the moment. A good lesson for us all.

Charles Wright poems on the web:

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
Early Saturday Afternoon, Early
In the Greenhouse
Last Supper
Words and the Diminution of All Things