Language of the Unreckonable: James Wright and Necropolitics

In 1958 james wright was considering a return to ohio. Teaching at the University of Minnesota, but short on cash, and with a baby on the way, Wright planned to abandon his faculty position along with his poetry. It was the very day that Wright penned a poem called "His Farewell to Poetry" that he chanced upon an issue of Robert Bly's new magazine, The Fifties. The formal inventiveness within reignited Wright's poetic ambition. "His Farewell to Poetry" would be published five years later, much reoriented, and retitled "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium." The revised poem is predicated on negativity; it asks what might be brought forth by a poetry of absence. Wright finished the poem in his Minneapolis basement, surrounded, as he told Donald Hall, by "the skeletons of mice and the necklaces of twilight" (10). Wright had complained that his previous volume, The Green Wall, had been "written by a dead man," yet it is the imagery of death and the corpse that energizes his 1963 collection, The Branch Will Not Break (6). Wright's new poetry would be a poetry unbound from calcium, transgressing the animate, efficient, and nutrient-rich body of bios, and bending instead toward a deathly poetics that recognizes a permeable boundary between life and death.

Lingering at that permeable boundary, this paper reconsiders James Wright's poetry alongside the concept of necropolitics, a rubric recently elucidated by cultural theorist Achille Mbembe. Wright populates his poems with bodies and forms bent by ever-encroaching political and environmental pressures; his formal arrangement of these scenes raises questions of power and sovereignty and suggests a renewed relevance for the increasingly unread American poet. To use Mbembe's language, I understand Wright's rural and industrial scenes as necropolitical "death-worlds" crafted in an effort to understand the "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead" (40).¹ Wright's verse allows for complex formulations of meaning beyond the mere impressionism with which he is often associated. His work is complex, but not in service of naturalizing complexity. When read as a poet of the necrocene, Wright's verse shows itself to recognize the human death required by hegemonic powers, and makes clear the continued violent merger of industry, nature, and social formation.

Critics have often relied on broad narratives and clear divisions when framing Wright's poetry, speaking of shifts in style, rediscoveries, resurrections, and leaps over walls. For example, Peter Stitt traces the trajectory of Wright's The Branch Will Not Break as an "enduring quest" in which the author searches "for happiness, for comfort," turning from "society to nature, from a fear of the finality of death to a trust in immortality" (66). While it is true that The Branch Will Not Break represents a shift in Wright's style, as well as a turning point in his biography, these sweeping critical narratives limit the expansiveness of Wright's poetics, particularly as they demand to be read today. The same critics insist on the austerity of Wright's verse—comprised largely of short lines, short poems, disparate images and colloquial language—from which they tend to extrapolate an aesthetic, narrative, and a straightforward political agenda, rough lives smoothed by the poetic speaker. But such traditional narratives foist both a presumed division between nature and culture, and a sense of clarity onto Wright's work that his verse resists. In my reading, Wright has little interest in separating society and nature, preferring instead to represent the ways in which the violence of industry and extraction lead to a regime of control that is coextensive through and between society and nature.

While Wright appears on some American poetry syllabi, and his "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" remains an anthology staple, his poetry has not been the focus of critical or scholarly attention for many decades. Despite some evidence of a resurgence (a 2017 biographical treatment, and the return of the James Wright Poetry Festival in Martins Ferry after a...