Charles Wright’s Resistance Against Certainty
When asked in his Paris Review interview what he looks for in the poems he reads by younger poets, Charles Wright answered:
. . .[L]anguage that has a life of its own, seriousness of subject matter beyond the momentary gasp and glitter, a willingness to take on what’s difficult and beautiful, a willingness to be different and abstract, a willingness to put on the hair shirt and go into the desert and sit still, and listen hard, and write it down, and tell no one.
I don’t remember Charles explicitly saying this in his undergraduate writing workshops when I was his student, but I want to say it is what I came to understand in his classes—or something very like it. Regardless of whether or not I had the skill to take on the difficult, I intuited in his class that the way to acquire those skills was to engage in the attempt, and that it was just as much my business as anyone else’s. His observations, his questions, his seriousness which was always serious, no matter how funny—blew open my understanding of what could be perceived and what could be asked, and let me glimpse at how much was required. Was I willing to put on the hair shirt and go into the desert and sit still, and listen hard, and write it down, and tell no one?
Charles’s most important teaching didn’t come through explicit statement, but some of his statements (many from Halflife) have become so vital to me that I think of them habitually.
1. What you have to say, most likely, will not be news. How you say it just might be.
2. Unless you love the music of words you are merely a pamphleteer.
3. Art tends toward the certainty of making connections. The artist’s job is to keep them apart, thus giving it tension and keeping it alive, letting the synapse spark.
4. New structures, new dependencies.
5. Where else do we live but in our own constructions?
The first book by Charles I ever picked up was Zone Journals. I remember standing in Daedalus Bookshop in Charlottesville and looking at the Cy Twombly detail on its cover followed by undramatic poem titles like “Yard Journal,” “March Journal,” “Night Journal.” Its abstract cover said to me: art. Its journal poems said to me: life. This idea is entirely obvious and not new even to me, but the experience of reading Zone Journals made the idea real to me: a living person had made something extraordinary out of life experience that did not seem by its facts particularly noteworthy. My experience of those poems was the experience of what I wanted life to feel like: a brilliance of heightened awareness in which time feels luxuriously ample. Every poem seemed to emerge from sitting still and listening hard. “A Journal of the Year of the Ox” observes:
These monochromatic early days of October
Throb like a headache just back of the eyes,
A music
Of dull, identical syllables
Almost all vowels,
Oooohing and aahing
As though they would break out of in speech and tell us something.
But nothing’s to be revealed,
It seems:
each day the shadows blur and enlarge, the rain comes
and comes back,
A dripping of consonants,
As though it too wanted to tell us something, something
Unlike the shadows and their stray signs,
Unlike the syllable the days make
Behind the eyes, cross-current and cross-grained, and unlike
The sibilance of oak tree and ash.
Not all experiences of “nothing” are the same. There is the intellectual evaluation in which “nothing” is conclusion; there is the drama of being alert to the “nothing” that is to be revealed. It’s how both of these senses cross each other so that the meaning of “nothing” accumulates and unravels that I find exhilarating. It’s the bedrock of poetry: Nothing ever really means one thing. The accumulation and unraveling of the word “nothing” in King Lear is exhilarating too: in that world we are terrorized with revelation. In Charles’s world, “Nothing is to be revealed,/It seems.” It seems that nothing is revealed.
Charles has said that poems aspire to the condition of prayer, and that perfect prayer is silence.
Recently, another poet told me that he found the poems of Charles Wright to be like fantastical Parisian boats floating by at night, bright with hundreds of delicate, multi-colored lights.
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“I like those boats,” I shot back nonsensically. I had no idea what kind of boats he was talking about, or if they existed, or if I liked them or not. His tone, as I heard it, insinuated frivolity, some accusation of the music of Charles’s language as decorative. I thought of Emily Dickinson telling Higginson, after he advised her to stop rhyming, that she “could not drop the Bells whose jingling cooled [her] tramp.” What I learned from Charles is that you can’t move through the heat of difficult material without something to cool you down enough to get you through. Sometimes you have to light up the dark to find your way. Sometimes you need to light it up excessively to find your ways. And maybe you can’t come up to face the brink of nothing, of silence, without being willing to sing to it.
Charles Wright has said that “All [his] poems seem to be an ongoing argument with [him]self about the unlikelihood of salvation.” He says he fell from grace when he was 16, but he describes his poems as devotions and compares them to prayer beads, each one in some sense circular, returning to where it began.
Charles used to talk a lot in class about the possibilities of a line: how the emphasis of their endings mattered at least as much as the emphasis of their beginnings. He was interested in how far a line could be pushed, how much it could include and still have the energy and force of a line. The enormous amplitude of his lines stands in tension with the sense that each poem is a kind of prayer bead in a larger sequence. The small is assembled from the large.
Here is the end of section 21 from Littlefoot that takes place “just before sunset,” in “the entry of evening light”:
All the little black bugs have left the dandelions,
The robins have gone.
Even the clouds have changed
To the color of 2% milk.
Out the north window, the grasses stand bright and erect as acolytes.
I remember the way they stood at Desenzano, like that,
Some forty-five years ago,
Though I didn’t pay much attention then,
twenty-three, on my way to anywhere else.
We’re always, apparently, on our way to anywhere else,
And miss what we’re here for,
The objects we never realize
Will constitute our desire,
The outtakes and throwaways of the natural world.
The movement of creek water at dusk,
The slippage and slow disappearance of what we love,
Into the silence of here-and-now
That will survive us, and call back.
*
The barn house is upside down in the motionless pond.
And pine trees.
Two ducks land suddenly
And everything’s carried away in the blurred, colorful pieces.
If this poem is a lit-up pleasure-boat ride, it is one that ends in pieces. What we love disappears into “the silence of here-and-now/[t]hat will survive us, and call back.”
“Something infinite behind everything appears, / and then disappears,” he says in “The Other Side of the River.”
A fantastical, multi-colored boat disappearing into the dark: a prayer bead held just for the length of a prayer: neither metaphor is adequate. Each one “tends toward the certainty” that Charles’s poems resist.
“The more luminous anything is, / the more it subtracts what’s around it. . . / making the unseen seen,” he says in “Yard Journal.”
And in “The Journal of the Year of the Ox” he asks:
What is a life of contemplation worth in this world?
How far can you go if you concentrate,
How far down?
There is nothing inherently virtuous about concentration here. That seems to me the bedrock of his poetry. “We should always write out of our ignorance and desire and ambition,” he said. “There is no success in poetry, there is only the next inch, the next hand-hold out of the pit.”
Charles has said that poems aspire to the condition of prayer, and that perfect prayer is silence.
Recently, I have been living with Sestets and its example of how form can point to and include silence. Each sestet is missing its octave, but the octaves, the “problems” of these partial sonnets don’t need to be spelled out. The problem, we know, is mortality. The question is salvation, of what or any kind. We carry the challenge with us, day to day through our lives, as the sestets do. They meditate on it, over and over, each like a prayer bead on a rosary that never promises to deliver you beyond its circle.
The monk Thomas Merton claimed to have no method of prayer; “quiet down and then it happens,” he used to say. I don’t claim to understand it, the peculiar power of Charles Wright’s poems to suffuse me in their wonders, to quiet me down. Charles has taught me better than to call this prayer. I’d rather let the synapse spark.
