The experience of leafing front-to-back through James Wright’s Above The River: The Complete Poems unfolds like a case study in the development of free verse. Stephen Dobyns draws on Wright in his book, Best Words, Best Order: Essays On Poetry to illustrate a multitude of points in this regard. Wright’s career not only spanned the pivotal time when free verse was gaining rapid popularity, but seems to have also helped define what makes free verse compelling. In particular, it occurs to me how many of Wright’s later poems rely on elements of narrative and surprise that do not necessarily depend on the line break. In order to isolate and describe these elements, it is useful to look at his prose poems and prose excerpts. This one is particularly captivating:
On Having My Pocket Picked in Rome
These hands are desperate for me to stay alive. They do not want to lose me to the crowd. They know the slightest nudge on the wrong bone will cause me to look around and cry aloud. Therefore the hands grow cool and touch me lightly, lightly and accurately as a gypsy moth laying her larvae down in that foregone place where the tree is naked. It is only when the hands are gone, I will step out of this crowd and walk down the street, dimly aware of the dark infant strangers I carry in my own body. They spin their nests and live on me in their sleep.
The prose poem is a kind of extrapolation of many of the principles that can make a stichic (i.e. single-stanza, with line breaks) poem work well. Like the stichic poem, it often succeeds through internal tensions that build to final climax. In the case of “On Having My Pocket Picked in Rome,” much of the tension is derived from beginning the poem in the middle of the main premise–that the pickpocket is like a gypsy moth or some other form of parasite inserting its young into the victim’s body.
This premise succeeds on the strength of the metaphoric comparison, which works on many levels: the delicate work of the parasite compared to the delicate work of the pickpocket, the need to go unnoticed in both cases, the irony of both types of victims walking away unaware, and, of course, the sense of violation involved. The sense of violation involved in the literal act of having one’s pocket picked is heightened to a revolting measure by being compared to having larvae inserted into “my” body that “spin their nests and live on me in their sleep.”
In this climactic conclusion, the full strength of the metaphor is realized. By starting in the middle of this premise, the poem creates immediate tension which is simultaneously lessened as the meaning becomes more clear, and heightened as the full implications of the meaning slowly build–sentence by sentence–up to this chilling conclusion. The strength of the metaphor, and its careful unraveling throughout this prose poem, are sufficient to carry a transcendent impact–all without having to focus the reader on any unit of thought more unusual than the common sentence.
In fact, it is because the poem employs the same fundamental unit of thought as prose, and looks like an innocuous paragraph, that a further tension exists between the strangeness of the subject and the shape of the writing. In this way, we have a prose poem that realizes numerous potentials in the form while remaining unmistakably a poem, grounded in metaphor, sprinkled with internal rhyme and repetition, and building in a non-narrative fashion toward a conclusion and after-effect that transcend words.
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Reading this, I realized that Wright’s (extensive) influence on my own work was the worst thing that could have happened to me as a poet. It stopped me dead for years. I’m 56 years old & just now beginning to recover from Wright’s abject, self-congratulatory sentimentality. I am having to reinvent sincerity from scratch. I blame James Wright for the wasted years.
You sound bitter, Joe. I have often tried to make a clean break from past influences – but am now looking more seriously at the idea of culmination, cultivation, and development than some ideal notion of cutting free & becoming (suddenly) more original. So, I would suggest that maybe you don’t have to reinvent sincerity from scratch – but that your Wright-like days might be an evolutionary stage, rather than some “wasted” period. There are tactical elements (cadence, tone) independent of subject or voice (“abject, self-congratulatory sentimentality”) and the tactics that work seem to get under my skin if I read and re-read them long enough. So, the question for me has become not as much how to undo the damage as focus that rich source of raw energy in a direction I like.
A lot of fine poetry has been wrung from bitterness, Robert. I still have hope.
No moral high ground here, Joe. I’ve had my share feelings.
Robert, I think the poem of Wright’s you quote is just awful, the poet parodying his earlier voice without realizing it: “Therefore the hands grow cool and touch me lightly.” Wright was very important to me as a young man. I liked his detached way of observing his own alienation. But as he aged — though there are exceptional poems — “he became his admirers,” as Auden said of Yeats in another context. That is, he came to admire his own stance toward the world & that is poison to a poet. I’ve been reading Zbigniew Herbert recently & though I only have translations, I think Herbert & Wright are similar in many ways. Both are personal / political poets. Herbert never loses his skepticism about his own point of view. And that is the mature Wright’s main failure. That he comes to believe in his own voice.
To each his own, Joe. Perhaps I haven’t read enough Wright to consider this voice somehow a caricature of itself. I just look at it as a set piece and find the metaphor sufficiently interesting to carry it along. I suppose I wasn’t really thinking of Wright at all in the piece – just the recounting of an experience in somewhat Kafkaesque terms, which necessarily demands an authoritative presentation. No room for examining one’s own voice in such a tidy little vignette.
It seems to me, if I’m reading you right, that you detect in Wright’s poems certain aspects of his consciousness – and which you recognize in your former self – which you dislike. I can’t revise Wright’s life for him, but I do detect, articulate, and hopefully will one day appropriate certain tactical elements of his poems as valid and useful.
I am not sure if writing is a means to greater self-realization. I know other ways that work. And I know writing is a reflection of consciousness, so examining oneself carefully can lead to better writing. I just don’t know if the act of writing in itself can be expected to transform us. I have yet to write myself better – though, undoubtedly, it has helped. So, I work on my life and work on my writing. Which, on the writing side, means gleaning whatever I can from whomever I can.
I’m not sure either whether writing has anything to do with self-actualization. I’m not actually sure what self-actualization means. I think Wright maybe began as a hard-nosed existentialist with a communist (small c) social conscience, who got suckered by the idea of writing as self-actualization. See Wright’s poems, “The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio,” “Hook,” & “Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism.” I like the poems from _Two Citizens_, a book Wright came to regret as he slid into his decline, embarrassed perhaps by his own earlier social engagement. Maybe it’s just that he became middle-class & like so many folks from the working-class who rise in the world came to see his earlier engagements as suspect.
*Note:* I’ve shifted this comment out to the left margin because it seems to introduce a new movement in the discussion & because we might have indented ourselves into invisibility like the mouse’s tail / tale in _Alice in Wonderland_.
Thanks for saving us from marginalization, Joe. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
I don’t know about the specific movement away from being a working-class existential communist, but I can certainly relate to the Auden quote about Yeats. Like Auden, the grief comes from caring so much for what’s at stake; I have been most disappointed in the later work of certain poets whose early work I still admire greatly. Two that come immediately to mind are Galway Kinnell and (though it pains me even to say it) Li-Young Lee. Their most recent books wax philosophical in a somewhat generic fashion, as if all the complexity and careful choice has been loosened and distilled down into the quaint homilies their audiences crave. They’re not bad books. But compared to the earlier stuff, they come up short.
I think so much of it comes from poets now assuming the roles formerly held by priests, or philosophical teachers in ancient times. It is when poets begin to accept this task of teaching other humans about their humanity — instead of focusing on what makes for solid poetry — that, as another poet-friend also named Joe once put it, they “go soft.” Fortunately, I don’t have enough admirers to metamorphose into any of them — but I am acutely aware of this phenomenon, since I find it so upsetting to see so many great poets turn into mediocre philosophers in the twilight of their careers.
A poet who got good young & then stayed good is Hayden Carruth. His mature work is . . . mature.
Good to know.