Originally from Arkansas, C. D. Wright's earlier poems are composed of regional details and could identify her as a ‘poet of place’. However, in the 1970's while living in the Bay area, she become loosely associated with the Language poets and brought an emphasis upon not what is being signified in the poetry, but the words themselves being and having the sole responsibility of defining the worlds which they inhabit.
Now, within her most mature work, physicality meets language theory. Wright assembles with qualities from both traditions to craft poems which remind me of the assemblage techniques used in film– with short, lyrical syntactical phrases, strategically compacted for precision and heightened awareness towards what is being brought into the text, Wright’s lines enter my mind like spliced segments of film, the language lifted from superfluous padding in order to place urgent and necessary emphasis upon what is being projected.
To compose her most recent collection, Rising, Falling Hovering, Wright drew upon a number of film reels to create a body of work that is both intimately personal while equally relevant to the social and historical conditions of the past ten years. The personal includes her relationship and history with her husband, trips taken to Mexico, her son as he begins entering the adult world, a friend who is battling cancer, her own ageing and the reliance upon poetry within her daily life. Combined with these are reels of broader socio-political issues: the struggles of illegal immigrants from Mexico, capitalist globalization and its overtones of imperialism, the unresolved aftermath of Katrina and the rising, and ultimately incalculable, death count of the Iraq War.
Wright objectively bears witness to all of these events (her unavoidable subjectivity included) and allows each aspect to enter with equal significance, as if someone were carefully placing objects upon a well lit table, and is what allows a suggestion for betterment without reducing her work to heavy handed didacticism. Ultimately, Wright is well aware of the inability of poetry to enter the political world, The temperature has already been adjusted/ by the state/ Our obsolescence built into the system (91). Instead, Wright’s poetry draws the reader’s attention to the interconnected relations of her material within the world, Not so many scientists subscribe to the Gaia hypothesis./ Nor are so many rushing to refute the thousand and one levels of interdependence. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, as the Gestalt theorists put it. Further emphasis results through elliptical techniques to thread the work into a whole. Two such examples (and neither at all pleasant) being the body count in Iraq, the number rising as the book progresses, and sopa de pollo, “chicken soup”– noted at the end of the book that pollo is sometimes used for undocumented emigrants from Mexico.
Rising, Falling, Hovering is a difficult book at first, and it took me a couple reads to feel like I had a decent relationship with the text. However, once the difficulty is removed, there is an entirely unique experience awaiting for attentive and patient readers, and unlike what can be found in more traditional poetic techniques, one that is entirely human and concerned for the world while also intellectually satisfying as to how to conceptualize the world's problems and one's place within it. Wright is in many respects a ‘poet of consciousness’, and while that is a description used pejoratively by dissenters of contemporary poetry, they would find themselves at a loss to even suggest that Wright’s work is not grounded 100% upon the significance of the real world and demonstrative of how the experiments in the poetic arts over the past 30 years have paid off, in spades.
Now, within her most mature work, physicality meets language theory. Wright assembles with qualities from both traditions to craft poems which remind me of the assemblage techniques used in film– with short, lyrical syntactical phrases, strategically compacted for precision and heightened awareness towards what is being brought into the text, Wright’s lines enter my mind like spliced segments of film, the language lifted from superfluous padding in order to place urgent and necessary emphasis upon what is being projected.
To compose her most recent collection, Rising, Falling Hovering, Wright drew upon a number of film reels to create a body of work that is both intimately personal while equally relevant to the social and historical conditions of the past ten years. The personal includes her relationship and history with her husband, trips taken to Mexico, her son as he begins entering the adult world, a friend who is battling cancer, her own ageing and the reliance upon poetry within her daily life. Combined with these are reels of broader socio-political issues: the struggles of illegal immigrants from Mexico, capitalist globalization and its overtones of imperialism, the unresolved aftermath of Katrina and the rising, and ultimately incalculable, death count of the Iraq War.
Wright objectively bears witness to all of these events (her unavoidable subjectivity included) and allows each aspect to enter with equal significance, as if someone were carefully placing objects upon a well lit table, and is what allows a suggestion for betterment without reducing her work to heavy handed didacticism. Ultimately, Wright is well aware of the inability of poetry to enter the political world, The temperature has already been adjusted/ by the state/ Our obsolescence built into the system (91). Instead, Wright’s poetry draws the reader’s attention to the interconnected relations of her material within the world, Not so many scientists subscribe to the Gaia hypothesis./ Nor are so many rushing to refute the thousand and one levels of interdependence. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, as the Gestalt theorists put it. Further emphasis results through elliptical techniques to thread the work into a whole. Two such examples (and neither at all pleasant) being the body count in Iraq, the number rising as the book progresses, and sopa de pollo, “chicken soup”– noted at the end of the book that pollo is sometimes used for undocumented emigrants from Mexico.
Rising, Falling, Hovering is a difficult book at first, and it took me a couple reads to feel like I had a decent relationship with the text. However, once the difficulty is removed, there is an entirely unique experience awaiting for attentive and patient readers, and unlike what can be found in more traditional poetic techniques, one that is entirely human and concerned for the world while also intellectually satisfying as to how to conceptualize the world's problems and one's place within it. Wright is in many respects a ‘poet of consciousness’, and while that is a description used pejoratively by dissenters of contemporary poetry, they would find themselves at a loss to even suggest that Wright’s work is not grounded 100% upon the significance of the real world and demonstrative of how the experiments in the poetic arts over the past 30 years have paid off, in spades.
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