“Poets, it should be noted, keep shaping their metaphors out of the ruins of their existence, in contradistinction to the powerful on this earth, whose stock-in-trade is the fable of their victories.” —Stanley Kunitz
Yesterday was the birthday of James Wright. I was going to send a shout out on twitter or facebook, but the day got away from me and I’m only just now, early the next day, getting a chance to reflect and offer up a birthday wish.
I would count Wright as one of the top five poets whose work has been most inspirational for me. Is that right? To say a poet’s work is “inspirational?” Somehow that word does not capture the potency of my emotional relationship with his work. There was a time in my life when I read him constantly. Over and over again. Like a favorite record, music and lyrics I could never get enough of. In fact, my copy of his Collected Poems is so tattered and natty, the binding having disintegrated long ago, it’s taped and re-taped, pages falling out and reshuffled. I think I own every book he ever published. Two Citizens and To a Blossoming Pear Tree are particular favorites, though I love as much his early formal work of Saint Judas and The Green Wall. When I was in graduate school, his work was held up as a quintessential example of achievement in contemporary American poetry. We all wrote bad imitations of “A Blessing.”
It would be safe to say Wright played a significant role in taking American poetry in a new direction in the Sixties, and that many trusted and followed. And he would probably admit that new direction was not a trail he blazed through wilderness, but a path he found and followed, though probably hard to distinguish at times, traversed by the ancient Chinese, Whitman, and the later by Spanish, German and South American poets of the early and mid-20th Century. His work was a magical mix of influences—both foreign and domestic—and his own working-class background growing up in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio.
I don’t know. I don’t claim to be any poetry scholar. All I know is how Wright’s poetry makes me feel. (Always the first question I ask when I read a new poem.) And I would say it makes me feel indistinguishably connected to the earth and humanity, at the same time—like few poets do—yet also strangely disconnected, anonymous and transparent. There is a witness quality to his poetry. The impersonal becomes universal, when attributes are transcended and only self remains, as a silent observer in the background of the world's ceaseless machinations. (Oh, I can hear the empiricists groan from here.)
Further, as a Midwesterner, I feel a resonance with his poetry, as I do with the early poems of Robert Bly and John Logan, also Midwesterners. A soft-spoken simplicity, economy and subtle derision—a joy buried in the existential prospect of long hours working alone outdoors in the vast, treeless expanse of the upper Midwest. In those conditions, there is no room for lies or deceptions. There is only room for truth.
That said, I will leave you with this famous poem by James Wright, and one of my favorites:
Lying In a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last years’ horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
