Introduction: Defining Spiritualism
I am a scientific naturalist. I believe—given growth over time and with perspective—that biological, sentient consciousnesses (human or otherwise) can achieve understanding (systematic knowledge) of all the processes, functions, components, and mechanisms of the cosmos, and that all of these categories, ultimately, are fundamentally based in what we would call mathematical-physical. This is a complex, nuanced belief system that, of course, misunderstands, misexplains, and misdefines most concepts it seeks to encompass. What is important about this belief system in the context of poetry, though, is simpler: how does scientific naturalism interact with poetics, given the former interrogates what is knowable and the latter what is unknowable? The answer is a domain I would call spiritualism. I define spiritualism as the domain beyond what is known or understood, but within what is knowable (indeed, currently, what is felt; what is perceived; what is indirectly sensed; what perplexes, given discrepancies between intelligence and instinct; etc.). The spiritual is what we feel to be true and real but do not know how to explain.
This is simply my definition of poetic spiritualism. I find most others’ unsatisfactorily vague, wishy-washy, unhelpful, or a separate assertion entirely (which is, however, rarely acknowledged as being a separate assertion entirely): that spiritualism necessarily entails faith in the existence of a divine. I do not believe one need be a theist to feel, consider, and to seek to define and graph interactions between things, people, and events that, together, feel spiritual.
Further Context: What Is Spiritual Poetry?
The answer to the question why are (even non-theistic) poets so often spiritual is, in this new light, fairly straightforward. Poets are interested in—by constitution and habits of thinking—the category I call spiritualism: what is felt but not known. What is only indirectly observable. What we feel but cannot yet, satisfactorily, explain. Those who call this category metaphysics have a different understanding and set of beliefs than I do, considering that, one day, with time and learning, I believe this domain of knowledge can and hopefully (if we survive that long—a dubious proposition) will be known as physical, material, etc. Spiritual poetry is not about scientific knowledge, it is about what may one day be scientific knowledge. For that reason, I do not believe spiritual poetry is about anything that cannot be known (I place certain versions of the divine or God or why we are here in this category: the likely unknowable).
What, then, is knowable but remains unknown?: What connects us? How do love and longing work? What happens when we die? Do we have a soul or anything that survives biological death? How do we understand loss, sorrow, defeat? What is our place and context in the cosmos? What are each of our individual places and contexts on Earth, and how do those interrelate? Other spiritual questions abound. Most, however, in my opinion, concern invisible, indirectly observable, emotional or otherwise interpersonal connections between elements of life, the once-alive, and the seemingly-not-alive. Many poets ask these questions or probe this domain. The three I will focus on, in order of most attention to least, are Charles Wright, Jean Valentine, and Arthur Sze.
Iconography, Spiritualism, & Refuge in the Poetry of Charles Wright & Others
Charles Wright is a late Twentieth & early Twenty-First century Appalachian poet from Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, and former US Poet Laureate. Biographically, of interest: Wright was raised in a Christian Episcopal household in a deeply religious (often fundamentalist-fused-with-mystic religious) area (snake handling and blood magic ceremonies witnessed in childhood are described in early poems); Wright traveled with the Army and spent formative years in Italy, where he fell in love with the poetry of Ezra Pound, the still life art of Giorgio Morandi and earlier colourists and modernists like Cézanne (all extensively mentioned in poems throughout Wright’s career); and then picked up Buddhism and Taoism and read deeply in Tang Chinese poets like Li Bai and Du Fu (also meticulously referenced in Wright’s poems). Together, this broad cultural and artistic sampling and transition rather directly informs the corresponding transition, in Wright’s work, from what I would call surrealism (and less-directly interrogated magicalism in the early work) to symbolism of the image and a modernist (or post-modernist) interest in and inversion of color-field work and imagining, toward, ultimately, a highly spiritual, Zen-like and/or Taoist, gentle but truly incessant probing of the connections underlying reality.
Wright’s poetry always bears the weight of (but also benefits from the precision granted by) various forms of iconography: images and objects are imbued always with substance, with a kind of soul—immaterial or not, it truly does not matter. Why I want to spend so much time (many pages, covering, in succession, nine books published over twenty-five years) on Wright is because the development of his iconography lays out how, I believe, his work transitioned from symbolic iconography typical of Western poetics (signifying) away from iconography of difference (typical, Western), into an iconography of connection (spiritual, conversant on nourishment, maintenance, sustainability, fluidity, interchangeability). These categories, then, unlock the usefulness of spiritualism in the work of other poets of his time: Jean Valentine will be highly interested in maintenance and interchangeability, for instance, and Arthur Sze will be fascinated by nourishment, fluidity, and a related concept: simultaneity.
It is possible to read spiritualism in Wright’s and other American poets’ work as a refuge; in Wright, the refuge is from both the burden of faith and the burden of loss, namely the deaths, at a young age, of both of his parents. In Valentine, spiritualism will constitute a refuge from addiction, from threats and anxieties of illness and imprisonment, and also from loss, both of freedom (due to patriarchal restrictions on wives and women) and of relatives’ deaths, including stillbirths and abortions. Sze, finally, seems to seek refuge in re-ordering or returning life and historical events to a kind of balanced, simultaneous position of equal factors: to unwrite the obliterating effects of empire and white supremacy and to re-write history’s and life’s elemental moments as all eminent (none preeminent) and anti-hierarchical, their importance being not symbolic or conceptual but material—these things are real, these things happened, etc. The connection between all of these poetic sanctuaries is connection: attempts to un-make, in verse, neoliberalism’s flattening and severance of history into singular images and to re-write history as all (invisibly) interconnected. No I/other distinction; no god/not-god distinction; indeed no history/present distinction—spiritual/poetic non-dualism—all is all; all is now; all are living.
Wright’s Personal Spiritualism
And all are I, for Wright. Wright’s is an emphatically personal spiritualism: everything comes back to what is this self? What are its connections? What will it be, in death? Therefore, because the future is also now: what is it now, already, that it also always was?
Let’s begin, finally, to read the books, the poems, and the transition, in Wright, away from surreal symbolic icons and into—quickly and more and more fully with each successive book—a personal spiritualism of interconnectedness and invisible yet perceptible reverberations (echoes). I am going to draw out and closely read, in chronological order, poems from all nine collections that, together, Wright would go on to refer to as an Appalachian Book of the Dead.
From Hard Freight (1973), let’s begin with a poem called “Blackwater Mountain” (16 [all Wright pagination is from Oblivion Banjo, Wright’s collected poems]). In this poem, reproduced, in part, below, Wright’s speaker is beside a lake, which prompts, immediately, a memory of a semi-unwilling child version of the speaker duck hunting “for two hours, waist-deep in the lake” with his father, who is now deceased (17). I say the memory comes on immediately (and almost dissociatively) because already in the poem’s first line the speaker describes, generalizing, “That time of evening, weightless and disparate, / When the loon cries, when the small bass / Jostle the lake’s reflections” (16), and those reflections, those memories, those echoes that stretch through time then jostle, oscillating throughout the poem between past, present, and forever. “This is what I remember,” the speaker says, elucidating the rationale for the highly imagistic, highly iconic “freeze-frame[s]” that constitute the narrative arc of the poem (and of most of Wright’s poems): “And this: / The slap of the jacklight on the cove; / … The moon of your face in the fire’s glow; … Young / Wanting approval, what else could I do?” (16-17).
The images that comprise this poem (and every Wright poem) are not just images but connecting forces: the loon’s cry reverberates through space and time, just as the lake “jostle[s]” now, the same as it did then; the freeze-frames of memories, the light’s slap across the water, and the moon—let us now see what becomes of that moon, which is what becomes of every moon—we (along with the speaker) think of how each moon that appears to us and to others is that same moon (emphases below are mine):
The stars over Blackwater Mountain
Still dangle and flash like hooks, . . .
I stand where we stood before and aim
My flashlight down to the lake. A black duck
Explodes to my right, hangs, and is gone.
He shows me the way to you;
He shows me the way to a different fire
Where you, black moon, warm your hands.
(17)
A different fire—notice—not a different moon. It is because the moon is always that same moon that we can be transported to different fires, fires beyond, spiritual fires that are not where we are and yet are also, now, poetically, right where we are: backward in memory and forward beyond our own deaths. I am going to read Wright extensively over the next many pages because of how shockingly, clearly, and how insightfully his many, many spiritual icons, totems (moon, light, echo, fire, roots, tattoos, stars, bones, songs, needle and thread, shadow, water) connect past, present, and future: what is alive, what was alive and is now dead, what will be dead but is, for now, alive, what draws us back and draws us forward and keeps us from staying still or comfortable or disconnected too long. Hooks—to borrow a word from the passage above—not just echoes, but baited lures. They reel us in on invisible lines from all directions, all the time.
Jumping forward only a short period of two years to 1975’s Bloodlines, it startles me, first, that I have never fully internalized this collection’s title (I think later collections have much stronger and more memorable titles). Bloodlines shows us immediately what Wright is—and will ever be—up to: the ties that bind, the lines drawn in and by blood that stand out due to what I’m sure Wright would call the “power in the blood.” This power is, again, invisible, spiritual, unscientific but knowable and presently, strongly felt. There is also something even more powerful, more menacing than love and longing in the blood in this collection: cancer, which, in the poem “Cancer Rising,” “starts with a bump, a tiny bump, deep in the throat” and “spreads . . . around / Like music . . . / Repeated, but not believed” (29). I believe cancer is the cause of the death of the poet’s mother, though I am not certain: the deaths of both parents are detailed throughout this collection, though only through their emotional, not factual, details and effects. But those effects are, let’s say, what linger: a legacy of images and metaphors like song, ash (recall, in the previous collection, that other fire), light, root, worm, and bone. Each of these details, these icons, perhaps at first tempted Wright toward the symbolism of his earlier books (spiders were a favorite symbol, as was poison: things without their own malice, but that taint), though these spiritual icons Wright will devote his mature writing to are more than symbols in themselves. They are vehicles, they describe what is transmutable or transubstantial: they are flesh become (g)host, material become meaning, body become spirit become memory.
One of the most famous poetic sequences of Wright’s entire career, “Tattoos” (30–43), is a twenty-section poem comprised of vignettes from his life, the origins or spark-points of which are elucidated in notes that follow the poem. “Tattoos” is probably the farthest and most directly Wright will ever peer into (or, at least, the most directly he will show the reader that he is peering into) discrete events from his childhood and teenage years: the deaths and funerals of both parents, a “snake-handling religious service,” “fainting at the altar,” “blood-poisoning; hallucination,” childhood sexual abuse by “the janitor,” a “sideshow stripper” (43). The descriptions, in notes, of these vignettes—shockingly forthright to a reader more accustomed to Wright’s typical autobiographical reticence—do little to depict or suggest what this poem actually does, what its emotional affect is on the reader. The notes are necessary, in fact, because the poem itself is so nebulous: every section sounds hallucinatory, dreamlike (two are dreams, one is a “vision[s] of heaven” (43), plus the aforementioned actual hallucination). What binds the poem together is the spiritual, the liminal, the sense that the poet is, in fact, nowhere within these scenes: he is outside, he is between, he is dreaming, he is imagining to escape living in these moments-become-memories.
“The darkness is only light / That has not yet reached us,” the speaker reminds himself, watching his father, in memory, fish a run in (most aptly named) Blood Creek, “I watch you turn / in that light, and turn, and turn, / Feeling it take. Feeling it” the section, abruptly, ends (31). The section, the second of the sequence, is dated 1972, the year of the father’s death. It fascinates me: where is the speaker? Where is the father? Is he fishing, or buried in the earth beside Blood Creek? It is both. And the speaker is both there and not, which makes the speaker, and everyone he loves, and love itself what is in-between. Spiritual. Connecting. Felt (feeling it), not known, not seen (watched, yes, but only in mind’s [or heart’s, or soul’s] eye). Further sections of the poems stagger similarly, their emotional weights enormous: “A tongue hangs in the dawn wind / … That tongue is his tongue, the voice his voice” (34–35).
What was physical, what was known and knowable once but is lost, now, reverberates beyond physicality—psychically, as in, two poems later (the next two poems are dedicated, each, to one of Wright’s parents), when the speaker suddenly realizes and declares (Whitmanically, but with a twist) (emphases and bracket mine):
I am not listening. They made the sound,
Which is the same sound, of the ant hill,
The hollow trunk, the fruit of the tree [of knowledge, yes?].
It is the Echo, the one transmitter of things:
Transcendent and inescapable . . .
(47)
They, the hanging pronoun at the start, is hanging because it is, well, everything. It is the parents, first. It is objects in nature (which humans also are). But it does not matter. What matters is that they, we, everything makes the sound, which is the same sound as everything else. And it—the sound, the echo, the reverberation of the many people and things—is the one transmitter. The echo is what transmits, not the original. The echo transcends known material. The echo, though seemingly secondary and superfluous, is what carries us beyond knowledge, beyond morality (tree of the knowledge of good and evil), into what matters: what is not known but felt. What is known is escapable: in death we shirk the mortal, material coil. The spiritual, what is beyond knowledge, revisits us, and, because we can feel but cannot know it, haunts.
The collection ends by answering a question raised near the start, in “Tattoos”: “whose face / Comes and goes at the window? // Whose face . . . ,” from the “blood-poisoning; hallucination” section (33, 43). The answer, though, is not the answer we expect: it is “a face / Once mine, the same twitch to the eye” (62). The speaker is hallucinating his own boyhood face. This is the personal spiritualism that is quickly becoming so familiar to Wright. Everything returns to the self. But what happens to the face that comes and goes? “I back off, and the face stays. / I leave the back yard, and the front yard, and the face stays. / I am back on the West Coast, in my studio, / My wife and my son asleep, and the face stays” (63). But of course. Through everything that haunts—through everything that sings or echoes the song, the liminal song, through everything that is lost—what is never gone, for Wright, is the self. Even if we are hallucinating the self, we are always hallucinating the self. It is ever-present, ubiquitous to our existence. What is most spiritual and will remain most spiritual to Wright throughout his entire career is that he can never (and perhaps never wants to) shake this self that mirrors, that appears.
Having spent so much time with Bloodlines, I feel we can proceed more quickly and from a higher vantage point through China Trace (1977), especially because, I feel, its important developments are largely formal, wide-angle, broadstroke. China Trace actually tries to revert to earlier Wright tendencies from before the previous two collections: very short poems, symbolist indicating, high abstraction, and minimalism. It’s actually, in context, funny (Wright becomes, quickly, after this book, very self-aware and funny). The speaker returns to his formal roots, ironically, for comfort, because he is also trying to move away from the material of his first several collections (he will fail hilariously, in my opinion, to do so—then return to that material the rest of his career). The collection’s first poem, “Childhood,” speaks directly to childhood: “You’ve followed me like a dog,” the speaker chides, “I’m going away now, goodbye” (67). This was the first of many, many times that I laughed audibly reading Wright. He must know, given his obvious obsessions with the past, that little of utility will come from seeking to put away the past. But, as is known from the previous collection, he is in California, he is married to an actress from a well-known family of actors and has a child, he is teaching and writing productively: the “West Coast,” no doubt, provokes doubt and shame related to obsessions with one’s midcentury Appalachian misadventures and minor (seeming) tragedies.
Regardless, already, only a few pages into the book, the speaker seems to know his project of forgetting has already failed. His symbols quickly morph right back into spiritual, connecting hooks: in “Quotidiana” (the title betraying an attempt to dismiss such memories, such hooks, as trivial) we are presented again with the images—moss, mist, light, and rivers—of autobiography (71). The speaker seems to feel as though he is supposed to want to disconnect—though he is afraid he cannot and, further and fascinatingly, afraid he does not want to. Finally, toward the book’s close, he opens up. He speaks, in the first line of “Stone Canyon Nocturne,” directly to God:
Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back.
No one believes in his own life anymore.
The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread
. . .
In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings.
They sing songs, and their fingers blear. . . .
(80–81)
Blear is a verb I associate with eyes, not fingers, first of all. This is dissociative and, perhaps more specifically, synecdochic. Everything blears when no one believes in his own life anymore. What is funny about this line is that it is not about no one, or everyone—it is about Wright (or his speaker, at least). In Wright’s personal spiritualism, if one cannot believe in his life, cannot connect to his past, to the god of his childhood, then everything blears. The knots are undone. The songs are meaningless. Even the eternal and ubiquitous moon is a dead heart: unstartable. He is wallowing. That’s okay, he’s a poet. So he is about to jumpstart that heart, formally.
I’m not a historian of poetry, so I’m not sure how Wright adopted what I will call the dropped line or where or from whom he got it, but the famous dropped line that will appear in every single successive collection of Wright’s throughout his career (and, in time, in every single poem), appears first at the very end of this collection. Do you know what Wright’s first two dropped lines are? They are “family of dust” and “and anxious for no one,” the latter the end of a three-line poem, “Signature” (82, 83). I don’t even have to read that, it’s so direct and obvious. How will the speaker address this anxiety of the past, of Bloodlines and family ties? He will dive directly back into it. “I’m here, on the dark porch, restyled in my mother’s chair,” he says, in the book’s antepenultimate poem (87). “Everyone’s gone / And I’m here, sizing the dark, saving my mother’s seat” (88). Knowing that Wright will craft expert, deeply moving, richly connected and actively connective poems about these losses and this longing nonstop for another forty or more years, it is so satisfying to see the speaker return, in the space of less than a single collection, to himself. To his losses. To the place he has saved for the dead. They don’t even occupy it. He occupies it. He is sitting in the seat that is saved. For many of us, that is our life. Our lives have meaning. The meaning is what was there that is gone so that, now, we step in to reside in it.
Beginning the second one-third of what will only much later be termed Wright’s Appalachian Book of the Dead, Wright’s work and tone in The Southern Cross (1981) signal a coming-to-terms-with, partial acceptance of, and, consequently, a masterful interweaving of the original subject matter that has captured the heart of the poet with the newer, art-historical (Modernist) and “golden age” Tang Chinese poetics that come to occupy the poet’s mind. The Southern Cross also marks a shift in publishers, from Wesleyan to Penguin; the beginning(s) of serious thoughts about moving back east, back to Appalachia, which Wright and his wife Holly and their family will do in 1983, to Charlottesville, an area they will never permanently leave again; and, finally, Wright’s first time as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a status each successive book in this overarching text will achieve until, four books later, Black Zodiac wins the prize. But we are not there yet. The Southern Cross is simply the beginning of these trends.
Wright’s work is therefore also becoming meta-textual in more obvious ways for the first time: he, or his speaker, is thinking about poetry and art and where he fits among the great artists. The collection contains ekphrases of Cézanne, which Wright will later explain as a rationale for the dropped line (that it mimics formalist, compositional landscape painting), though also portraits of the self (several self-portraits, in fact) and of the poets Hart Crane and Li Bai. There is an obvious modernism to this collection—its connections are satisfyingly balanced, for the most part, until they are unbalanced again in the end by the poet/speaker’s restless heart. The intellectual or academic self-satisfaction of the majority of the collection is still no match, in the end, for the spiritually undoing, de-harmonizing, chord-striking lines like:
Fatherless, stiller than still water,
I want to complete my flesh
and sit in a quiet corner
Untied from God, where the dead don’t sing in their sleep.
(106)
These lines are less shocking if you have read and parsed the earlier Wright books, but up against the cool ekphrases and self-portraits and ars poeticas that precede them in this book, these lines stagger and concern us as readers, if we are able to empathize with a speaker who feels this way. Especially, of course, if we know that the speaker will never complete, will never still the mind, even in a quiet corner, and, of course, will never be untied from spiritual connection(s) with a god or with his singing, sleeping dead. Because he can sense “an otherness inside us / We never touch, ~ no matter how far down our hands reach” (125). (I will use a tilde mark [~], following a style established by Cal Bedient, to represent a dropped line in Wright’s poems from now on.) Taken from the middle of the very long titular poem of this collection, the poet’s longing to be untied, coupled with the impossibility of such an act—due to the facts that 1) the ties that bind us are somewhere inside us, 2) they are not us, they are an otherness, and 3) we never even touch them, despite probing deeply—make such spiritual longing read, at this point in the larger work, as uncomfortable. Undesirable, or untenable, even. Worth grappling over, though, for the purpose, if nothing else, of making this life and this spiritual existence more tenable. This becomes the work of the later poems (which was also, always, secretly, the work of all the poems).
In the next book, The Other Side of the River (1984), the dropped line finally takes over completely. Everything, in my reading, is now no longer either-or but both–and: not modernist or classical; not about self or other; not symbolic or spiritual; both–and always, all the time. Resistant to the pull of the past but also accepting, restlessly traveling back through Italy and California again, but also returning home to Appalachia, looking for what disappears but also what appears, about the destination and the journey (which are one and the same). It seems like Wright, or the speaker, realizes that balance is not back-and-forth between influences: balance is all influences at once, all the time.
For context, each of these two techniques reverberates strongly in the work being done by two of Wright’s contemporaries (yes, by many of his contemporaries, but I have time to note only two). Jean Valentine is composing poetry—at the time, and will continue for the rest of her career—marked by a stylistic, aesthetic spiritualism of interrelated but also discrete units, vignettes: poems of tiny, ethereal, hallucinatory stanzas. Each poem in Valentine has to be read in the context of all the other poems around it, or its significance is extraordinarily unclear (though its emotional affect resonates regardless). This is both-and spiritual poetry: the poet and the poetic unit are both alone and interconnected. Arthur Sze, too (like Jean Valentine, who had trouble publishing any individual poems before winning the Yale Younger), employs a rhetorical strategy—though consistent from the earliest works of his career to now—that did not connect with many readers until he had written many books in his unique form(s) [five books until he was picked up by Copper Canyon] and continues writing both-and spiritual poetry throughout his career. Sze’s work is among the most strikingly all-at-once: his monostich lines, drawn from everywhere in personal and historical context (though always resonantly following lines of inquiry around subjects like colonialism, empire, and empires of knowledge, if you look closely enough), are both extraordinarily lonely and extraordinarily interwoven, interconnected, and summative, mirroring his famous quipu, the knotted record-keeping technology of Andean cultures. Valentine and Sze, along with many other eco-adjacent poets of the time, work along spiritual lines of simultaneous isolation and interconnection to show us, more clearly than we know until we spend a great amount of time with them, that what we feel is preeminent, is instinctual, and of greater utility to us, in fact, than what little we theorize or “know.”
I think it will be more productive and expedient to move on to Zone Journals (1988) than to dwell on The Other Side. . ., as Wright steps more confidently into his own unique, personal, mature spiritual writing in the later book. It is exactly this diaristic style that will complete, complement, and revolutionize his writerly voice and dominate his tone for the remainder of his career. Wright is funny, as mentioned earlier, though he does not seem to know it for quite a while. He also can tell incredibly moving stories, though he always believed and maintained that he was the only US Southerner who could not. Taken together, both of these strengths of his writing and voice resonate strongly in this new diaristic form of journal keeping. Journals are interconnected—everything flows together—yet the book is comprised of multiple, themed, discrete journals, which allows Wright, I think, to feel like he is maintaining structural integrity. However, these differences, too, are being probed, strikingly, throughout the book:
And I suddenly recognize
The difference between the spirit and flesh
is finite, and slowly transgressable . . .
(198)
As previously stated, everything in Wright’s work becomes, over time, inevitably, about transmogrification. Considered carefully, though, the above statement is remarkably more complex than it seems. It flows smoothly, but what is it actually saying? The difference (okay) between what is spiritual and what is corporeal (okay) is not infinite (okay) and such difference can be transgressed, slowly (I’m sorry, what?). How does one transgress a difference? By turning it into a likeness? Okay, then. Spiritual difference can be made to feel, instead, as likeness between body and soul. Yes, okay. Here is an explanation of my lengthy, probably confusing introduction at the start of this essay. Given enough time, given pressure, given the proper techniques, what is spiritual can be seen as simply an unknown or not-presently-knowable extension of the material. What is spiritual is only what has been transmogrified, by a process we do not fully understand, such as death, into a realm we can no longer directly interact with. However, no strong categorical difference exists (perhaps). Perhaps it is not material vs. spiritual but simply known vs. unknown. The poem above, “A Journal of English Days,” arrives finally at one inconclusive conclusion: “God is an abstract noun” (208). That’s it. That’s the discovery. That’s all that is discoverable, that is knowable, now. According to our existing categories of knowledge, what’s knowable of God is simply that: 1) abstract, 2) noun. Case closed, for now.
Similarly, deeply unsatisfying spiritual abstractions begin to accumulate: “—It’s all such a matter of abstracts— ~ love with its mouth wide open, / Affection holding its hand out, / . . . No one can separate the light from the light” (emphasis mine) (215). What does separate a quote like the above, from “A Journal of True Confessions,” toward the end of Zone Journals, from a quote like the following, from “Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn,” which is the opening poem of Chickamauga (1995) some seven years later (an eternity between Wright collections) is the last-gasp lyricism of the former almost entirely abandoned here, in the latter (emphasis mine):
I used to sit back here and try
To answer the simple arithmetic of my life,
But never could figure it—
This object and that object
Never contained the landscape
nor all of its implications . . .
(305)
By this time, with Chickamauga, the beginning of the final third of the Appalachian Book of the Dead, Wright has done away with the lyricism that drips from most poems in all his previous collections, even the “Journals,” and taken up wholly the diaristic style and tone that will mark the work of the remainder of his career. These two passages mean nearly the same thing—images (landscape) cannot contain meaning (or at least cannot contain all the meaning we pretend they can and do)—but, while the former still employs images to make the point of their emptiness, the latter contains the only image present in the entirety of Wright’s oeuvre: me/I back here (on the porch) trying to figure it out and being unable to. All he can do, all we can do, is feel it. Trying to figure it (render meaning in images, in figures, sums, accounting, anything computational) is useless. Instead, Wright will lean fully into feeling, even if, in advancing age, those feelings are grave, blah, or, through Eastern teachings and meditational practice, increasingly unattached: “Loss is its own gain,” he writes, in “Reading Lao Tzu Again in the New Year,” “Its secret is emptiness” (307). That last line repeats as a refrain a few lines later.
Wright practices exact repetition more and more beginning around this time, affecting, seemingly, the rhetoric of mantras and koans. Again, a few poems later, in “Cicada” (which itself buzzes, hums, mantra-like): “Such emptiness at the heart, ~ such emptiness at the heart of being, . . . We measure what isn’t there. / We measure the silence. ~ We measure the emptiness.” (314). Lao Tzu is the purported (likely legendary) author, of course, of the Tao Te Ching, one of the foundational texts of Taoism, which teaches observance of the Tao, the Way, the transformational process underneath reality. Without going too far into Taoism, its close interactions with Chinese Buddhism and other neighboring philosophies, etc., one can appreciate how Wright takes on these doctrines and modes of thinking to highlight what he has always been highlighting, which originated in his own upbringing in Episcopal Christian rites: transubstantiation. What is empty can be filled, re-filled, and transformed based on how and by what it is filled. A spiritualism inhabits all objects and people is this inherent emptiness and correlated inherent transmutability. What is corporeal can be made holy, lasting, and vice versa.
In the following collection, Black Zodiac (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, all the questions and assertions and readings and meditationally-unlocked truths work, in my opinion, cohesively, productively, emotionally, as a whole. “Landscape’s a lever of transcendence–,” Wright’s speaker asserts, in the second section of the book’s first (long) poem, “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” (353), the eponymous origin of which is complicated, but which harkens to a nineteenth century English religious pamphlet laying out the author’s progression of thinking and practice from Anglicanism to Catholicism proper. “How like the past the clouds are,” Wright continues, “laying their shadows under our feet // For us to cross over on” (355). Image, figuration returns, but sparingly, precisely: the only lyricism present is subtle and sonic, not the old Baroque layering of images of earlier Wright. The speaker has identified the vehicle of transmutation: the landscape can be returned to—it doesn’t have to contain meaning—it simply transmits us toward the place(s) where meaning resides. The entire book does this.
The comeuppance, in the end, for Wright is a series of bruising self-questions, followed by a response that supersedes any and all of his speaker’s uncertainties across every poem he ever wrote. First, the questions (still in “Apologia Pro Vita Sua”):
What are the determining moments of our lives?
How do we know them?
Are they ends of things or beginnings?
Are we more or less of ourselves once they’ve come and gone?
(364)
The speaker finds “one of mine [such moments] tonight, / The Turkish moon and its one star / … Over my hometown street . . . / Surely this must be one” (364). And so, again, that moon. That connecting, single, same moon. And its constant companion, its one star. We could read who is the moon, who is the star, to Wright. But it doesn’t really matter. They are everyone. They are, together, both everyone he has ever lost and, crucially, himself. His self. One of them is him.
Here, now, is his answer to are we more or less of ourselves once they’re come and gone, from the end of the same devastating, life-affirming poem:
As for me, I’ll take whatever wanes,
. . .
The wandering stars, wherever they come from now, wherever they go.
I’ll take whatever breaks down beneath its own sad weight—
. . .
Language, the weather, the word of God.
I’ll take as icon and testament
. . .
Sun on tie post, rock on rock.
(367)
What I left out of the above are, well, Wright’s minor obsessions: traffic, the dark, some paintings, and the daytime metaphysics of the natural world. He already said as much. What he doesn’t say, what I read in the above, is: I will claim my own broken self. The stars are personal. Language, weather, God: personal. Sun and rock: personal, for Wright, as much, equally so as some paintings he likes, and metaphysics, and traffic. It’s all a matter of personal choice, what we have affinity for, what we attach ourselves to. These become our ghosts. He’ll take it, or he’ll choose it: there is no distinction, in Wright’s notions of fate and free will, between the two. We choose our lives, or our lives are chosen for us: big whoop. Same difference. They are. We do.
Wright now starts bringing out collections in even quicker and more staggering succession than before, not shocking given 1) the Pulitzer win and corresponding marketability of the books, now, and 2) that addressing problem drinking will tend to enable that kind of production). The final collection of the nine-book, twenty-five-year arc, Appalachia (1998), is out with FSG (whom Wright has been with for a few books at that point) only one year following Black Zodiac and the same year BZ wins the Pulitzer Prize. Appalachia feels like outtakes from the preceding collection: where the BZ poems are incredibly long, even for Wright, these poems are brief and liminal. They also read, though tangential to the powerhouse poems of BZ, pithier, somehow: “The soul is air, and it maintains us” is the closing line of “Stray Paragraphs in April, Year of the Rat” (418). The connections that were so mesmerizingly both physical/material and ethereal/abstract/empty before are now, kind of, neither? The soul is air? That’s the takeaway?
However, finally, we arrive—through and despite a cascade of semi-searching absurdisms—to the lesson of absurdism itself: the more we want and search for meaning, the more we try to observe the spiritual, the less in touch we grow with the “real” world. A cautious and cautionary tale unfolds, in Appalachia, that is truly valuable for those who, like Wright and most of his readers, are not monks, do not live separate from the world, and have obligations here and now: to teach, to write, to mentor, to be good parents and siblings and children, etc. There is something absurd about trying to suck soul-sustenance out of the air, always. There is something to be said for grounding, too, for trying easier, sometimes. For giving ourselves a break. If nothing else, ironically and brilliantly, this final, somewhat rushed collection instructs us to slow down and reconnect with those we have not yet lost, those still here, and to practice healthy nonattachment so that, in the end, perhaps, we can be haunted less in the future, when they depart from us, too.
Two Quick Corollaries: Jean Valentine & Arthur Sze
It occurs to me that what Charles Wright was and is in love with is the enigmatic. Lover of the cantos of Pound, of the genre- and form-defying art of Cézanne and Morandi, and of the intractable wisdoms of Laozi and others, Wright, to the contrary, I believe, saw the greatest success when his poems stopped trying to be enigmatic. To defy and re-define boundaries of understanding is not, perhaps, something one can try. Wright’s real gift was in recapitulation of ideas, wisdoms, and visions that predate him but that have not yet been well-synthesized, contextualized, or incorporated into as smooth a stream of thinking as his is. There are enigmatic spiritual poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, though, two of whom offer, I think, extraordinary contextualization of what Wright was tangentially saying, or poking around in, but not doing on the page.
For starters, it will be fun, after so much Wright (whose poems are often many dozens of lines longer than those I chose to quote) to look at an except of a much shorter Jean Valentine poem and then compare what the poets say, what they do, and how they do what they do. I have heard it said that what is most wonderful about a Jean Valentine poem is that even advanced poets do not fully know how her poems work. This is extraordinarily spiritual and, I think, so true and so exemplary of why we should read Jean Valentine. Her poems are like alien artifacts in a way: they contain technology—emotional technology—that works through efficient and robust processes that we cannot fully understand from points A to Z. These short poems take us miles and miles away from known mechanisms of language, even as they are composed of simple-seeming diction, always. Here is an excerpt of the poem “I came to you,” from Door in the Mountain (I have elided some repeated, evocating phrases at the poem’s end):
I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence
of this world
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground.
(8)
There are only, by my count, 21 unique words in this poem, which, in recent years, has been reappearing all over the internet in response, generally, to any given current political event. However, though Valentine wrote often about the AIDS epidemic, about unjust imprisonment (often from intimate, subaltern human perspectives), and about such (now) highly politicized topics as abortion and white male privilege, I cannot help but read this poem first in the context of her (the poet’s) recovery from alcoholism. The italics in the poem are hers, but I also read the title and the poem’s first line as “I came to you,” which helps me make sense of where the rhetorical stress of the poem lies, given that the existing stressors (world, reticence) are negated almost immediately by the speaker in the poem.
I came to you: I didn’t want to (so there is reticence, but it is not the world’s, it is my [self’s] own). Considering the second refrain first: we also negates, or subsumes, I, self. We were sad on the ground. Who is we? Well, those who were sad on the ground. So, as always, the subaltern: the subjects are, categorically, the same subjects as in almost all Valentine poems not about the husband. This is not a Wright poem. All Wright poems are about the husband, who, in Wright, is I. Wright’s speaker is never sad on the ground: he is in the air, he is his soul, he is anaesthetized and anxious about that anesthetization. The Valentine speaker is, perhaps, similarly “recovered” from direct ailment but still, in a sense, sad on the ground. The I that was forced to come to you was not saved completely, though. There is still reticence. There is still the world. As is the case in Wright, what does not fit isn’t the concepts of these things, but the words for them. I, you, world, reticence. The speaker tries them on, tries them out, and recoils at their incorrectness or insubstantiality.
The most vexed word, Lord, is repeated four times in the poem. No punctuation lends it the obvious directness of address that it operates under anyway (it is not Lord, come or oh, Lord or you, Lord). Lord is here, Lord is with, Lord has been sought and found and yet still has not come. Such a rhetorical suggestion, I think, presents a fascinating spiritual dichotomy, like but unlike Wright’s both–and: the speaker has come to the Lord, but the Lord has not responded by coming to them. A true loneliness, “truer,” in a way, than Wright’s, who is accompanied always by those spirits he seeks, though he cannot touch or know them. Valentine’s speaker is with the Lord and yet, still, untouched and unknown, intimately, by him (you).
One form of subalternity is to be known but not known, present but not felt, witnessed but not heard, as Valentine’s speakers are. Another form, the form interrogated by the poet Arthur Sze, is to be known: to be brought together, to be simultaneously occurring and interacting, and yet not to be truly among. To be simultaneous and obviously interconnected but still disconnected, disparate, un-alike. Sze’s poems, for the first many decades he was writing them, I must assume (though I was not yet alive) felt extraordinarily frustrating. In the vast majority of his poems, he presents a cacophony of narrative elements, often singled out using monostich lines (lines that are alone, solo: not in stanzas, as is more the norm), that only connect through repeating sounds or images or, often, simply because they exist together in the same poem. Readers must make connections themselves (repeated readings, of course, can help one gain confidence in the strength of any given noticed association, but there is no solution [which, given the mathematical and divinatory order apparent in Sze’s poems, is frustrating at first]).
The best example of this I can think to summon comes from Sight Lines, Sze’s 2019 National Book Award–winning collection. The collection has no sections: instead, it is punctuated by six separate, solo pages, their first words italicized in the Table of Contents, that contain single lines within em dashes (from Sight Lines):
—No one could anticipate this distance from Monticello—
—During the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing squad—
—A woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body—
—Salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—
—The plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—
—A man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now—
(13, 18, 23, 34, 38, 48):
Six is an auspicious number throughout all of Sze’s work: his poems often mimic I Ching divinatory readings, which use hexagrams (sets of six) broken and unbroken lines in 64 unique arrangements to offer augury about the day, what one should do, or how one should read the day’s events, etc. These six individual lines in Sight Lines, though, then come together, in the end, in the book’s title poem, which is composed of these lines, out of order, plus 14 more.
Though none of the six lines is, ostensibly, about the speaker, almost all of the 14 new lines of the poem, which still provide only a sense of the context between the existing text, are about the speaker, the I: “I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself;” “though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery” (53). Sze lives and teaches in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and this poem mentions Los Alamos, the historically preserved site nearby, where the US nuclear bomb was designed and tested. What is fascinating (and, ultimately, intellectually satisfying) about a Sze poem is that it neatly, exactly subverts expectation: instead of the way we are used to telling a story, in which the I is the subject/text and the you, or history, or everything else in the story/poem is subtext/context, in a Sze poem everything else is the text, and I am merely context. I bring history together. History makes sense, or has meaning, because there is an I here to witness and shape it. Wright, of course, says and believes the same thing, but he does not show it to be true in this way. Wright’s way is the old way: I am the text, you are the context. Valentine’s way is to negate such distinctions: I am the text—no, you are the text—no, neither of us is the text—the text is there is no text. It takes (at least for me) a long, long time to realize what Sze is doing because it is so novel, unlike, even, the divinatory tomes it is often based upon. It is new. It astounds and is deeply truthful.
Conclusion
I hope it is clear and appreciable, more than anything else, how truly personal Wright’s spiritualism is. For purposes of comparison, a highly personal spiritualism is nowhere near the only kind being practiced by Wright’s contemporaries in spiritual ecopoetics. W. S. Merwin, Arthur Sze, Forrest Gander, Dana Levin, and many other near-contemporaries are practicing spiritual ecopoetics of witness, of fluidity, and of an inconsequential self smaller than the whole during the same period, and drawing on similar Eastern texts: it’s only that Wright seems to prefer emptiness as a concept within these philosophies over smallness and impermanence. (Emptiness—or hollowness—a message, and a listener being the requisites for echo.)
Works Cited
Arthur Sze, Sight Lines. 2019. Copper Canyon Press.
Charles Wright, Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright. 2019. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New & Collected Poems, 1965–2003. 2004. Wesleyan.
