High Lonesome: on the Poetry of Charles Wright (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS Adam Giannelli, Ed. High Lonesome: on the Poetry of Charles Wright. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 2006. 388 pages with bibliography, contributors list and acknowledgements. Trade paperback. $29.00. It is difficult to write about poetry and especially difficult to write cogently about the poetry of Charles Wright. Even so, a goodly number of commentators have given it valiant tries, and High Lonesome: On the Poetry of Charles Wright (Oberlin College Press, 2006) collects twenty reviews of nine separate volumes and fourteen essays on various aspects of the work as a whole—that is, the work in its entirety to the date the essays were written. For example, Stephen Cushman's "The Capabilities of Charles Wright" was published in 1991 and at least eight more titles have appeared since then. That fact points toward one of the difficulties: Wright has published a lot of poetry and shows no sign of tapering off. Just keeping up with him is a bit of a task. There have been some important stylistic developments, the major one taking place between China Trace (1977) and The Southern Cross (1981), and commentary must take account of the changes. Yet in the largest context, this poet's aims and methods have been consistent from the beginning, and though such consistency eases the enumeration and delineation of themes and concerns, it also invites repetitiousness. There is a lot of that here. A further difficulty derives from the particular nature of the poet's diction. Often freighted with abstract nouns and metaphysical terminology, it almost co-opts the vocabulary that can be used to write about it. For example, when Helen Vendler tries to talk about "Chickamauga," one must fight off the impulse to turn her sentences into Wright-like lines: His poems, looked at from one perspective, lie about us like the life-masks they are: immobile, "placed," shaped, blanched. This problem confronts a writer aspiring to write about other poets like Thomas Traherne, T. S. Eliot, Lucretius, and the Milton of 80 Paradise Regained, or about such topics as philosophy, linguistics and historiography. There is no adequate metalanguage sufficiently removed from the language of its subject to grant perspective. For this reason, even the well intentioned and well informed Stephen Cushman canlapse into pretentious humbuggery. Pondering the poet's pronouncements about form, subject matter and content, he says, "the real 'content' of any poem, or at least any poem by Charles Wright, is the mystery of how the bread and wine of lines of verse become the body and blood of the universe" (207). Jorie Graham might claim that her lines are capable of becoming the blood of the universe, but Wright—? Never. As his discussion proceeds, Cushman confuses the content of a poem with its themes and the result is logical mishmash. One's sympathies go out to him. An essay about poetry, unless it is to be some dithyrambic effusion in the manner of D. H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman or Henry Miller on Rimbaud, must maintain logical structure to remain comprehensible. But Wright cheerfully, almost gleefully, admits that he possesses no "logical, sorting-out" kind of mind. That fact makes explication a tangled prospect. A number of the essayists here speak of his "eluding" narrative as one of his major strengths. Whether it is a strength or not, Wright's associational procedure has allowed him to develop an original style, distinctive yet flexible enough to include precise description of nature alongside plenty of religio-metaphysical lucubration. It has also allowed him to write many pages of "philosophical" poetry without ever proposing or shaping a definable setofideas. Hispages are often called "meditative," but they offer more reverie than meditation; we find more Dubussy that Messiaen. Frustration is bound to creep into some of the criticism. Three of the writers have noted a tendency toward "self-parody"; Peter Stitt calls Calvin Bedient's review of The Southern Cross "radically disconnective and almost unreadable" (240 n.). Sometimes sheer delirium results. J. D. McClatchy says of the poems: "They are the Buddha's smile, the dolphin's teeth, the galaxy's whir, the coins on the eyes of the dead" (104). Here is Vendler...