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A Commentary on the Poems of Charles David Wright by Chuck Guilford We first take in the poems of Charles David Wright with the eye, but the words on the printed page quickly pass beyond the retina and awaken a different sort of vision, illuminating a whole world of experience and memory, until the inner ear comes alert, attuned to the slightest sound, and the mind and even the heart get caught up in the process. Perhaps this is just an elaborate way of saying that the poetry of Charles David Wright speaks to the whole person. It does so, I believe, because it was written from the whole person, and because it was written by a person who refused to accept pat answers to life’s difficult and perennially challenging questions. For this reason, he was truly original in the deepest and most meaningful way: he looked at life with a sharp, clear eye, and he wrote about it with unflinching honesty and courage. Although his published works are relatively few in number, it must be remembered that he wrote poetry seriously for a very short time. Even so, individual poems in Early Rising, and to a much greater extent in Clearing Away, somehow manage to reach deeper, soar farther, and ring truer than volumes written by lesser poets who publish a book a year. Taken together, the two books offer an overview of Wright’s development as a poet and reveal much about the ways in which American poetry changed during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, because Early Rising was written in North Carolina and Clearing Away in Idaho, it may be possible to understand how the temporal influences on the poetry have been affected by regional influences. Both earlier and later poems combine technical expertise with sharp wit and clear-eyed honesty, but in the earlier poems Wright favors traditional metric and rhyme patterns, much like Richard Wilbur or the Robert Lowell of Lord Weary’s Castle. In Clearing Away, on the other hand, Wright prefers a more organic, open-ended structure, and the content, if not confessional in the vein of Plath or Berryman, explores immediate personal concerns in the manner of Richard Hugo or of William Stafford, who wrote the Introduction to Clearing Away. Like both Hugo and Stafford, Wright, in these later poems, comes to see the drama of his personal life in a larger context of natural processes, juxtaposing the joy and heartache of human consciousness against the “Dinglichkeit” of natural objects or the relentless progression of the seasons. The poems in Early Rising, for the most part, are characterized by a wry, sophisticated detachment from their subject matter. They have a distinct satirical edge, more Horatian than Juvenalian, treating human foibles not with contempt so much as sympathetic condescension: Feinschmecker
sliced Yet beneath these polished surfaces, another world begins to assert itself. Its presence can be felt in “Sudden Flaring,” a poem worth quoting in its entirety: Now
that his place is dark The rhythms are characteristically precise and smooth, the harmonies of vowels and consonants are tightly controlled, but the poem evolves its own solemn, dirgelike music, each phrase building on the preceding one in a pattern at once open-ended and inevitable. These two attributes, the concern with probing more troublesome areas of human experience and the movement toward a more direct and organic style, come to the foreground in Clearing Away. Wright never lost his love of satire and wordplay, as “Losing the Scent” and “The Party” illustrate, but now the humor grows serious. The poems speak clearly, directly, as in “October Ending”:
Like my graying sideburns
Tomorrow up Robie Creek Some tell old stories, true or imagined, remembered or handed down from friends. Others speculate on the ordinary drama of daily living, remodeling the house or waiting for guests to arrive for a party. There is plenty of variety in tone and in subject matter. Yet it is hard not to feel in every poem the sense of a life, rich and deeply lived, coming to an end. With an almost Keatsian intensity, poems like “The Party,” “Clearing Away,” and “The Land Inside Two” press the final drops of sweetness from a life fully lived and too soon ended. This painful leave-taking is perhaps nowhere more evident than in “A Killing Frost”:
This is how it’s going to be. This is all.
As a poet and as a person, Wright took in much and gave much back. While
his untimely death was a great loss in so many ways, we can be thankful for the
rich legacy he has left us. Chuck Guilford, now retired, was an Associate Professor of English at Boise State University and coordinator of the Idaho Writers Archive for the Hemingway Western Studies Center. Return to Charles David Wright collection main page Return to Special Collections homepage For questions or comments about this page, contact Special Collections Department This page last changed: 1 October 2004
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