James Wright

Once I got over Wright's constant insistence on a very pure manner of practically Horatian craftsmanship - not to mention his predilection for over-obvious rhyming couplets that make you cringe at the sheer clanging sound - I found a succinct poet of humbleness and sublimity. Ostensibly a nature poet, he's one with fierce ties to the industrial working class, and a sense of the constant ghost of his birthtown of Martin's Ferry, Ohio that flavours his work the same way Detroit does for Philip Levine. Anyway, I'm not bloody wikipedia, I'm just saying that it's exciting to find someone new that honestly impresses me. I feel guilty, though, that I've not been able to feel as excited about any British poets for a long time, something that the recent watery mulch of the National Poetry award-winners has only served to prolong I'm sad to say.

Here's a bit of Wright's I admire from 'The Frontier':


A girl stands in a doorway.
Her arms are bare to the elbows,
Her face gray, she stares coldly
At the daybreak.
When the howl goes up, her eyes
Flare white, like a mares.


I gulped the whole stanza in one go and, as the collected inflections, meanings and associations settled, I was amazed to feel that little shiver you feel when something truly stands out for you. I don't want to analyse it for exactly that reason.

Wright's classical dedication to the sheer craft of form gave me something of a second thought. Though I always considered form essentially an archaic, sing-song affectation thrown in for sheer technical diversity in creative-writing classes, I've come to realise the difference that it can really make in the inception of a poem. Obviously no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job, as our boy TS never tires of telling us, but in composition the prosodic rhymes are essentially just replaced with semantic ones. With a free rein, it's all too easy to fall into a similar path of associations at times, and, as Thom Gunn remarked, even the act of laboriously reading out every possible permutation of a rhyme can be immensely liberating and force a change in direction or approach that the pacey ramble of free verse could never happen upon.

Wright decided never to write again, that he'd said everything he could possibly say. Then, after the emotional and spiritual vacillations of breakdown and an epiphany, he returned with This Branch Will Not Break and Shall We Gather at the River, loosening his formalist tendencies of old. But again, I am not Wikipedia. Here's a bit from the final poem, 'To the Muse', from Shall We Gather at the River where, as far as I see, there's a tender emergence of the lost loved one and a bitter candour similar to that found at the end of Bunting's 'Briggflatts'. Although the baldness of his sentiment initially rankled to one such as me - raised with the sickly veneer of postmodern, smartarse irony daubed hideously over everything - it still managed to ring clear with me somehow. I can't help but feel that in itself that's an achievement:


You come up after dark, you poise alone
With me on the shore.
I lead you back into this world.

Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don''t have to call them, they are always there.
But they only have to put the knife once
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.

It's awkward a while. Still, it lets you
Walk about on tiptoe if you don't
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube
keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you
Once. Oh Jenny.

I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy
And disastrous place. I
Didn't, I can't bear it
Either, I don't blame you, sleeping down there
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring.
Muse of black sand,
Alone.

I don't blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.