In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C. D. Wright | 399 the border-crossing relational poetry of c. d. wright Suzanne Wise I. “I am a serious border-crosser,” C. D. Wright has written.1 Her poetic journeys have often led readers across the borders between the urban and rural, and between the North and South of the United States. Wright’s poetry initially centered on and has frequently returned to the landscape, idiom, and working-class lives of her native Arkansas Ozarks. However, other landscapes—New England, Mexico, and the open road between here and there—began to complicate this regional focus as early as Further Adventures with You (1986) and String Light (1991). Describing poetry as “tribal” and the role of poets as “griots, the ones who see that the word does not break faith with the line of the body,” Wright suggests the possibility of connection and community across cultural and regional divides (CT, 10).2 Yet Wright also proposes a poetics of political resistance that draws strength from the differences that are shaped by geography and culture in opposition to “the inexorable course of cultural assimilation and the willful course of historical amnesia” as abetted by mass consumerism (LRP, 1). Idiom in particular is a site for her investigation of cultural distinctiveness, but with String Light, Wright begins to combine her attention to idiom and detail with disruptive formal techniques that draw attention to the poem as a construction. As she says in the prose ars poetica “The Box This Comes In,” she prefers craft in which “the work shows” (SL, 59).3 Her poetry evolves from free-verse narratives with naturalistic line breaks to poems that rely more on fragment, the dismantling of narrative conventions, abrupt syntax, and shifting diction marked by the tendency to be, as Stephen Burt aptly describes, “disorientingly specific in single phrases and words.”4 The subsequent works Just Whistle (1993) and Tremble (1996) focus more on themes of sexuality and family life, but they also assert a more fractured, provisional sense of the lyric moment, using more ample white space, and often dropping punctuation, introducing the strategies that Wright later expands on in geographical and cultural border crossings. These techniques inform Deepstep Come Shining (1998), an intensely fragmented collage poem that marks Wright’s first book-length foray into the documentary form. Deepstep Come Shining charts a road trip through North and South Carolina and northern Georgia that Wright took with 400 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century photographer Deborah Luster; together they visited outsider artists and explored “the reaches of seeing, of not seeing, visions, dreams.”5 In this book, Wright manages to embrace geographical distinctiveness yet subvert traditional documentary’s reverence for fixed, observable evidence. She writes: “The eye is a mere mechanical instrument” (DCS, 78). And: “Don’t need a magnifying glass / To make the feelings seen” (DCS, 103). And: “The objective is hopeless” (DCS, 13). Calling into question the act of seeing and the search for empirical truth, here Wright underscores her unsettling of witnessing and the documentary that will be central to the poetics that inform two of her recent books. This subverting of personal testimony and the documentary takes on greater intensity and new significance in One Big Self (2003) and Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008), which will be my focus in this essay. Originally published with photographs by Deborah Luster, One Big Self is a book-length collage work that takes as its subject three Louisiana prisons, the inmates of which are largely poor and black. Rising, Falling, Hovering, a multifarious, splintered travelogue, explores border conflicts between Mexico and the United States amidst the confluence of personal journeys, the Iraq war, and other scenes of social and economic strife. Both books present a self-questioning poet-guide who struggles to connect across aggressively maintained divisions of race, class, culture, and geography. In these works, Wright acknowledges and incorporates her limitations and blind spots, as she seems to advise in Cooling Time: “We need to lower the veneration around the terms of communication and expression and aim to see better—and to see better we have to move at whatever pace we can tolerate in the direction of our blind spot, else learn to recognize its advance toward us—which is usually where we are most smugly and snugly ensconced. Best not expect any grand vista” (CT, 93). II. The developments in Wright’s poetics have a number of different sources, from an interest in Brecht’s alienation techniques...

Share