"Ink of eyes and veins and phonemes": C. D. Wright's Eclectic Poetics

LYNN KELLER "Ink of eyes and veins and phonemes": C- D- Wright's Eclectic Poetics Since the MID-1980S, C. D. Wright has positioned herself as an eclectic artist, free to draw upon the resources even of "antithetical poetries." Her 1987 essay "Op-Ed" provides a typical assertion of her aesthetic credo: I believe in a hardheaded art, an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one's own faith in the word, in one's own obstinate terms. I believe the word was made good from the start, that it remains so to this second. I believe words are golden as goodness is golden. Even the humble word brush gives off a scratch of light. There is not much poetry from which I feel barred, whether it is arcane or open in the extreme. I attempt to run the gamut because I am pulled by the extremes. I believe the word used wrongly distorts the woild. I hold to hatd distinctions of right and wrong. Also that antithetical poetries can and should co-exist without crippling one another. They not only serve to define the other to a much more exacting degree than would be possible in the absence ofone or the other; they insure the persistence of heterogeneous (albeit discouragingly small) constituencies. While I am not always equal to it, I appreciate the fray. . . . Important, I believe, to resist closure in one's own work while assiduously working toward its completeness . Detrimental, I think, the dread ofbeing passed on the left as is the deluded and furthermore trivializing notion of one's Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 3, Autumn 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 ii6Lynn Keller own work being in advance over any thing or any one. Truthfulness is crucial. (167) Even as Wright suggests some value in preserving the boundaries that are reflected in different reading constituencies, she presents herself as an artist who can "run the gamut" of aesthetic possibilities. Her assertions of individualism and her moral grounding in good and evil, right and wrong align her with pre-modern traditions. Yet her openness to "arcane" writing and her resistance to closure, perhaps echoing Lyn Hejinian's 1984 essay, "Rejection of Closure," ally Wright with postmodern experimentalist proponents of open forms. At the same time, Wright's critique leveled against those claiming to make an advance precludes affiliation with any self-styled vanguard, perhaps particularly with the mainly leftist Language writers. Wright attributes the mixture constituting her own poetics to the varied geographical circumstances of her career. Having grown up in the strongly Christian society of the Ozark Mountains (though not in a particularly religious household) and having launched her poetic development from the narrative and vernacular traditions of the rural "upper south," in 1979 she moved to San Francisco where she lived into the early '80s. At that fertile time for Language writing, when the Bay Area Language community was fully energized but still a genuinely marginal avant garde virtually unknown in the academic world and unrecognized in mainstream publishing venues or poetry institutions, Wright worked at one of Language writing's generative sites, the Poetry Center of San Francisco State. Although she kept to "the sidelines," she was "stimulated" by the fractious debates taking place ("Looking"); Wright read work being produced by Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, and others we now label Language writers and incorporated aspects of their aesthetics into her own. Eclecticism per se is hardly controversial in postmodern culture, yet when its mix involves drawing directly upon Language writing, hackles rise, both inside and outside the Language community. For instance, following a talk she gave on her poetics at Breadloaf in the summer of 1997, mainstream poet Edward Hirsch attacked Wright for quoting from writers affiliated with the Language group when such writers, he claimed, belonged to a "cult" who would assert "the exclusivity of their truth claim" and deny the legitimacy of her own inclusive aesthetics.1 CD. Wright's Eclectic Poetics117 Though hardly a "cult," Language writers have experimented in carefully theorized ways that reflect particular understandings—often associated with post-structuralism—of the construction of the self and the world through language, the imbrication...