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"A Crowd of Solitudes":
The Social Poetry of James Wright

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“A CROWD OF SOLITUDES”:
THE SOCIAL POETRY OF JAMES WRIGHT

BY
Raphael J. Schulte

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1992

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ABSTRACT

“A CROWD OF SOLITUDES“:
THE SOCIAL POETRY OF JAMES WRIGHT

BY
Raphael J. Schulte

This dissertation explores the relations between James
Wright's poetic practices and forces of contemporary culture
during the three decades between 1949 and 1980. It begins
with two theoretical assumptions: Wright's poetry and
critical writings strained against the New Critical model
common during the fifties, and the Frankfort School's
paradigms of cultural studies, particularly those of Theodor
Adorno and Walter Benjamin, provide a useful approach to his
poetry and its contexts. This study examines the presence
and effects of the dominant American culture, and such
cultural institutions as universities and creative writing
programs, on the content and form of his uncollected and
collected poems.

This dissertation consists of an introduction, five
chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction asserts the
value of a cultural criticism of Wright's poetry, including
those texts he published in magazines, journals, newspapers,
and anthologies but did not include in his individual
volumes of poetry. Chapter one presents key concepts of
individuals associated with the Frankfurt School and
establishes correspondences between their theoretical

framework and Wright's lyric praxis, while chapter two

utizes in detai;
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examines in detail two representative texts, a formal poem
and a free verse poem, whose content and techniques are
informed by contemporary culture. The limitations inherent
in Wright's poetics are discussed in chapter three: while
the anti-rational impulse of Deep Image poetry is a source
of cultural criticism, it risks withdrawing into self; the
poetics of authenticity, though problematically privileging
personal, "transparent“ communication over public
discourses, can convey social engagement. Wright's repro-
duction and resistance to the dominant culture through his
work as a literature professor and the social models
suggested by his student-teacher relations are addressed in
chapter four. Chapter five examines ways his involvement in
creative writing programs and active participation in the
literary marketplace undercut the effectiveness of the
implicit social criticism in his poems. The conclusion
briefly suggests a context for evaluating Wright's collected
and uncollected works in light of his cultural resistance

and complicity.

Copyright by
RAPHAEL JOHN SCHULTE
1992

 

 

To the 1

To the memory of Phyllis and Cletus Schulte

 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I think back on the beginnings of this study, I
have to consider not only the many people I have directly
worked with during the last three years, as the actual
research and writing were undertaken, but also those people
who influenced me when the only poems I was familiar with
were nursery rhymes: my parents, my older brothers Mike and
Tony, and my sisters Ann, Peg, and Jane.

As important and influential as those early comments
and encouragements were, it would be unscrupulous of me not
to address those individuals most directly and immediately
involved in the day-to-day details of this project. I am
thinking especially of Jim Zimmer who, besides providing
emotional support, read innumerable drafts of chapters and
edited the penultimate copy. I would also like to thank
John Piller for his continuing interest in Wright's poems
and his honest critique of many half-baked ideas; his
friendship and scholarship offer a paradigm for academic
discussion and candor. My appreciation also extends to Paul
and Sherry Liang, Cindy Fredrick, Larry Jensen, Jack Sun,

Liqian Lynn, and Allison Alison for their friendship and

vi

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encouragement as I muddled through the many details of this

endeavor.

Completion of this study would have been impossible
without the help of Lorraine Hart in the Department of
English; the ways she contributed to its final shape and the
circumstances surrounding its production properly deserve
more notice than I can express here. Similarly, Andrea
Zoelle and Sarah Vodicka at the Des Plaines Valley Public
Library, together with Barb Wilson who worked with the Burr
Oak Library System, came to my rescue many times, locating
primary and secondary materials, sometimes with only
incomplete citations and even less time. I also want to
acknowledge the valued friendship and help provided by Mike
McSeoin in the Document Delivery Service of the Michigan
State University Libraries, as well as the generous
assistance from Peter Berg in Special Collections. Gary
Lundell, in his indubitably friendly manner, located various
manuscripts and papers housed in the University of
Washington Archives, and Brian Abbott at Serendipity Books
in Berkeley helped in my quest for primary sources.

Finally, and most immediately, I need to thank the four
members of my dissertation committee: they have born with my
demands and many infringements upon their time. Dr. R. K.
Meiners, my director, patiently assisted me during the
various crises in the evolution of this project. He

introduced a wealth of views concerning twentieth century

vii

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poetry and critical theory, and he demonstrated a logic,
intellectual rigor, and passion that I continue to learn
from and aspire to. Dr. Douglas Peterson's knowledge of the
history of the lyric has shaped my understanding of poetry,
and his comments about his personal relationship with Wright
and other contemporary poets were both insightful and
enjoyable. Dr. Marcia Aldrich, besides bolstering my work
by her own commitment to postmodern poetry, graciously read
drafts of this study, suggested revisions, and introduced me
to new poetries and critical views. Finally, Professor
Douglas Lawder, whose conversations about James Wright were
always stimulating, shared information about his relations
with Wright and provided a sounding board as I attempted to
articulate my point of view, even when I only dimly
perceived that view. Needless to say, this dissertation
would have been quite different without the direction and

encouragement of these four scholars and teachers.

viii

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Cultural Criticism and Wright's Poetry:
The Collected and Uncollected Poems... ......... . ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE
Wright and the Frankfurt School:
”Implicit Subversiveness“ in Poetry and Theory ....... 11

CHAPTER TWO
Lyric Praxis as Resistance ......... . ......... . ....... 52

CHAPTER THREE
The Oppositional Limits of Deep Imagery and
the Poetics Of AuthentiCitYO O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 84

CHAPTER FOUR
A Rear-guard Defense of
the Institutionalization of Poetry... ....... . ....... 123

CHAPTER FIVE
Wright's Economic Connections with
Official Verse Culture......... ................... ..171

CONCLUSION
Toward an Evaluation of Wright's
Cultural Complicity and Resistance..................227

BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................... ...... .243

ix

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INTRODUCTION

CULTURAL CRITICISM AND WRIGNT'S POETRT:
THE COLLECTED AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS

I said at one point that there can't be a
good poetry without a good criticism. I did not
mean that there has to be a great body of formal
criticism in print. I meant that a person who is
writing and reading is going to be able to write
better and more truly if he tries to think about
language, if he tries to imagine what his own
writing is going to look like and smell like and
sound like to an intelligent person of good will.

James Wright1

Having argued at length in favor of critical
irreverence, I find myself in the somewhat comical
position of inviting my reader to look upon my
interpretation of the text as irreverently as he
can. Anyway, I hereby so invite him.

James Wright2

In the biographical sketch "Fragments from a Journey,“
Anne Wright briefly narrates a trip she and her husband made
to the Protestant cemetery where Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and Walter Savage Landor are buried. After arriving and
ringing a bell at the entrance gate, the couple followed a
large ambling woman—~notable for her disheveled hair,
chipped teeth, dirty glasses, and stained dress--to the
guest book. The woman, speaking with barely subdued
emotion, allowed James and Anne Wright to sign the registry,

1

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and--after more discussion--she showed them the graves they
had come to see; Anne Wright notes, “James...already
whispered to me that she seem[ed] half crazy“ (36). The
gatekeeper, musing that visitors frequently ask if she is
afraid of the dead, “gesture[d] to the graves. She [wa]s
not afraid of them. She [wa]s afraid of those out there.
She wave[d] her hand to the traffic in the street, the ugly
blocks of flats which surround[ed] us“ (36). The living
frightened her much more than the dead.

This odd tale should not be surprising: it seems
appropriate that James Wright would encounter, while paying
homage to two poets he respected, a half-crazed woman
frightened by society and contemporary culture. His poetry
often foregrounds the contradictions and struggles which
individuals, including the poet himself, experience in an
advanced industrial society. This cemetery attendant,
situated between the living and the dead, presents yet
another example of a person isolated by and fearful of the
dominant culture. Her life amid the “crowd of solitudes,“ a
phrase taken from Wright's uncollected poem “Heritage” (unc
1964), is a text he might have written; and she could be,
with her frightful knowledge of this culture, his most
insightful critic.3

Since his own death on 25 March 1980, Wright and his
poetry have been the focus of much critical “looking,”

“smelling,” and ”sounding"; the recently published James

 

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Wright: The Heart of the Light, edited by Peter Stitt and

Frank Graziano, contains an eleven-page selected
bibliography of critical materials, including reviews,
essays, and chapters from books completed after Wright's
death, as well as two full-length studies, two collections
of essays, and two volumes of reminiscences and memoirs (an
earlier collection of essays, gathered in a special issue of
Ironwood devoted exclusively to Wright, was completed before
his death). With the publication of Above the River: The
Complete Poems in 1990, additional essays, reviews, and
monographic studies continue to be generated, including
another book devoted exclusively to Wright's work, Andrew
Elkins's The Poetry of James Wright.

Amidst this growing body of criticism scant attention
has been paid to the poems and translations Wright published
in various journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers
but was unable or unwilling to include in his stylistically
and thematically organized books. These uncollected poems
span the length of his career--the earliest were printed
eight years before the publication of his first book, Th;
Q;ggg_flgll, while the last were published several months
after his death--and are a significant part of his oeuvre.
AQgyg_thg_R;yg;;_2hg_§gmplgtg_gggmg contains 380 poems and
translations, while I have--to date--located and gathered
together approximately 200 previously published works which

have yet to be republished. Now, twelve years after

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certainty-us.

ttrselves and a‘ ‘

4
Wright's death, a reader examining Wright's books of poetry
in conjunction with his uncollected individual poems can
begin to critically assess his entire output.‘

My decision to discuss in the following chapters
examples of Wright's uncollected texts together with his
collected poems has been informed by the necessity of moving
away from Wright's own judgements and intentions concerning
these poems--realizing we can never know those intentions
with certainty——as well as the obligation of freeing
ourselves and all of Wright's texts from his criteria for

poetic evaluation.S

My motivations, moreover, are also
shaped by concern for our cultural memory and the repressive'
quality of ideological apparatuses. Cary Nelson has
observed,
Literary history should continually question the
institutional memory of the discipline. It should
resist acquiescing in the loss of any portion of
our heritage. And it needs continually to ask a
series of questions: What have we entirely
forgotten and why? How has the selectivity of our
literary memory facilitated and inhibited (and
been directed by) our development as a culture?

How might both the present and the future be

altered if we rediscover the literature we have

lost? (Repression 51)

 

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Nelson's questions provide valuable sources of entry into
Wright's texts. In the following chapters I will attempt to
examine the ways in which Wright's poems, both the collected
and uncollected texts, address important issues concerning
the effects of the dominant culture on individual lives and
poetic texts. I will also explore how Wright's texts resist
as well as participate in the dehumanization and inequities
of that culture. Nelson indicates that the very act of
forgetting is not without motive, "...no texts are merely
erased from our memory in a neutral and nonideological
fashion. There are no innocent, undetermined lapses of
cultural memory“ (52). Because Wright's texts, as I shall
demonstrate, confront and offer resistance against dominant
ideologies, they can easily be “forgotten“ and omitted from
our cultural memory; the suppression of oppositional views
is, after all, a chief function of ideological filters. It
is my belief, then, that recovering and discussing these
uncollected texts in conjunction with the texts gathered in
Above the River is not only a literary endeavor but also
cultural and political work that can have an impact upon
individuals and, in a more general view, on literary
culture. Because of the impossibility of separating these
“literary“ and ”cultural" functions, the following chapters
will specifically address the literary characteristics of
Wright's collected and uncollected texts as the site of

their cultural and political work. Before such an

excitation of
recovered poez:
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6

examination of the texts is possible, however, these
recovered poems must be re-situated within the body of
Wright's work and his historical context. These texts can
now, almost forty years since Wright began publishing, be
judged by different and possibly even more severe standards
than he established and that critics during the 608 and 70s
applied. With this in mind, I would like to examine
Wright's collected and uncollected poems by “looking,”
“smelling,“ and “sounding” them out in their own right, as
well as considering them in relation to his publication
practices and the historical context in which he lived,
wrote, and published. This critical endeavor, though, may
not in itself be enough. As Pierre Macherey notes,
'Allegorically, criticism uses ears and eyes: the inaudible
must not escape the gaze“ (96). Because literary texts
contain richly suggestive silences and absences, we must
also attend to those voices, ideas and values which Wright's
poems manifest but do not (and cannot) directly communicate.
We need to address the ideological structures which inform
those gaps and restrict what Wright expresses, or--as Terry
Eagleton observes,

The task of criticism...is to install itself in

the very incompleteness of the work in order to

thggrigg it--to explain the ideological necessity

of those ‘ggt;gaigg' which constitute the very

principle of its identity. Its object is the

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7
ugconsgiousness of the work--that of which it is
not, and cannot be, aware. (89; Eagleton's
emphasis)

By examining Wright's poems within their socio-historical

context and foregrounding their inherent ideological

structures, we can confront the contradictions between
history and ideology which these texts evidence.

Rather than offer a generalized overview of Wright's
recovered poems and the texts in Above the River,6 I*will
discuss the structure and content of those poems which
present what I see as Wright's major contribution to the
postmodern lyric: his ambivalent relationship to the
advanced industrial society and dominant American culture
during the three decades between 1949 and 1980.7
Countering the sentimentalization of bums, hoboes, and
outcasts evident in much Wright criticism, I will examine in
the following chapters the presence and effects of the
dominant culture--including such cultural institutions as
universities and creative writing programs-«on Wright's
poetry, and I will pursue his textual resistance and
economic complicity with those cultural forces.

After briefly stating in chapter one several key
concepts of individuals associated with the Frankfurt School
and exploring ways in which their theoretical framework is
especially applicable to Wright's work, I discuss in chapter

two several of his poems which generate resistance to

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8
elements of late capitalism and contemporary American
culture. Chapter three, while exploring the limits inherent
in Wright's poetics, examines how these limitations restrict
the oppositional potential of his lyric praxis. Chapter
four discusses Wright's reproduction and perpetuation of the
dominant culture through his work as a literature professor
and suggests the opportunities for resistance which that
teaching position offered. Chapter five explores his
involvement with creative writing programs and the economics
of publication, examining ways in which his active
participation in the literary marketplace undercuts the
effectiveness of the implicit cultural criticism in his
poems. In the conclusion I briefly suggest a context for
evaluating Wright's collected and uncollected works in light
of his cultural resistance and complicity. His poems, like
that half-crazed woman tending the cemetery, try to withdraw
from industrial society but remain entombed, nonetheless,
within contemporary culture and that social totality which
institutionalizes the production, dissemination, and

interpretation of poetic texts, including his own.

1. This epigr pr.
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Notes

1. This epigraph is taken from Dave Smith's interview with
Wright on 30 September 1979 (210). Hereafter, all
references to this interview will be identified within the
text as DS.

2. This quotation is taken from Wright's unpublished
dissertation, “The Comic Imagination of the Young Dickens"
(49), submitted to the University of Washington in March
1959. In a 25 June 1958 letter to his dissertation
director, Wayne Burns, Wright introduces his term “critical
irreverence“ by stating that the first chapter of his
dissertation is ”a long and careful (though at the same
time, curiously, it is wild) argument in favor of what I am
calling Critical Irreverence, and an explanation of my idea
that...a critic ought to be irreverent toward his text and
toward other critics...“ (58).

3. For the past several years I have been engaged in the
process of recovering and annotating Wright's uncollected
poems and translations. Throughout this dissertation I will
frequently refer to those uncollected texts which Wright
published but did not include in his individual volumes of
poetry or translations, texts which have subsequently not
been included in his Collected Poems and Above the River:
The Complete Poems. Citations for these previously
uncollected texts will be provided within parentheses after
each title: following the abbreviation “unc” I will provide
the year of the text's publication, unless otherwise
indicated. I will parenthetically provide citations for
other Wright poems by providing their page numbers in Above
the River. This deviation from standard methods of
documentation will more readily differentiate between these
recovered poems and Wright's other published texts.

4. It is important to note, however, that not all of
Wright's translations are included in Above the River: for
example, many selections from his two volumes of works by
Hermann Hesse, Poems and Wanderin , are excluded, as is his
translation of Theodor Storm's The Rider on the White Horse.
I have not included these translations among the uncollected
texts that I am gathering since they have already been
collected in their respective publications.

 

5. In the second epigraph above, Wright himself encourages
this critical freedom. It is important to note that he
often showed a remarkable critical detachment, humility, and
severity about his own writing. In his comments about the
poem “Uncle Willy,” he observes, for example, that he
“reread the Uncle Willie [sic] poem. It doesn't seem like

9

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10

much to me now. Reader, if you and I felt like puking all
over each other with boredom before we both sank into
terminal catatonia, I could easily name you a list of at
least five hundred other persons who could have written it
or something very like it. It's not a bad poem, It's not a
good poem. What is it, actually? It's a conventional
exercise in modish free verse or what the hell this week's
cant word may be..." (“Knott” 321-2).

6. Good book-length overviews of Wright's career are already
available: see David C. Dougherty's Jame§AWrighg, Kevin
Stein's James Wright The Poetrv of a Grown Man, and Andrew
Elkins's The Poetry of James Wright. These books discuss
the evolution and continuity of Wright's work by examining
each of his volumes individually. A number of valuable
essays, including Stitt's "The Poetry of James Wright” and
“James Wright: The Quest for Home,” do the same.

7. I am aware of the problems inherent in terms like
“dominant culture“ and “hegemony” which imply the presence
of homogeneity and clearly defined monoliths; I could use
Ron Silliman's phrase ”ensembles of value” (172), but its
cumbersomeness does little to alleviate the original
problem. I do, however, follow Ernest Mandel's
chronological understanding of "late capitalism“: "The era
of late capitalism is not a new epoch of capitalistic
development. It is merely a further development of the
imperialist, monopoly-capitalist epoch” (9). I also adhere
to Morris Janowitz's characterization of "advanced
industrial society“: ”The changes in political
participation, social stratification, and military
participation represent long-term trends in the shift from
an industrial to an advanced industrial society. While it
is appropriate to stress the continuity in these trends,
their results accumulate into a threshold of societal
transformation” (546-7).

HUGHPAID THEr
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L the rea‘

CHAPTER ONE

WRIGHT AND TEE FRANKFURT SCHOOL: "INPLICIT SUEVERSIVENESS"
IN POETRY AND TEEOR!

Far back in the angelic choir a slightly smaller
angel has folded his wings. He has turned
slightly away from the light and lifted his hands.
You cannot even see his face. I don't know why he
is weeping. But I love him best.

”The Lambs on the Boulder" (270)

If great poetry means anything, anything at all,
it means disturbance, secret disturbance, that can
be disposed of in public, as the pharmacists's
delivery of prescription disposes of lonely
midnight daydreams. But that cannot be so

easily disposed of privately, as the insomniac
discovers that the soporific provides him with
sleep only to follow the hand of sleep into a land
of secret wakening, nightmare, or enough to be
miserable; but to be happy, how far beyond shock
it is.... [T]he poetry I want should deal with
the hell of our lives or else it leaves me cold.1

In the late 40s, when the first of Wright's poems were
published, he had returned from an army tour with the
occupational troops in Japan and was beginning-~with federal
assistance from the new GI Bill (Defense 30)--his
undergraduate education at Kenyon College. Though the war
seemed Victoriously behind him and the rest of the country,
in many ways its presence lingered (and still continues to
do so): the realities of the Holocaust and Hiroshima did not

11

singly dissipate

 

as a nenber of

v’: ‘ ‘: '
1‘34" '38 'C

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6.2.”. Elle BZOZLC I

.l.ilized ran, a:
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with a violent c

evident in 90ers

 

carpenter: 1966 '

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5‘.

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egins

12
simply dissipate for him. Alan Williamson refers to Wright
as a member of the “middle generation of contemporary poets“
(65), “the first generation to confront concentration camps
and the atomic bomb, the fully revealed destructiveness of
civilized man, while still growing up, before private values
had had a chance to solidify“ (67). It is this engagement
with a violent culture--and a different war--that becomes
evident in poems like “A Mad Fight Song for William S.
Carpenter, 1966“ (183) which probe the atrocity of "war
games“ during this century of war: “...terrified young men /
Quick on their feet / Lob one another's skulls."

In this poem William Carpenter's decision to drop
napalm on his own troops is posited within the context of an
athletic contest (“At the edges of southeast Asia this
afternoon / The quarterbacks and the lines are beginning to
fall”) which has gone “mad.“ Wright suggests in another
text-~the uncollected poem “A Reply to the Post Office“ (unc
1961)-—that these war games, as advertised through the
postal service, are a government sponsored slaughter,
cloaked in false gleefulness. The enlistment fliers that
arrive in the mail entice citizens to join in the war
effort--'singing' even--and share in the suicide and murder.
The poem begins with the epigraph "Take me to Rice Bros. to
be slaughtered (spoken by a cow on a billboard)" and

concludes:

And t:
And :1

Canine

 

 

 

 

 

719 barbarisztnb

21‘3“? Policie

bil‘ .
macs! the

‘3‘ ‘
i d; gangs, ew

13

I cannot climb

The trellises of their prayers,

And I turn away

From the enlistment poster's hands,

And the startling red mouth of our President,

And the pure white

Canines of love.
The barbarism--bordering on cannibalism--of war and the
military policies of the American government in the early
60s are themselves under attack in Wright's text. He sees
that barbarity as it is domesticated and promoted in
billboards, the mail, and even relations with "my friends
and neighbors” and the “kind mothers.“ Wright's emphatic
response to the poster's invitation is expressed in the one-
word stanza: “No.“ He wants to distance himself from those
fatal games, even as their domestication creeps closer and
closer to him.

His poetics, though constantly changing during his
career, were consistently informed by this century of war
and crisis, and he frequently reveals how that violence has
pervaded daily life. His poem “As I Step over a Puddle at
the End of Winter, I think of an Ancient Chinese Governor“
(119) conflates contemporary life in the Twin Cities with
war-torn ancient China:

But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,

And the tall rocks of Minneapolis

 

Build

Where

Wtere

0‘ 1
Tie 'wars' 335;
internal 53:“.

whose Values !

governor, Wr:

the rapids I

an active en;

'Mi‘rical

social Cri t i

indiv id‘s. a; 5
mt;

can a1'30 be

14

Build me my own black twilight

Of bamboo ropes and waters.

Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?

Where is the sea that once solved the whole

loneliness

Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis?
The “wars“ and exile Wright confronts in Minneapolis are the
internal struggles and isolation he experiences in a society
whose values he cannot accept. Like Po Chu-i, that ancient
governor, Wright feels the need to escape and be “towed up
the rapids / Toward some political job or other.“. For him,
an active engagement with a social poetics is itself a
"political job“ and a public function; it is an act of
social criticism which identifies the effects upon
individuals of the ongoing cultural violence.

This lingering presence of war that informs his poetics
can also be found in his critical writings. Comments about
World War I are included in his uncollected review (written
while he was an undergraduate, fresh from war-ravaged Japan)
of The Poems of Wilfred‘Owen. Similarly, while reflecting
on Rene Char's war diary, ngygg_gf_§ypggg, Wright was
prompted to observe, “Behind the delighted suicide of our
wars lies our terror at reality“ (“Meditations' 68). Just
as his poetics entail social criticism, his essays
demonstrate an awareness of writers who combined public and

artistic lives. His foreword to Storm's The Rider 0 the

15

White gorse, for example, expresses admiration for “Theodor
Storm, one of the finest German lyric poets of the
nineteenth century, [who] returned to his home and
effortlessly assumed powers of great civic importance“ (x).
Storm, like Po Chu-i, embodies an ideal: he was a politician
and person of letters simultaneously addressing the
political and literary needs of his community.

Wright's response to contemporary culture in poems like
“As I Step Over a Puddle...” (119), "A Mad Fight Song..."
(183), “The Undermining of the Defense Economy" (131),
“Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959“ (129), and others was
based, in part, on this society's ongoing engagement in
military, economic, and social destruction of individual
lives both abroad and at home. The United States survived
World War II politically and economically intact, emerging
as the preeminent international power; but that status in
the world marketplace was almost immediately challenged, and
attempts to maintain it led to a continuous cycle of massive
military build-ups.z The three decades during which Wright
actively wrote are notable for their seemingly endless
series of crises: the Cold War, the Red Scare, the Korean
Conflict, the Cuban Crisis, and the Vietnam War.’ Walter
Kalaidjian offers an appropriately excruciating and lengthy
litany of the international tensions during those years, a

period characterized by

16
foreign adventurism, unprecedented defense
spending and weapons production, and a pervasive
national atmosphere of fear and paranoia. In
1948, the year the Soviet Union blockaded West
Berlin, it also annexed Czechoslovakia through
staging a government coup. Two years later North
Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel,
invading South Korea and eventually leading to the
United States' mobilization for possible war with
the People's Republic of China. Meanwhile, the
Eisenhower administration orchestrated its own
CIA-backed military coup in Guatemala,
overthrowing the land reform policies of Jacobo
Arbenz Guzman in 1954 and installing the pro-
American Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. In 1956,
Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary, at a time when
British, French, and Israeli forces were invading
Egypt during the Suez crisis. In 1959 Fidel
Castro overthrew the Batista dictatorship in Cuba,
to which the United States responded with its 1961
Bay of Pigs misadventure. That same year American
advisers were deployed in South Vietnam. (7-8)
This list of crises--though overwhelming--is not
comprehensive; Kalaidjian adds other alarming incidents: the
Soviet Union's test of a nuclear device in 1949, China's own

first nuclear detonation in 1964, the decision by President

l7
Truman in 1950 to build the hydrogen bomb, the massive
retaliation doctrine of Secretary of State Dulles in 1954,
and the nuclear alerts during the 1960 U-2 incident and
again in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis (8).

The postwar era also included Senator Joseph McCarthy's
warnings in 1950 to President Truman about communist
infiltration of the State Department; the anti-apartheid
strikes in Johannesburg in 1950; the 1953 death sentences
imposed on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for selling military
secrets; the 1954 Supreme Court ruling which outlawed
segregation by color in public schools; the Montgomery city
bus boycotts in 1955; the building of the Berlin Wall in
1961; the 1963 arrest of Martin Luther King in Birmingham
and the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas; the
1968 riots by students and workers in Paris; the anti-war
protests in various American cities and on university
campuses in 1969; and the worsening violence in Northern
Ireland in 1971. Lists, like this one, of twentieth century
upheavals cannot, of course, be exhaustive and accurately
recreate a writer's historical context; even more
importantly, they cannot even begin to assess the impact and
sustained repercussions of these events on the daily actions
and thoughts of countless individual lives.

As we will see in poems like “Mercy“ (unc 1957),
“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio“ (121) and “Heritage”

(unc 1964), this tumultuous political and social climate in

18
which Wright wrote--though alarming to consider--is seldom
directly and personally encountered in his texts. Even
poems like “As I Step over a Puddle...“ (119) which make
strong political and social statements, do not overtly
address the crises of this century. A notable exception to
this restraint exists in the student workbook Wright
submitted to his teacher, Theodore Roethke, at the end of a
poetry workshop during Spring Quarter 1954. One short,
unpublished, Swiftian poem from that workbook, though not
(by any stretch of the imagination) a subtle, rich, or
complex text, is significant nonetheless because it presents
an example of Wright attempting social satire and
politically committed poetry. The poem exemplifies a bold
engagement, that Wright did not often match, with
contemporary history and society; and it is possibly even
enhanced by its clumsy Augustan devices and iconoclastic
humor. The indecorous text, entitled “A Scatological Wish
Occasioned by the Current Senate Hearings: Being an
Excellent New Song,“ probes (from Wright's “safe“ position
within the Department of English at the University of
Washington) the Red Scare.‘

Written while Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt was
being covered by national television--only to end with the
Senate censure of McCarthy-—the poem presents a farcical
response to the rumors of communist infiltration of

military, governmental, and university personnel across the

PA".
bit“

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one

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19

country. It audaciously provides an indirect and semi-
public response to the denial of employment and the
dismissal from university positions of those academics
considered to be communists, a policy which was--as
Kalaidjian observes--“vigorously endorsed in 1953 by the
Association of American Universities, the National Education
Association, and the American Federation of Teachers“ (38).

Rather than withdrawing from historical and social
considerations, Wright produced a committed poem which
(unsuccessfully) confronts political issues headlong. His
engagement with the social functioning of poetry--as opposed
to narcissistic and solipsistic lyrics which deliberately
turn away from the social arena-~is apparent even in this
early text. At the same time, though, its failed
confrontation anticipates his later realization that poetry,
in order to create “disturbances,“ does not have to be
directly political or overtly address headline news. In his
1956 essay on Rene Char, published when he was a graduate
student, Wright notes, for example, that Char's “political
attack, as far as his poetry is concerned, is, like that of
any good writer, an attack on triteness, on the clotting of
the mind by outworn language" (67). Similarly in his 1964
foreword to Ihg_gigg;_gg_§hg_flhi§g_flg;§§, Wright observes
about Theodor Storm, “His public life and art are obviously
related, and yet the second cannot be understood simply as a

direct expression of the first. His art had its own formal

Ffi'fiu
“My.“

C
“:
hm
Eng.
§‘~;c
6'
s.
“A
Mr

20
tradition...“ (xii). Wright recognizes, even before the
publication of his first book, the complex and nebulous
relations between poetry and politics; and he asserts that
the political impact of a text can be expressed in its very
language and technical elements. Based upon these
realizations, he discarded his early bombastic attempt in
texts like “A Scatological Wish....“ to conflate poetic,
political, and social considerations. He pursued, instead,
a possibly more forceful and social poetic that, as we shall.
see in greater detail in the following chapter, frequently--
though usually indirectly--critigues American political,
economic, and social conditions.

I am going to argue in this study that as an alterna-
tive to more customary models of literary history which have
prevailed until recently and which certainly dominated
graduate literary education when Wright undertook his
studies, the Frankfort School's paradigms of cultural
studies offer a useful approach to Wright's writing and its
contexts. It may seem jarring to be reading Wright in light
of a group of German philosophers, literary critics, social
psychologists, political theorists, sociologists, and
cultural critics; but because his poetic and critical
writings strained against the literary historical/New
Critical model common in 508 graduate schools, the work of
the Frankfort School provides an alternative model for

approaching Wright's texts. It may also be interesting to

III
1"

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FA.
5'!“

3e:
§

21
note that immediately prior to Wright's entrance to Kenyon
College and studies with the New Critic John Crowe Ransom,
the Kenyon Review (as edited by Ransom) published essays by
Theodor Adorno in both the Autumn 1945 and the Spring 1947
issues. Though Wright's critical and aesthetic ideas may
not have been directly informed by Western Marxism, I
suspect he was not a stranger to those views. As Wayne
Burns--the director of Wright's dissertation at the
University of Washington--notes, the Department of English
contained a number of individuals familiar with Marxist
perspectives:
[O]f the six or seven Communists or former
Communists (numbers and exact affiliations weren't
too clear) the Canwell Committee had presumably
identified, something like four or five had been
or still were in the English department at the
University of Washington. A surprising number,
considering the size of the English department in
relation to the rest of the University, and one
which further convinced me that Washington might
be the place for me--not because of my own Marxist
background, or at least not primarily because of
that, but rather because a department which could
include that many Marxists, along with Porter
Perrin, must be a wide-open department indeed.

(65-6)

22

Those texts by Wright which confront postwar American
culture can profit by being read and considered in light of
Frankfort School paradigms, including Walter Benjamin's
perverse “angel of history" with its outstretched wings
entangled in the approaching storm of “progress“ ("Theses"
257-8).S Wright's texts explore the contradictions and
tensions manifest in the advanced industrial society of the
United States during the second half of the twentieth
century, and those texts themselves--like Benjamin's angel-—.
become caught in the storm of cultural “progress" and
history. As Wright observes in the first epigraph to this
chapter, his angel of progress is sad and withdrawn from the
community, and in “A Prayer to the Lord Ramakrishna“ (167)
that angel is physically pained and displaced: "On the
window sill, I lean / My bare elbows. / One blue wing, torn
whole out of heaven, / Soaks in the black rain.“ Like the
gatekeeper at Browning and Landor's cemetery, he is torn
between two worlds; try though he may, he cannot escape the
“black rain“ of this society.

Just as Benjamin's angel of history wants to return to
paradise, Wright desires to be raised up—-as he observes in
“The Minneapolis Poem" (167)--”By some great white bird
unknown to the police, / And soar for a thousand miles and
be carefully hidden / Modest and golden as one last corn
grain.“ He is entangled, though. Realizing he cannot flee

the wreckage, his poems scream out in witness to its effects

23

upon him and society; he is--to borrow words from Benjamin
again--'a messenger who rushes toward us crying aloud, his
hair on end, brandishing a sheet of paper in his hands, a
sheet full of war and pestilence, of cries of murder and
pain, of danger from fire and flood, spreading everywhere
the ‘latest news'” (“Karl Kraus“ 238). Wright's latest
“news which stays news“--to mangle Ezra Pound's definition
of poetry--concerns ways in which we, like that angel and
the woman tending the cemetery, try to flee this industrial
“progress“ but remain entombed within contemporary culture:

There they are now, ~

The wings,

And I heard them beginning to starve

Between two cold white shadows,

But I dreamed they would rise

Together,

My black Ohioan swan.

Here, carry his splintered bones

Slowly, slowly

Back into the

Tar and chemical strangled tomb,

The strange water, the

Ohio River, that is no tomb to

II

‘9:

O.

.A
5V

.
'-
«a

24
Rise from the dead
from.
“Three Sentences for a Dead Swan“ (163)

Wright's texts frequently foreground this escapist impulse
to rise like a bird or an angel above the social wreckage,
and they express a frustrated desire for transcendence. In
texts like "A Poem Written Under an Archway in a
Discontinued Railroad Station, Fargo, North Dakota" (159),
he yearns to situate himself ”Outside the great clanging
cathedrals of rust and smoke.“ His efforts, of course,
fail. Even as he says, “I am leaving,“ that combination of
”rust and smoke” follows him “across the street,“ into "the
parking lot,“ and ultimately even into his old age.

In the justly famous ”A Blessing“ (143) this escapist
impulse is evident in a different form: Wright eagerly
removes himself not only from human relationships but also
human constructs, including literally a highway (“Just off
the highway“). The poet attempts to retreat into nature and
transcend human bounds: he “step[s] over the barbed wire
into the pasture“ to experience the love and loneliness of
two ponies. In the often quoted final lines, he seeks
escape from his own humanity and physicality: "Suddenly I
realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break /
Into blossom.“ At the same time that he is desirous of

transcendence, the penultimate line ending asserts that this

2629;

I
V'a’fi'
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.“ be

I ‘k
Q. “
4,; ‘.
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25
metamorphosis “would break“ him by severing him from those
very social and human elements which define and produce him.
These issues which Wright addresses regarding the
relationship between individuals, society and nature as well
as culture, domination and repression also concerned
twentieth century thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse; the poetic work Wright began
in the late 408 can be illuminated and explored in light of
the insights and methodologies of the members of this so-
called ”Frankfurt School,” especially Adorno and Benjamin,
who wrote during approximately the same period as Wright.6
In the forward to a collection of his essays, Marcuse
identifies issues which were central to the Frankfurt
School, the same issues that Wright and poets from his
generation confronted-~and sometimes scurried away from--in
their own writings:
What precisely has gone wrong in Western
civilization, that at the very height of technical
progress we see the negation of human progress:
dehumanization, brutalization, revival of torture
as a “normal“ means of interrogation, the
destructive development of nuclear energy, the
poisoning of the biosphere and so on? How has
this happened? (i)
Wright, like the individuals associated with the Institute

for Social Research, critically examines the social,

afb

U!

Q.

.h.‘

Rh

26

economic and political conditions evident in postwar
capitalism which cause this “dehumanization“: he, like them,
addresses labor relations, the commodification of cultural
objects, the social effects of industrialization, and--among
other issues--the contradictions inherent in capitalist
ideologies.7

In the following chapters my discussion of Wright's
relations with the dominant culture, including its
educational institutions, has been informed by Adorno's
discussions about the relationship between art and society

in “On Lyric Poetry and Society"3 and Aesthetic Theor , as

well as Walter Benjamin's Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet in
the Era of High Capitalism.9

(originally a radio lecture) Adorno postulates that even

In his essay on poetry

lyric poetry, often considered the most subjective of
literary genres, is socially mediated and expresses social
tendencies: autonomous art is a cultural product itself and
expresses knowledge and critical insights.' Social and
historical conditions are inscribed within poems, empowering
those poetic texts to reveal within their very structure the
contradictions inherent in contemporary western cultures and
the prevailing social totality. Far from reading the texts
as sociological or philosophical data, Adorno bases his
critical views on close reading and attention to the

literary forms, structures, rhythm, and rhymes of particular

1

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27
poems by Stefan George, Eduard Morike, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

“On Lyric Poetry and Society“ provides an accessible
introduction to the more developed and labyrinthine complex
of views paratactically expressed in Aesthetic Theory.‘1O
Among the many ideas explored in that volume, I am primarily
concerned with the tenets Adorno advances about those areas
where politics, society, and art come together. An emphasis
upon socio-historical contexts informs his understanding of
artistic production and reception. True art, because of its
social nature, is oppositional. He observes, for example,
that art ”is not social only because it is brought about in
such a way that it embodies the dialectic of forces and
relations of production. Nor is art social only because it
derives its material content from society. Rather, it is
social primarily because it stands opposed to society" (AT
321).11

For Adorno, society is manifest in art works by the
very artistic techniques which are employed: technical
problems in a poem or opera are expressive of social

tendencies.12

We can see this interaction of poetic
technique and social elements in the structure of Wright's
*May Morning" (333), a prose poem written shortly before his
death and included in This Journey:

Deep into spring, winter is hanging on.

Bitter and skillful in his hopelessness, he stays

28

alive in every shady place, starving along the

Mediterranean: angry to see the glittering sea-

pale boulder alive with lizards green as Judas

leaves. Winter is hanging on. He still believes.

He tries to catch a lizard by the shoulder. One

olive tree below Grottaglie welcomes the winter

into noontime shade, and talks as softly as

Pythagoras. Be still, be patient, I can hear

him say, cradling in his arms the wounded

head, letting the sunlight touch the savage face.
In this poem the absence of formal verse structures
foregrounds the text's prosodic clarity, treats sentences
(rather than lines) as the unit of construction, and
highlights the textual ”freedom” from generic orthodoxy.
This hybrid prose--though containing elements such as
personification, allusions, and devices for the manipulation
of sound--pursues immediate comprehensibility rather than
strictly ”poetic“ features.

Prose poems like “May Morning” are frequently
characterized as expressions of liberation from traditional
generic restraints. Stein, for examples, observes the
freedoms available for reader and writer alike in prose
poems:

[T]he form offers a means for the poet to address
self-consciously himself, the aesthetic process of

writing, and his audience (who themselves are

O

0

no

(3

(1'

’(t

(D

29
freed from their preconceptions of poetic form and
rhetoric). The freedom of this rhetorical stance,
a freedom not present in the modes that had
dominated earlier decades, enables the poet to
move readily between perceived outer experience
(or narrative) and interior experience (intellec-
tual or imaginative reality)” (Wright 140).
This rhetorical use of prose, free from the restrictions
that closed forms entail, resembles and suggests liberation
from social constraint: ”...[F]rom a political perspective
the abdication by poetry of generic underpinnings parallels
attempts to destroy social boundaries, which genres, of
course, reinforce" (Fredman 4-5).

Wright's choice of prose for this text, then, suggests
broader ideological concerns, but the underlying social and
political alliances of ”May Morning“ become less clear when
- we realize, as Michael Heffernan points out (51), that this
prose poem is actually a sonnet which can be divided into
lines with feminine and slant rhyme endings (abbacddc
efbefb). It consists of a clearly defined octave and sestet
and contains relatively regular iambic pentameter lines,
with occasional variations provided by trochees. The first
'quatrain' could be presented:

Deep into spring, winter is hanging on.

Bitter and skillful in his hopelessness,

-Ihb I"

._u ..

4 :

FOua '

~~u ..J
r

cf:e:s a

:8 p“ 9-

iv»

30

he stays alive in every shady place,

starving along the Mediterranean.
The “freedom“ evident in the prose format of the text
actually disguises a hybrid Petrarchan sonnet. Heffernan
offers an explanation for Wright's choice of form: because
the poem appears in This Journey immediately before a prose
poem dedicated to Robert Bly (who has frequently criticized
received forms), this text expresses aspects of the literary
struggles and friendship between the two men (52). This
view, though attesting to Wright's humor, does not consider
that both open and closed poetic forms are historically
formed, as well as ideological, political, and social.

We could argue, instead, that Wright's text is an
expression and fusion of two poetic traditions and two
opposing ideologies. The very act of reading a “poem“ which
contains irregular line lengths justified only on the left
margin is informed by traditions and histories that differ
radically from that of reading prose and prose poems.
Anthony Easthope, for example, sees in the history of iambic
pentameter an alliance with the upper social classes. In
293;;y_g§_2i§ggg;§§ he contrasts Renaissance court poetry
‘with ballads, noting that the former is "individualist,
elitist, privatized,” while ballads are ”collective,
popular, intersubjective' (77). Wright's prose poem/sonnet,
in this light, ambiguously conjoins the socio-historical

tradition of iambic pentameter and the sonnet with the

31
ideological structures that inform prose writings and recent
prose poems. It can be seen on one level as a fusion, an
attempt to bring together two different sets of readerly
expectations and two different classes of readers, striving
for both elitism and popularity, individualism and
community.

On the other hand, the embedding of a traditional verse
form within a prose paragraph resembles the way ideologies
themselves are hidden but still pervasive in individual
lives. The sonnet structure, though buried in the prose,
determines the underlying form of the poem and invokes
specific responses: the rhyming iambic pentameter lines,
whether they are recognized or not, are evocatively present
and subvert the prose facade. Wright's poem, by masking its
own structure, imitates the undetected ways in which
ideologies shape people.‘13 Similar ideological struggles
are evident in “Dawn Prayer in Cold Darkness to my Secret
Ghost” (unc 1975), another of Wright's ”Jenny Poems.“ In
this text, though, these conflicts are not hidden, but are
foregrounded in the radical shifts from heroic couplets to
prose statements. The text can be understood, on the level
of its poetic techniques, as a dialectical movement between
two social forces.

By conflating the aesthetic and socio-political
qualities of art, Adorno approaches art works less as

mimetic presentations of metaphysical truth than as attempts

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to reveal truth by depicting the radical falseness of
current culture. Art presents the world with a strange and
foreign quality, as individuals in a utopian society might
view it. To express truth, then, art must be “disturbing“
(to borrow Wright's term from the second epigraph) and
negative: ”Rather than gathering up the diffuse threads of
being into a meaningful whole, art wants to destroy what
little meaning there is“ (AT 201).

Adorno's aesthetic theory posits works of art in the
social arena and approaches them as texts embedded in the
sphere of social dOmination; he extends that analysis to
include cultural objects which have been mass produced for
ready consumption. That ”culture industry,“ a term coined
by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enli htenment,
Primarily attempts to create diversionary, readily
accessible, and entertaining objects which provide escapist
illusions from the realities of working conditions. Rather
than existing in opposition to the dominating powers, the
Culture industry contributes to the socialization of
individuals by creating and marketing products which
en<=<>urage those individuals to willingly accept their
Situation as “natural“ and reproduce the existing social
Order; it masks the pervasive dominant ideologies.

True works of art, on the other hand, are subversive
and function in critical capacities: they contribute to the

spontaneity and self-emancipation of individuals. Like

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objects created by the culture industry, art expresses

social tendencies, but because it does so through radical
artistic techniques and unconventional means, it assumes
cognitive oppositional value. This polarity separating
autonomous art from the products of the culture industry
breaks down in late capitalism when art itself becomes a
commodity. As capitalism advances, literary means of
production change, as do the relations between artists and
their audience, writer and reader. Commodity forms become
pervasive, and the literary marketplace--including a host of
publishers, printers, editors, designers, advertisers, book
buyers, reviewers, and other individuals--mediates the
relationship between poets and the reading community: poems,
essays, and books become commodities in a competitive
marketplace where the use-value of the texts is transformed
into an exchange-value. Similarly, as capitalism
Progresses, laborers (including writers) cease to be engaged
in fully human interchanges and instead become highly
8Peeialized workers, separated from their final “product.“
Because of this specialization and fragmentation, forms of
dOmination are more easily and impersonally facilitated:
8‘3C3ial relations become reified.

Adorno and Benjamin, though addressing similar

concerns, often prove dissimilar, and their works can
p r of--°It:ably be read as a dialogical engagement. The 4

complexity and subtlety of Benjamin's book on Baudelaire can

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dly be acknowledged in an overview like this, but we can
e that Benjamin discusses the historical, economical, and
itical context for the emergence of modernism as it is
dent in Baudelaire's verse{“ Benjamin's discussion of
ielaire is informed by and situated in Paris during the
eteenth century: in a famous comment, he observes that
goal is to “show Baudelaire as he lay embedded in the
eteenth century. The impression he left there must
rge in a manner so clear and pristine as that of a stone
ch, having lain for decades in its place, one day rolls
m its spot“ (Jennings 21). Jonathan Arac notes
jamin's inclusion of the “whole life of the time, and in
ticular with changes in the structure of economic life,
k, and the conditions of labor“ (198).

In the history of pre-modernism contained in his work
Baudelaire and the “Arcades Project,” Benjamin
ablishes a basis for approaching twentieth century
ernism, which also applies to Wright's own views.
eteenth century Paris, as characterized by Benjamin, is
able for its omnipresent masses (I am tempted to say,
wds of isolated solitudes), emerging mass communication,
urbanization. Together with the contemporary
hnological developments in mechanical reproduction, these
lities of Baudelaire's Paris suggest insights concerning
erience, individuals, and society in the nineteenth and

)
ntieth centuries. Benjamin also asserts that modern

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capitalism caused the decline of the lyric and the social
role of poetry, and--as Arac notes--Benjamin focusses as
much on what is excluded from Baudelaire's poems as what is
included, an approach equally valid for Wright studies.

The Frankfurt theorists' discussions of the "culture
industry“ and the relationship between cultural products (as
well as their production) and society provide a valuable
paradigm for examining Wright's poetry. Instead of reading
his poems as autotelic texts, I will consider Wright's works.
in light of their cultural, social, economic, and
institutional contexts, in order to probe the interaction
between cultural products and society. Wright, too,
understood his poems to be more than literary performances:
on the dust jacket for Saint Judas, he observes:

To me, poetry in this age is the art of stating
and examining truth. I have tried to shape these
poems, singly and as a group, in order to ask some
more questions: Exactly what is a good and humane
action? And, even if one knows what such an
action is, then exactly why should he perform it?
Like Marcuse's theoretical discourse, Wright's poetic texts
question the moral and historical situation of individuals
living in the twentieth century. In an attempt to explore
those issues concerning truth, Wright's literary actions can
be defined in terms of a deployment: he launches his poems,

like literary flares, as disturbing, illuminating presences

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36
in a society that would prefer to ignore and forget their
very existence.

Within the theoretical framework provided by Adorno and
Benjamin, Wright's subjective lyric utterances can provide,
through their specifically literary aspects, insights into
their own cultural and institutional contexts. Before
approaching these poems, though, it might also be profitable
to examine the similarities between Wright's theoretical
understanding of the role of art in industrial societies and_
that of members of the Frankfurt School. In his critical
dissertation on the six early novels of Charles Dickens,
Wright foregrounds his own variant of cultural criticism and
presents Dickens's novels as attempts at social reform.15
While focussing on the ways Dickens's imagination shapes
discourse, Wright examines in detail what he refers to
(borrowing a phrase from John Stuart Mill) as “social
tyranny“ in nineteenth century England.‘16 Wright
interprets Dickens's use of farce as a modernist literary
device revealing institutional attempts to control and strip
the authority of the self. By establishing a binary
opposition between institutions and individuals, Wright
reads Dickens's novels as dialectical engagements with
polarities: I'the individual human values which are
threatened, in Dickens' view, by modern anti-human
institutions” (87) and ”the self whose very nature is

irreducibly human and the institution whose very nature is

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37
reductively anti-human" (94). It is precisely this struggle
in its various forms that is manifest in Wright's own poems:
the strained postmodern relations between individuality and
the social, political, economic, and educational
institutions. Though motivated by an optimistic desire for
change, Wright's assessment of modern society, as perceived
in Dickens, is bleak:
...[I]n spite of Dickens' artistically successful
evocation of the oppressive workhouses and of the
London underworld, he lacks at this [early] stage
of his career either the skill or the stamina to
drive his vision to its conclusion--namely, that
modern society as he finally came to see it...is
so hopelessly self-deluded that its villains and
its so-called “good“ people are alike tricked and
swallowed and devoured by it. (190)
In this vision of an all-consuming society, individuals—-
regardless of their moral standing-~can only with great
difficulty, if at all, escape illusions intrinsically
contained within the society and culture as a whole;
Wright's concern, in other words, is with ideology as a
false-consciousness which distorts reality. Like the
Frankfurt theorists (as well as the philosophy of Louis
Althusser), Wright focusses on the sites in Dickens's texts
where ideology seems least oppressive but is, in fact, most

pervasive: those routine daily situations which individuals

'1:
“‘ckens

38
experience and are tempted to accept without pondering their
significance:

Perhaps the most powerful feature of Dickens'
imagination in this early novel is its ability to
show how commonplace notions of reality (that is,
the superficial, the everyday, the ordinary)
contain within themselves the seeds of a reality
deeper and stranger than themselves, so that, when
the details of everyday reality are seen from a
certain point of view, or placed in a certain
juxtaposition of violence and upheaval, they
themselves vanish and reveal-~to the horrified
reader--the essential reality of nightmare
underneath. There are seeping wounded cracks in
the minds of the most ordinary men, wounds that
suppurate under the pressure of mob violence or
internal psychological pressure. (210)

Dickens's revelation of the “essential reality of nightmare
underneath“ the ordinary can be construed, in light of the
second epigraph to this chapter, as an important function
for aesthetically effective poetry. The early novels of
Dickens provide Wright with the opportunity to more clearly
focus the aim of his poetic flares by directing them at the
“seeping wounded cracks“ of ordinary readers (but as we
shall see in chapter four, this very concept proves to be

problematic for Wright: "ordinary readers“ of poetry are not

39
necessarily an audience comprised of the “most ordinary men“
and women). A poem, then, like Dickens's novels, is
launched into the world specifically to irritate and
suppurate within the minds of readers, as well as to reveal
the illusory nature of those ideologies which inform
“everyday reality.”

While noting the presence of social tyranny in
“everyday reality,“ Wright (like Adorno and Benjamin) sees
the possibility for cultural products to offer resistance to
the dominant culture by revealing ideological distortions;
printed texts can expose that tyranny, at least in part.
Wright notes that Dickens “subjects [his imaginative]
creations to the forces of modern institutionalization, and
discovers much perpetual defeat of the human, curiosities of
wild laughter, and strategies of resistance that move either
towards farcical mockery or towards outright crime“ (173-4).
Limited by the dominating forces, individuals have four
possible responses to the encroaching institutionalization:
they can see themselves as victims doomed to fail, be
marginalized, or--as a third option--create interference by
overstepping the law. Their fourth possibility is to write
the kind of oppositional “farcical mockery“ that Dickens
himself creates in his novels.

By 1959, four years after he had submitted his “A
Scatological Wish Occasioned by the Current Senate

Hearings,“ Wright realized that texts intent on provoking

40
social change and freeing individuals from the tyranny of
institutions not only do not have to directly attack those
institutions, but also might better succeed by n9; directly
challenging them. Texts, like Dickens's, which are
“farcical mockeries“ are more effective oppositionally than
direct assaults on social, economic, and political
institutions. Reminiscent of Adorno's observations about
autonomous art being only indirectly political, Wright
defends the political effectiveness of Dickens's novels
which contain “implicit subversiveness.“ Texts that are
implicitly subversive succeed while
The ordinary strategy of defense against
propagandistic social protests does not work,
because the conditions necessary for its
effectiveness are absent. If nothing in
particular is attacked, then nothing in particular
can be defended. If the very iggg of a social
institution, on the other hand, is attacked, then
we are all stripped naked and defenseless against
this appalling vision. (103, Wright's emphasis)
Wright's concept of implicit subversion, then, entails
direct, emotional, and aesthetically effective assaults
against the ideas and ideology which inform the power
structures rather than assaults against the institutions
themselves. A writer, imitating Dickens's model, can rebel

against modern tyranny, resist institutionalization, and

41
defend her individuality by "implicit subversiveness' which
indirectly undermines the authority of dominating
institutions, without allowing for recourse. Though
perceived as failures by the dominant culture, texts of
“farcical mockery” can offer resistance; in fact, their
failure may itself be a sign of success.‘ Wright sees the
trial scene in Dickens's Pickwick as an example of that
success amid apparent failure:
So the outcome of the trial can only be one of
resistance. In other words, on the level of the
trial itself, Sam is defeated, along with every
other human being in the Old Bailey. But in the
larger and more important sense, he is the victor,
for he succeeds, through the employment of the
farcical methods which I have described, in
illuminating some genuinely subversive facts--
among them the intrinsic and irreducible existgngg
of human beings as uch, and not‘as instruments of
power. (162, Wright's emphases)
Wright's lesson from Dickens--that failure in discourses of
POWer may actually enhance the resistance a text can
Provideuagain, as we shall see, proves to be problematic,
not. because textual “implicit subversiveness" is
ineffective, but because in late capitalism all successful

8trategies are themselves appropriated and commodified.

42
Besides his concern for individuals contesting the

authority of industrial-era institutions and his recognition
that implicitly subversive texts can offer resistance
against domination, Wright was aware—-like the Frankfurt
theorists-—of the implications surrounding this
commodification of cultural products. As Adorno notes in
the essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the
Regression of Listening“: “To be sure, exchange-value exerts
its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods"
(279). That unique power can involve the usurpation of the
use-value of both human labor and printed texts by the very
system which is being resisted, stripping both labor and
texts of their identity and intended function. In his
dissertation, Wright discusses commodification in ways
suggestive of critical theory: ”...[A] world based on purely
cash-value in human relationships is a world in which men
assume the form of animals..." (247). While aware of the
ways human labor is being 'dehumanized,“ to return to
Marcuse's term, Wright also realizes that the fruits of
human labor--including books, poems, essays, and serialized
novels--are consumed as items bought and sold for a profit,
not their use-value. Wright was attuned to the effects of
the literary marketplace upon the production of nineteenth
century fiction. He observes:

With his mind filled with fruity and open plans,

Dickens tuned his ear as sensitively as possible

43

to the responses of his public while he was

 

writing his book. Having planned one series of
fictions, he discovered that the public did not
care for them, and so--between one weekly number
and the next--he let the sales accounts of his
publishers (Chapman and Hall) influence him into
searching for imaginative conceptions that would
genuinely please his readers....

This failure of [Martin] Chuzzlewit to sell
as quickly and as widely as its predecessors was
undoubtedly one of the reasons for Dickens'
decision to change his plan for the novel, and to
send his young hero Martin with the valet Mark
Tapley to America. (256; 285-6, Wright's
emphasis)

Dickens, while writing novels of implicitly subversive
social reform, was at the same time monitoring the pulse of
the marketplace; tailoring his ”reforms“ to readers'
responses (as measured by the public's willingness to buy
the serials), Dickens attempted to make certain his novels
would be profitable. His “implicit subversiveness,“ then,
was a strategy designed to effectively silence those opposed
to his reforms, even as it would allow him to “sugar coat“
his social medicine and ensure its palatability for unwary

consumers .

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In discussing the effectiveness of Dickens's early
novels, Wright fails to take into account the complex ways
in which Dickens's ”farcical mockery“ turns at times into
sheer entertainment that is neither aesthetically warranted
nor successful but reinforces, instead, the current status
quo--times, that is, when it becomes a product of the
"culture industry.“ Without going into great detail, I
would suggest that even the eight chapters of American
adventures in Martin Chuzzlewit (added--to bolster sales--to
the original plans for the serialized novel), which Wright
defends, are problematic aesthetically: though entertaining,
their relationship to other aspects of the novel seem all
but purely tangential. By lessening the aesthetic integrity
of the novel, Dickens's attentiveness to economic factors
and eagerness to satisfy the desires of his readers
compromise the novel's very oppositionality. Allowing the
marketplace to determine the structure of the novel reveals
in itself an aspect of “social tyranny" and undermines the
novel's effectiveness in resisting that tyranny.‘17
Dickens's unsolved dilemma between his desire for reform and
his need for financial stability becomes an imbroglio which
Wright also encounters and, like Dickens, is unable to
resolve, an issue that we will probe in greater detail in
chapter five.

Wright's critical agenda in his dissertation, though

distinct from that of the Frankfurt theorists, also shares

Col:

45
many of their concerns. Equally important, though, the
poetry written by the young academic who was completing his
dissertation is informed by those critical issues. In
letters to his dissertation director, Wayne Burns, Wright
acknowledged the direct impact his dissertation research was
having upon his poetry: “...I have spent the summer really
being affected so deeply by Dickens that he has changed my
entire conception of poetry itself" (93-4).“ In a later
letter, wright addresses more specifically the nature of
those changes:
I had a traumatic experience with poetry this
summer--subconsciously. Dickens himself
undermined the neo-classicism: and now I am a
full-fledged modern, whether good or bad. No more
rimes, no more tum-te-tum scansions, all in the
American language. I'm really happy and liberated
for the first time since I had a poem published
(98, Wright's emphasis).‘1a
Dickens's attentiveness to social reform stirred Wright's
willingness to become “modern,“ to confront his socio-
historical situation, to attempt implicit subversiveness in
his own work, and to direct his political attention to “the
American language.” In the following chapter we will
examine two texts by Wright, an uncollected poem and a
collected poem, to see his attentiveness to the social

tyranny of the dominant culture in the SOs, 60s, and 70s;

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and we will witness the possibilities for implicit
subversiveness contained in those texts written during the

series of national and international crises between 1949 and

1980.

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Notes

1. This quotation is extracted from Wright's review/essay “I
Come to Speak for Your Dead Mouths” (291-2).

2. It is worse than presumptuous, of course, to consider the
implications and effects of World War II only in terms of
the United States. The history of the Frankfurt School and
the lives of its individual members were horrifically
entangled in the grotesque political, racial, economic, and
social upheavals of the pre—, during-, and post-war periods.
Not the least of those catastrophes is Walter Benjamin's
suicide when denied entrance into Spain at the French border
and the movement of the Frankfurt School from Germany to the
United States, an emigration which eventually included the
somewhat reluctant Theodor Adorno. For a more complete

history, see Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination.

3. Much of my historical information comes from the
following sources: Paul Breslin's The P8 cho-Political Muse,
Cary Nelson's Our Last First Poets, Walter Kalaidjian's

Lan a es of Liberation, and Bernard Grun's The Timetables

of Histogy.

4. Unfortunately, because of the changing legal status of
unpublished materials, I cannot quote this humorous text.

I draw attention to Wright's relative security because
Wayne Burns, a faculty member at the University of
Washington during the Red Scare, attests to the English
Department's unwillingness to be cowed into following those
employment strategies. See particularly chapters four and

five in Burns's Journey Through the Dark Woods.

5. Benjamin writes: "A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus'
shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away
from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is
how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned
toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got
caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no
longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call
progress“ (257-8).

47

 

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6. I am aware of the problematic nature of, first of all,
speaking of a ”Frankfurt School“ as if it were a gathering
of theorists joined by a single or unifying set of standards

or beliefs. As Martin Jay in The Dialectical Imagination
and Susan Buck-Morss in The Origin of Negative Dialectics

~ make clear, that was certainly not the case for Adorno,
Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, and
others. I am equally aware of both Adorno and Benjamin's
awkward, at best, relationship with the Institute for Social
Research and their own philosophical differences with each
other, as documented in their correspondence (Aesthetics and

Politics (110-141).

7. I do not in any way want to present Wright as a
mouthpiece for a group of Frankfort ventriloquists, nor do I
want to minimize the crucial differences between Wright's
oppositional poetics and the critical theory generated by
the institute. (Wright would, I suspect, bristle at even
the mention of a dialectical materialist approach.) But the
tensions that result from this attempted fusion generates
fireworks that can illuminate Wright's work and postmodern
lyric poetry.

When I discuss "ideological contradictions,“ I am not
asserting that ideologies themselves present inconsistent
and conflicting views since the very purpose of ideology is
to superimpose a myth of naturalness upon arbitrary social
formations. Contradictions are present, though, in those
gaps and silences where history has the potential to reveal
ideological constructions. For more information about the
relation between ideology and literary texts, see Eagleton,
particularly pages 64-101.

8. I fortunately have two different translations of Adorno's
essay to work with: the older translation by Bruce Mayo
(entitled "Lyric Poetry and Society") reprinted in Stephen
Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner's ggiticai Theory
and Society and the new translation by Shierry Weber
Nicholsen in volume one of Adorno's hotes to hitergtuge. My
quotes in the text are from Nicholsen's translation unless
otherwise indicated.

9. While recognizing the need to expose my own theoretical
beliefs and alliances, I am trying to resist presenting a
summarizing statement--even if I could do it--of Adorno's
and Benjamin's views: the stylistic complexities and
fragmentary essayistic nature of their writings seem
designed to thwart just such generalizations and attempts to
systematize. I will instead content myself by simply and
cursorily presenting some of their insights most relevant to
my area of study here. In the body of this monograph I will
develop those insights as they apply to Wright's work.

49

10. To make my way through Aesthetic Theory (if I can
erroneously assert that I, or anyone else, can fully process
Adorno's complex work), I have relied heavily upon two
recent books attempting to provide critical perspectives on
Adorno's ideas: Fredric Jameson's Late Marxism, particularly
Part III, and Lambert Zuidervaart's Adorno's Aesthetic

Theory.

11. All subsequent citations to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
will be presented in the text with the abbreviation AT.

12. T. Scitovsky asserts a similar idea but from a different
theoretical standpoint in “What's Wrong with the Arts Is
What's Wrong with Society.“ He argues, for example, “If
anything is wrong with the arts, we should seek the cause in
ourselves, not in our economy” (65).

13. The pervasiveness of ideologies can be understood
metaphorically by comparing ideological structures with
computer operations. As I work with my word processor,
messages flash across the monitor screen, enabling me to
accomplish my tasks with relative ease. What seems to be
“user friendly,“ however, actually borders on user
domination. The real work of the computer is not evident
amid the surface phenomena. Rather, the computer hardware
(including the inaccessible Read Only Memory [ROM]) and its
interactions with the software actively process data--of
which I remain unaware—-and prompt the instantaneous
messages. As I work at the keyboard, it is not so much me
“running“ the program as it is the computer controlling my
responses. When, for example, the message on the screen
asks for the name of the file to be retrieved, I must type
“ch1,” in this instance. Any variation or deviation from
these three characters will cause the “error“ message to
flash. The hidden programming determines which of my
responses will facilitate certain processes; other responses
are unacceptable.

This metaphor and my understanding of the “ideologies
of technology,“ are informed by John Hanhardt's giggg
Cuiture, Richard Lanham's “The Electronic Word,” Charles
Bernstein's “Play it Again, Pac-Man' in h_ggghig§, and
Marjorie Perloff's ngiggi_h;hiiigg.

14. The three essays in Charies thdglaire: A Lyrig Poet ih
the Era of High Capitaiism were extracted from Benjamin's

unfinished study of Paris in the nineteenth century,
Passagen-arbeit. The complex history of these essays and
Benjamin's Paris Arcades Project are best presented in
Michael W. Jennings's Qialectic Images and Susan Buck-

Morss's The Diaigctics of Sggi g.

50

15. Like his uncollected poems, Wright's dissertation and
master's thesis are ignored by most critics. His
dissertation is his longest, most sustained, and most
reflexive critical endeavor, and it offers a developed view
of his own methodologies of reading. The aggressive style
of that criticism is a wonderful complement to his poetic
texts. In the course of his dissertation, Wright offers a
wide variety of “social criticism“ derived from artists as
diverse as Shakespeare, Cervantes, and W. C. Fields. It is
also interesting to compare and contrast Wright's study of
Dickens with Adorno's essay--also about an early Dickens's
novel--“On Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop.“ Moreover,
Eagleton's discussion of the relations between Dickens's
literary form and ideology (125-30) provides yet another
socio-historical reading of Dickens's work.

Much necessary work can be done on the relationship
between Wright's theoretical perspective and his poetry.
Even the most superficial relationships between the two have
gone uncharted so far. In his dissertation, for example,
Wright devotes a rather lengthy discussion to Dickens's
presentation of violence in Barnaby Rudge (part of which is
included, in a revised form, in Wright's posthumous
Collected Prose (43-53): “The vision has to do with social
suppression, with irrational and sadistic punishments...and
with the actual nature of both mob violence and of
officially sanctioned corporal and capital punishments.
That is, Dickens' imagination in this novel is not only
stating but demonstrating (through created actions and
images) the hideous fact that mob violence and piiigigi
violence can be, and often are, distinguished from each
other in the simple sense that the agents of official
violence are a little better organized and a bit more
adequately armed“ (206, Wright's emphasis; compare this with
the version in Qpiigghgg_gpggg 45). I know of no better
summation than this of Wright's poem “At the Executed
Murderer's Grave" (82).

16. Wright's understanding of social tyranny is informed by
.Mill's essay “On Liberty." Wright quotes (and underscores)
a section from that essay: ”Society can and does execute its
[own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of
:right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought

not to meddle, i; practices a social tyranny more formidabie
'than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not
'usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewe;
means of esca e enetratin much more dee 1 into t e
[details of life, and enslaving the soul itself“ (297-8,
Wright's emphasis). Like Mill, Wright continues by
(iiscussing "tyranny of opinion,“ particularly in relation to
”the most feared tyrants of opinion in a democracy“ (307):
newspaper editors. Wright's recognition of the power and
'cyranny that can be connected with editorial work raises

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51

questions, that we will explore in chapter five, about his
own compliance with editorial practices.

17. Michael Gilmore in American Romanticism and the
Marketplace offers what I see as a better example than
Dickens of a novelist directly confronting the issues of
commodification and oppositionality: Herman Melville. See
especially Gilmore's discussions in chapters six and seven.

18. Regardless of the nature and intensity of Dickens's
impact upon Wright's work, Wright did not completely discard
rhyme and meter. He did learn from Dickens, however, that
to be a "full-fledged modern“ poet he would have to confront
modern social and historical realities rather than simply
rely on inherited poetic techniques and stances.

CHAPTER TWO

LYRIC PRAXIS AS RESISTANCE

The friends of my childhood

One after another have fallen behind

Payments

And stones.

All you have to pay for

Is shroud, fuel, and labor.
“On the Foreclosure of a Mortgage
in the Suburbs“ (unc 1961)

But this one was not the usual, cheap
Economics, it was not the solitary
Scar on a poor man's face, that respectable
Hole in the ground you used to be able to buy
After you died for seventy-five dollars and
Your wages tached for six months by the Heslop
Brothers.

“The Old WPA Swimming Pool

in Martins Ferry, Ohio“ (236)

The dust jacket for the cloth edition of Saiht Judas
includes a quotation from John 9:34 that is written entirely
in capital letters and printed with purple ink on an off-
white background.1 The single verse, taken from the King
James Bible, is repeated three times, with the second
instance in bold face, and the entire quotation printed in a
block as if to form a poem with a refrain or as a retort
gathering force by sheer repetition, only to slowly wane
away:

52

53
THEY ANSWERED AND SAID UNTO HIM,
THOU WAST ALTOGETHER
BORN IN SIN, AND DOST THOU TEACH US?
AND THEY CAST HIM OUT.
THE! ANSWERED AND SAID UNTO HIM,
THOU WAST ALTOGETHER
HORN IN SIN, AND DOST THOU TEACH US?
AND THE! CAST HIM OUT.
THEY ANSWERED AND SAID UNTO HIM,
THOU WAST ALTOGETHER
BORN IN SIN, AND DOST THOU TEACH US?
AND THEY CAST HIM OUT.2
The biblical quotation (printed in standard typeface) is
positioned between the two cursively written words of the
title--also in purple--though there are numerous places
where the two sets of letters overlap. (The large
capitalized S in "Saint,“ for example, covers “HIM" in the
first line.) This ensemble of texts forms the sort of
dialectical engagement which Adorno and Benjamin would have
appreciated, a visual constellation which aptly suggests a
series of binarisms explored in the book: humane and
inhumane actions; domination and repression; inclusion and
exclusion; the privileged position of the rich and royal--
dressed in purple--and the commonality and blandness of the
working class, presented in soiled white; sin and virtue;

individuality and community; and other issues.

54

Among these various topics suggested by the jacket
design, I would like to focus on one. We can approach this
constellation as being a representation, an emblem, of
Wright's relationship with his readers and the community.
It suggests the way his poetic vision is informed,
determined, and controlled by restrictive social codes as
much as it is an imposition upon that community. This
anticipated community may scorn and cast him out, treating
him as the Other, but the largeness of his vision (like that_
of the healed blind man discussed in the ninth chapter of
John's Gospel) can encompass their rejection and even expose
its comedy. His vision also defines the menacing crowd as
being essentially the same as those individuals who have
been cast out.

The poet, as an outsider, recognizes that his position
is an outgrowth and expression of that community, since even
the gaps comprising his identity--those spaces between the
letters of his name--are socially defined. The established
social order cannot sever him from those communal aspects
which he has internalized any more than he can completely
sever himself from them. The poet and his reading community
cannot be so easily distinguished when even the economy of
cultural commodities (the book) brings them together,
however indirectly and in highly mediated ways.

The emblematic dialectic also turns back upon itself

and demonstrates ways in which the poet is aware of his

outsi
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very

tie:

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blind

renew

55
outsider status: the truth that he was and remains
“altogether born in sin,” unfit to teach anyone. The
sanctity of society, even a fallen community, is a
redemption that he needs. Yet, he is “different“ by the
very fact that he exists at the margins of their discourse;
that difference is his willingness to create interference in
their tidy rows of block letters, to engage in conflict, and
to establish himself as an individual rather than simply
another anonymous space completing the crowd.

The dust jacket serves, finally, as an emblem of death,
both suicide and murder. By overlaying the story and
identity of Judas onto the biblical account of Jesus and the
blind man, the jacket design challenges the possibility for
renewed vision: it foregrounds the complicitous involvement
of Judas and the Pharisees--including their individual and
group guilt--in the murder of Jesus, as well as Judas's own
eventual suicide. The healing of the blind man did not
”open“ Judas's eyes and renew his sight; it only increased
the blindness of the Pharisees and led to the communal
exclusion and death of both Jesus and Judas.

The poems collected in Shihp_ghggg, like those in Thg
Qgpph_flhii before it, posit ways in which Wright as an
individual and community member is torn between life and
death, and those texts suggest that death can both sever and
reinforce the relations between community and self. Poems

like “My Grandmother's Ghost” (45) and “The Ghost“ (72), as

56

well as the uncollected “The Three Husbands" (unc 1957), “A
Whisper to the Ghost Who Woke Me“ (unc 1959), and “Dawn
Prayer in Cold Darkness to my Secret Ghost (unc 1975), among
others are haunted with ghosts unwilling or unable to leave
the community of the living, and the texts also present
individuals torn between the needs of their own lives and
their connections to the past and those who have died. But,
as is usual for Wright, he situates himself between twin
poles, this time between the polarities of life and death as
well as self and community. In the title poem of Sgihh
ghggp (84), Judas--the social castoff--wants to kill
himself, but when he encounters a man being beaten by
hoodlums, Judas intervenes. His care for the victim
suggests that life could have meaning for this Other and for
himself. His intervention between life and death and his
attempt at reestablishing communal ties is contextualized in
a dialectical discourse concerning money: those “proper
coins” which led to his own social and religious ostracism
and the fact that he helped the stranger ”for nothing.“ As
“Saint Judas“ and the two epigraphs suggest, even a
discourse of mourning and redemption is mediated by an
economics which fosters both community and isolation. That
emphasis on economics in this and other texts both provokes
and subsumes action.

The multi-faceted oppositionality exhibited on the dust

jacket suggests points of complicity and resistance between

This ‘
ueViCQ

57
the text and the world, an issue foregrounded by Wright's
uncollected poems as well as his various collections; for
him, lyric praxis is not necessarily a politically committed
intervention nor simply a symbolic action; it is, instead,
an indirect but forceful involvement in social criticism.
Wright would agree with Adorno, I believe, that art does not
and need not have a clearly defined social purpose: “If any
social function can be ascribed to art at all, it is the
function to have no function“ (AT 322). Lyric offers the
possibility for truly transformative praxis by being
useless, by not having to fulfill rational functions, and by
calling into question the very need to be functionally
efficient. Paradoxically, this very uselessness is what
empowers poetry to be socially and politically useful.
Lambert Zuidervaart offers a concise summary of a view that
seems equally applicable to Adorno and Wright:
According to Adorno, art's social isolation allows
it to challenge the dominant social praxis by
recalling the forgotten purpose for which .
rationality is deployed..... Art's impracticality
allows it to remember the forgotten purpose of
rationality and uncover the absurdity of the
dominant rationality. (135)
This indirect lyric praxis, though centered on its own lyric
devices, does not lose sight of its involvement in and with

society; Adorno's social aesthetics support and illuminate

:':e i:
Dicke:

SKCYEI‘

58
the importance Wright assigned to the subversive nature of
Dickens's early novels. While describing that “implicit
subversiveness“ in his dissertation, Wright observes:
its quality of social criticism is both accidental
and inevitable. It is accidental because the
poet's aims, though complex and multiple, do not
plainly include the establishment of specific
propagandistic programs. Implicit subversiveness
may be distinguished, for purposes of literary
criticism, from the explicit kind in that the
latter has a specifically definable social aim
which is primary, all literary and artistic aims
being secondary. (104-5, Wright's emphases)
For Wright and Adorno, the indirect but effectively
transformative lyric praxis is located in the technical and
formal aspects of a particular poem; to understand fully
Wright's lyric praxis of implicit subversiveness against
social tyranny, we must look closely at the ways he presents
and resolves specifically “poetic“ concerns within
individualitexts.
Wright's collected and uncollected poems, demonstrating
a variety of technical devices, offer varied and subtle
attempts at social criticism and lyric praxis. In this
chapter I would like to closely examine two representative
texts--an early uncollected poem written in a closed form

and an open form text from The hranch Will Not Break--to

0“

59

explore the relationship between Wright's poetics and forces
of contemporary culture. The first of these texts, the
postwar poem “Mercy" (unc 1957), focusses, like many of his
early works, on destruction and death and their effects upon
individuals and community:

They shot a horse. Some women in their shock

Snivelled the other way as they drove past;

The sheriff stared, a small boy tossed a rock.

Under far trees the skeleton lay blown:

The mad horse in the wind, the mighty thighs

Broken against a rock, the skull

Dumb with the bullet and the roar.

I lay lost, in a molten shadow thrown

Out of the rugged sky. I closed my eyes,

The sheriff and my father walked so tall.

Killers of god, they strode by, muscular,

And left me to my lamentation.

Self-blinded in the dark of dying time,

I crept off by myself, and lost my share

In that last brutal ritual of creation:

The grace of muscle pitched away in life.
In t1lis poem--one of many texts in which horses provide an
image of natural freedom, strength, and grace in a culture
lacking those qualities3--a horse with "mighty thighs“ and

grace of muscle” is killed. The text begins with a sudden

60
iambic burst: “They shot a horse." Then the action stops,
and because the referent for the pronoun “they“ is not
provided, the identity of those who killed the horse is
blurred, making the speaker's relationship to the killing
and this particular horse uncertain. The shooting,
presumably a mercy killing, is only ambiguously presented:
that the horse was “mad“ is the only explanation Wright
offers. Whether the animal was rabid or merely unruly seems
less important than the presence of reactionary social fears
and a desire to dispose of--to cast out--marginalized
individuals .

In this text the killing becomes a social event and
Provokes diverse responses from various community members:
"Some women in their shock / Snivelled the other way as they
drove past; / The sheriff stared, a small boy tossed a
rock, " The unemphatic response of the women is frightening
because of its resolute coldness: their attempt to distance
themSelves only implicates them more. The generic ”they“
responsible for killing the horse is an indictment of a
genell‘al citizenry which includes those women. After the
811001ting, they continue to whine about their problems and
the“ simply go on to other (presumably equally destructive)
rOutline business. Like the horse, they, too, begin with an
iambic movement forward and pause: they stop long enough--
for three unstressed syllables--to see the horse and evince

their dismay, during another pause, before moving on. The

 

 

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61
sheriff, rather than responding to violence and possible
injustice, watches with incredulity and passivity while a
boy, in imitation of the adult violence, tosses a rock in a
scaled down--and socially acceptable--version of the
violence. Death itself has become a social phenomenon.

The women's response--their "shock”--is linked with the
boys's weapon, a rock, by rhyme. The women, the sheriff,
and the boy are all equally implicated in the violence. The
results of this human "madness," though, are not easily
contained: just as the boy imitates the initial action, the
women carry the violence with them as they drive away, and
the horse's skeleton turns to dust and is “blown“ by the
wind. Wright's use of rhyme and meter are important
throughout the poem, both in their regularities and in their
disturbances of those patterns. The second line is the only
unrhymed line in the poem: the women “Snivelled the other
way as they drove past.“ That absence, like the absence of
a 8Pecific context and an historical "past,“ invokes an
incompleteness and desire for continuity that is maintained
thrOllghout the poem. Ultimately, that very openness serves
to illvite and implicate readers in the textual violence.

For the speaker, the death--I am tempted to say murder
“°f the horse, takes on a broader historical perspective:

the Shot animal is not only figuratively blown away, he

immediately decomposes:

C‘ e
.:e 2

62

Under far trees the skeleton lay blown:

The mad horse in the wind, the mighty thighs

Broken against a rock, the skull

Dumb with the bullet and the roar.
The horse that was just shot, as witnessed by the women and
a child, is already reduced to a skeleton and skull,
implying that this violence and death have happened before
and in other, possibly even distant, places ("under far
trees“). Its results, though, remain visible and audible,
at least to the speaker; he can see "the mad horse in the
wind“ and refuses to be struck mute by the roar. The final
two lines of the stanza are tetrameter, rather than the
Predominantly pentameter lines in the rest of the poem; the
lifeline of the speaker and the poem itself has been cut
short. Since both lines start with trochees rather than
iambs, they--like the poem itself--begin with violence
followed by the silence of two and sometimes three
unaccented syllables in a row. Yet, within the text (and
outiside of it), time and violence both roar on.

Just as the women and the small boy were joined
together by rhyme, the speaker and the shot horse are
unit-ed: "I lay lost, in a molten shadow thrown / Out of the
rugged sky. I close my eyes...." The line endings from the
fir-3t stanza create an echo in the second. Dust of the
horse that is “blown“ in the air is associated with the

apefilter who also lays down as if shot by "a molten shadow

63
thrown / Out of the rugged sky“--this darkness flashes upon
him. To separate himself from this history of abuse against
nature, the speaker closes his eyes: an empty gesture, like
the once powerful thighs of the lifeless horse.

This helplessness and confusion of the speaker become
even more apparent as the poem continues: "The sheriff and
my father walked so tall. / Killers of god, they strode by,
muscular, / And left me to my lamentation.“ This boy
transfers both the power and the death he associates with
the horse to those who killed it, [the sheriff and his
father. The features of the horse find their corresponding
attribute--their rhymes--in the two men. The lifeless skull
of the horse is linked with the men who seem “so tall,“ but
that too is an emptiness, an illusion of power. Wright
interrupts his pentameter line yet again to make the men
seem “so tall“; he disturbs the rhythm by introducing once
more three unstressed syllables in a row (itself an
intimation of mortality: a missed heartbeat). These two
"killers of god“ seem “muscular,” but that quality also will
Vanish in the roar and advance of time. These new images of
power focussed on the two men, as a result of their act of
violance, reveal their own vulnerability and powerlessness
before death.

Both stanzas contain a single word which disturbs the
rhYthmic flow and disrupts the pentameter lines. In the

first stanza that disturbance happens with the unexpected

64

appearance of the ”skeleton"; in the second stanza the
irregularity occurs with the word "lamentation.“

I lay lost, in a molten shadow thrown

Out of the rugged sky. I closed my eyes,

The sheriff and my father walked so tall.

Killers of god, they strode by, muscular,

And left me to my lamentation.
A jarring new presence becomes apparent with the
introduction of the biblical lamentation; the speaker ceases
to be a “lost“ boy and becomes instead a prayerful,
prOphetic voice for nature and humanity; if the missing
rhyme from the first stanza is satisfied at all, it is at
this moment. The culture which has attempted to create its
own “molten“ images and to kill nature and god with a
ramPant violence that continues to spread has to effect
eV'fili‘yone, even a witness who strongly objects to the crime:
the boy speaker. He recognizes that this act of violence,
this killing, also involves him; he, too, shares in the
responsibility. His own complicity in this society blinds
him to this dark and "dying time“; he becomes isolated even
from those he should be closest to, his family and the
social agents for order and justice. This prophet opposed
t° the cultural violence is a twofold loser: he cannot free
himSelf from the responsibility for the crime, plus he
cannot partake of the profits from that crime. He loses his

‘ahhre / In that last brutal ritual of creation" and cannot

65
benefit, as the women and the boy did, from the violent
attempts at self-creation. The speaker, the cultural
instigators of violence, and all of society, including the
women, children, and readers of the poem, share in the
natural, religious, and social loss, ”The grace of muscle
pitched away in lime." That loss is apparent in the many
disruptions and irregularities introduced into the meter,
lime lengths, and rhyme; the form, which--to borrow Madeline
DeFrees's'termuwe can call "convulsive“ form, is an
integral part of the poem's meaning. Nature, our advanced
industrial society, the poem itself, and each of us
individually are in need of mercy, which we can only receive
when the human destruction ceases.

Elkins argues that Wright's formal poems, like ”Mercy“
“Which Elkins, of course, does not directly discuss--
Present a problem that cannot be resolved:

'Metered verse is especially suspect, for it is one
more step removed from experience. As Karl
Malkoff, in Esc e from the Self, has noted, ”The
important characteristic of meter...is that it
exists as a rationally apprehensible construct in
the poet's mind before the poem is written, in
fact, before the experience that is the occasion
of the poem exists.“ Consequently, the poet may
feel, as Wright now begins to feel, that he has

“been imposing a logical system on reality,

66
distorting it rather than objectively describing
it.“ Precise, decorous forms imply an order that
Wright suspects violates the reality of the
subjects trapped inside. (43)
Rather than providing a “precise, decorous" form, texts like
”Mercy“ make it possible to see instances in which the very
regularity and discontinuity in the formal structures ebb
and flow in imitation and re-creation of experience.‘ It
is this re-creation--in the metrical violence--which further
implicates the poet in "that last brutal ritual of
creation.“

Even more important, though, is a point which Elkins
does not make: the speaker of this poem is not only imposing
a form upon reality but is himself a receiver of an imposed
Cultural stance. He recognizes his own complicity and
responsibility for the ideologies which he cannot control;
he is shaped and “self-blinded“ by that society and his
relationship to it. The visionary quality of postwar poems
like “Mercy” is restricted because both the poet and the
t°3ti are “self-blinded“ and informed by the atrocities of
war and contemporary society. Form, then, is not just a
°°nstruct created by the poet: it suggests the parameters
which define the poet's and the culture's ideological
horj~2ons. Elkins argues that Wright seeks

a way to speak that will allow him sincere, honest

communication that denies cultural assumptions

67

(the dominance of the ego, the willful

manipulation of the world for selfish ends, the

anthropomorphic appropriation of all the

contingent world to man's realm) of the language

he uses to communicate. (47)
We can see in ”Mercy," however, a speaker who is conscious
of himself as being inseparable from the assumptions and
:reesultant actions of his language and culture. I am not
arguing here for a privileged ranking of formal texts over
firee verse; but I am trying to counter the faulty notions of
f<>rmal verse which critics bring to Wright's early poems.
Tflae form and content of “Mercy“ reflect the violence and
crises of our culture and implicate both the poet and his
audience for their complicity in those crimes. These
(irmdictments, though, also turn back upon the text itself:
"hiercy“ implicates its own existence as well, questioning
the relevance of a poetic text in a culture gone “mad.“
Theodor Adorno, commenting about the role of lyric poetry in
Contemporary society in "Cultural Criticism and Society,“
a£>proximates the disturbing and negative view of poetry
expressed in “Mercy“:

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And

this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has

become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute

reification, which presupposed intellectual

progress as one of its elements, is now preparing

68
to absorb the mind entirely. Critical
intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as
long as it confines itself to self-satisfied
contemplation. (34)
“Mercy“ presents a self-conscious individual resisting that
urge for mere introspection and self-exoneration: the
speaker positions himself against the barbarism and cruelty
of late capitalism, and thus against his own barbaric
participation in that society.

I have gone to such lengths discussing this poem to
show that “Mercy“ and others of Wright's uncollected poems
do not lack the qualities, complexities, and depths evident
in his various volumes of poetry. Also, "Mercy" provides an
advantageous starting point because its content and form
provoke a reading which goes against the grain: it situates
itself within the advanced industrial society that informs
its own technical elements as well as the attitudes,
a<=tions, and subsequent responses of various individuals
within the text. The poem not only posits itself within the
cOntext of twentieth century American culture, but it
Culturally locates the poet and his contemporary audience as
well. The text identifies the poet as a cultural producer
who both confronts ideological structures and recognizes his
COmplicity with them.5 An understanding of Wright and the
works he produced requires knowledge of that culture, as it

is present in the poems and as an external force shaping

69
those texts and our responses to them. To read poems like
“Mercy“ as autotelic texts is an attempt to sanitize and
restrict their boundaries; it denies their implications
(about both author and reader, rather than enabling the poems
‘t0>serve as poetic flares launched into the world of
economics and reified relations.

The formal structures of “Mercy," while effective
unithin the poem, may have struck Wright as incompatible with
tlie texts included in The Branch Will Not Breah, but the
[ceentral concerns of this early poem--the cultural causes and
imnpact of violence upon individuals and society--are evident
.irl the free verse texts from that collection. In “Autumn
Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (121), for example, Wright
probes societal violence and another ”brutal ritual of

czreation" in a text that provides another variation of his

horse poem sub-genre :‘5

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in

Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace

at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

70
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
As he does in "Mercy“ and other poems--"Ohio Valley Swains"
(233), for example--Wright moves outside the poetic self in
”Iautumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio“ and deals, albeit
.ir1directly, with the socio-political world of manual
leiborers;7 he begins by stressing inclusiveness (with a
respetition of the coordinating conjunction 'and') and by
f<>cussing on individuals in the community: “Polacks nursing
1c>ng beers in Tiltonsville, / And gray faces of Negroes in
“tile blast furnace at Benwood, / And the ruptured night
wEltchman of Wheeling Steel.“ All of these laborers, who are
either working or relaxing after work, are addressed in
fEmmiliar terms. The ethnic reference to ”Polacks,”
Presumably based on familiarity, implies some bond between
'tllem and the poet who describes them as delaying their
return home by slowly sipping bottomless mugs of beer; faces
of black workers at Benwood are seen "in” the blast furnace,

tJJeir very livelihood scorching and consuming them; finally,

71
tJae night watchman is presented as ruptured--his masculinity
deformed and incapable of sustaining life.
These representatives of the working class, all maimed

.i11 some way, are reduced and dehumanized by their demeaning
work, and the poem recreates that social construct. Each
group of workers “possesses" a single line of this stanza
‘f<>r themselves (like a worker's allotment), and like the
.iridividuals described, these lines are unique units with
‘v11rying numbers of stress and syllables. But the workers'
issolation is emphasized throughout the stanza, not only by
”<20ntaining“ them within separate lines but also in the end-
8t:opped lines, preventing them from uniting. In The Last
Half-Century: Societal Chan e and Politics in America,
Morris Janowitz describes this separation of labor as a
reflection of the social totality:

...[T]he long-term trend in the social structure

has been toward a more differentiated pattern of

social stratification, reflecting the complex

division of labor and the persistence and growth

of cleavages based on age, sex, region, and

primordial attachments. The differentiation of

social organization has also been conditioned by

the fact that a person's position in the social

structure is not only a function of his position

in the occupational structure but is also

72
increasingly related to the claims and
expectations generated by the welfare state.
(547)
Ehresumably, then, the workers even during their off hours
are kept in their place and “cast out“ from social
fianctions--like high cultural events, including the
appreciation of poetry--deemed inappropriate for their
(Llass. Their isolation at work, then, becomes a synecdochic
representation of their social relations. Though separated,
tJae “Polacks," “Negroes,“ and the watchman do share one
feature: they are "dreaming of heroes.“ Demeaned by their
leives and work, they seek an escape and hope for something
better and more noble. Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism
situates this dream in the context of capitalism itself:
To the captive individual, whose entire life is
subordinated to the laws of the market--not only
(as in the 19th century) in the spheres of
production, but also in the sphere of consumption,
it appears impossible to break out of the social
prison. “Every-day experience“ reinforces and
internalizes the neo-fatalist ideology of the
immutable nature of the late capitalist social
order. All that is left is the dream of escape--
through sex and drugs, which in their turn are

promptly industrialized. (502)

73
:Lf the workers in this text are dreaming of sexual escape,
tlaeir expectations will be disappointed. The laborers'
isolation, induced by their participation in the processes
of industrial production, extends even to their most
.iritimate relations. These workers hesitate returning to
‘tlieir families. Again, the text stresses the distance
separating the individuals: their families and home life are
”forced“ into the following stanza: "All the proud fathers
are ashamed to go home. / Their wives cluck like starved
phallets, / Dying for love.“ This disjointed, paratactic
at:anza denies the workers and their families even the luxury
Of an expansive articulation of their situation; the fathers
[flare discussed in one line, their wives in another, and love
it: a third--the very relationship between the three elements
is; not directly discussed. The industrialized families are
Silenced by their labor conditions or kept unaware (denied
c(Insciousness) of their own selves by those working
cC>nditions. Once more the heavily end-stopped lines isolate
idmdividuals, separating the men from their wives and keeping
tile women from love (while the men are twice removed from
tlmat love) just as the workers in the first stanza are
8eparated from their dreams. The women even cease to be
hInman: their unfulfilled lives and relationships reduce them
t4) clucking hens. James Breslin, like Mandel, notes “a
c=<>nnection between the workplace and the bedroom: grinding,

ill-rewarding, and undignified work breaks the spirit of the

74
men, thus ruining their relations with their wives“ (168).
The poem, then, explores the relationship between demeaning
forms of work and family life, and it suggests that the
effects of labor conditions are difficult to enclose. They
cannot simply be left at the work site at the end of the
day: they follow the workers home, permeating their
relationships and contaminating their beds. In Remembering

games Wrigh , Robert Bly discusses the relationship between

sexuality and economics:
Studs Terkel interviewed a lot of working men
about the Thirties, and a heartbreaking detail
came out from several men. After a husband lost
his job during the Depression, his wife would
sometimes stop sleeping with him.... [W]hen the
man during the Depression stopped bringing home
food, and felt humiliated, a double humiliation
happened when his wife lost interest in him" (24).
It is that double humiliation which keeps the husbands and
wives isolated and silenced in the second stanza, but the
effects of industrial working conditions on families is not
restricted to the spouses.

The final stanza separates the children from their
working fathers and their loveless mothers and then re-
connects them. That union takes place in the single (itself
isolated) word “therefore“: it joins together--if for

nothing more than an implied logical, causal relation--the

75
sons with their fathers and mothers. This precarious
rationalistic basis for unity with their parents, however,
has little validity in this industrialized society: it also
drives the sons further away. They grow--in an image
reminiscent of Yeats's ”terrible beauty“--"suicidally
beautiful" as they ”gallop terribly against each other's
bodies.” The sons, while developing their natural
strengths, grace and power, have also been dehumanized--like
their mothers. They have been reduced to animals, a type of
deformed horse trained to destroy itself and others.
Ilronically, it is only in this third stanza of the poem that
isolation between individuals is broken down, but this
attempt of the sons to form a community, though “beautiful,“

is suicidal. While football provides a substitute for the

intimacy and human contact that are missing from their
family lives, the violent interaction of the sport only
diminishes them. Robert Hass observes: “Insofar as this is
a political poem, it is not about the way that industrial
c=epitalism keeps us apart, but the way it brings us
t-'-<>gether" (43). That way, it seems to me, entails violent
8elf-destruction on the football field or repressed self-
destruction in the Tiltonsville bars.

We cannot leave the poem, though, at this point: the

8Sneaker, presumably the poet, and his position within the

Poem need to be considered. Wright presents himself within

a football stadium, a common meeting area, where he, too,

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can establish relations with other individuals in the
community. While Wright the poet has the opportunity and
leisure to ”think” about others, the workers are still
engaged in their dehumanizing work or mustering the courage
to return to their fragmented lives; they are not attending
a football game. Wright, in this privileged position,
insists on seeing these workers only in diminutive
dimensions. Though attempting to understand and empathize
with them, he reduces the working class people to
caricatures by focussing on certain aspects of their lives
(the night watchman being ruptured, for instance) and
ignoring other possibly more positive and self-actualized
features. A social hierarchy is present within the poem.
Even though Wright includes himself in the same line with
the beer drinkers--“I think of Polacks nursing long beers in
Tiltonsville'--he, too, is isolated from them and maintains
that separation throughout the poem. (Wright observes in a
similar situation in his later poem “At the Grave” (239):
“Christ, it is going to be a cold day / In hell when any
Johnny Bull knows / What I am saying to you.”) Again, let
me return to Hass:

The word phppgiggg is what isolates the speaker,

but it is also what gathers the people of Martins

Ferry to the poet and his readers, makes them

known and felt. The poet does not rise into

suicidal light; he brings himself and them and all

77

of us up into the different kind of light that

poetry is, so that, even though what he sees is

tragic, that he sees is a consolation. (45)
My point is that Wright cannot “see“ these individuals as
more than cardboard figures. The very ideologies which
restrict and isolate the laborers also restrict the poet,
preventing him from transcending the false-consciousness of
late capitalism. I am not arguing that capitalist labor
relations and working conditions have not demeaned these
people and disfigured their lives (that is obviously true),
but I am asserting that the poet, in this poem, has not and
possibly cannot successfully or sufficiently “see” or
present these people in a way that reveals them as living
and suffering humans, rather than “dehumanized“ chickens and
horses. His synecdochic attempts to create representative
individuals denies the individuality of the workers and
their families as much as the industrial labor practices do.
Part of this failure is due to the very nature of separation
inherent in a capitalist industrial society and Wright's
involvement in that society as an agent of cultural
production; it also results from Wright's embrace of
unsubstantiated synecdoche. Whatever the causes, its
presence permeates the ”blind“ spots and silences in the
poem. At the beginning of his essay “The Terrible

Threshold,“ Wright states:

78

In New World Writin No. 4, Theodore Roethke

remarks of [Stanley] Kunitz that “he has an acute

and agonizing sense...of what is it to be a man in

this century.“ This statement is true, I believe,

and simply to pg a man (instead of one more

variety of automaton, of which we have some tens

of thousands) means to keep one's eyes open.

(249, Wright's emphasis)
In “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio“ Wright reveals
that even with ”one's eyes open“ one cannot always escape
joining the legion of automatons. As the ninth chapter of
John--quoted in part above--reveals, social and
institutional powers can forcefully restrict the scope of an
individual's vision. Wright's efforts to “see“ are marred
by his own “self-blinded" complicity with cultural forces:8
even those attempts to see seem doomed to fail and are a
cause for being cast out.

Herbert Marcuse, in “The Affirmative Character of
Culture“ raises another question which must be considered in
light of “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.“ Marcuse
asserts that art which depicts problems in the social order
by presenting these problems on a purely aesthetic level
actually “pacifies” its audience and ultimately affirms the
capitalist culture and status quo:

By exhibiting the beautiful as present, art

pacifies rebellious desire. Together with the

79

other cultural areas it has contributed to the

great educational achievement of so disciplining

the liberated individual, for whom the new freedom

has brought a new form of bondage, that he

tolerates the unfreedom of social existence.

(121)
Wright's poem, rather than “exhibiting the beautiful as
present," exhumes what we assume to be beautiful and begins
the process of obfuscating that image, in this case the high
school football programs, family life in a capitalist
society, and the social organization of labor. Wright's
poetic flare aims for those areas of unquestioned daily
experience where ideologies are least questioned, and
“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio“ reveals the nightmare
reality beneath the surface. The parataxis and complexity
of the poem forces a reader to assume an active role in
exploring the subtle elements of resistance, even as those
elements include the ”I,“ the poet, and the reader. Hugo
Achugar has demonstrated that this process is not
necessarily conscious during a particular reading: “These
social effects function independently of the will of the
real author, and, for that reason, they are necessarily
involved in relations with the rest of the signs uttered by
a society. This does not depend on the receiver being
conscious of the process“ (654). A reading of the poem,

though, cannot be complete without the “receiver“ herself

80
“completing“ the reading process by situating her own life
in terms of opposition or accommodation to the industrial
labor practices, the isolation, dehumanization, and other
factors evident in the text. On more than a casual reading,
the simplicity and disturbing silences of the poem will be
alarming precisely because of the embedded contradictions
which have to be considered, though probably not resolved,
by individual readers.

”Mercy“ and “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” are
only two examples of Wright's confrontation with American
culture during the middle decades of this century. These
and others of his poems illustrate a complex and tenuous
interchange between the subjective expressions of poetic
texts and the dominant forces of contemporary culture. His
implicit subversiveness, expressed in the content and
technical aspects of these poems, provides the basis for his
lyric praxis and discloses the broad reaches of ideological
apparatuses. These disclosures, in turn, empower his
readers to “see” the textual elements as emblematic
representations of cultural contradictions and to resist

“self-blinded“ acquiescence with those cultural forces.

Notes

1. I have no way of assessing and documenting the level of
Wright's involvement with the design of Saint Judas, but in
an 11 February 1958 letter to Roethke, which I cannot
legally quote, Wright articulates his desires concerning the
published book's appearance.

Also, for the 1976 publication of Moments of the
Italian Summer, Wright worked closely with the artist Joan
Root who did a number of illustrations for the volume.
Wright's concern for the production and design of his books
was certainly evident by that time.

2. Compare this version with that in the New American Bible:
“‘What!' they exclaimed, ‘You are steeped in sin from your
birth, and you are giving us lectures?‘ With that they
threw him bodily out.“

Wright's Collected Prose includes notes for a sermon
that he delivered in April 1969. Appropriately enough, that
sermon focuses on chapter nine of the gospel of John, whom
Wright refers to as “the dark lyric poet of the Gospels“
(126). Wright includes a parenthetical reminder for himself
in his notes: ”Here, give the Pharisees reply in the King
James version, with its coiling sneer“ (130). It is that
version which Wright used for the cover of Saint Judas.
Wright also offers the following comment about this verse:
“They cast him out. What did they cast him out from? It
was their flawless self-assurance. There is a flaming
scimitar of lightning that swings from one side of Jesus'
body, and it is the clear blade of comedy. He hated no man,
and sinners, who are you and me, delighted him. I believe
with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my mind,
such as it is, that the man born blind was delighted by the
blindness of the Pharisees. They are not to be scorned.

But they are funny. They knew everything except what stared
straight into their faces” (130).

3. For other examples of this sub-genre see "The Horse“ (9),
”The Thieves“ (unc 1958), “On the West Side of the Red
River“ (unc 1977), “Two Horses Playing in the Orchard“
(133), “A Blessing” (143), and possibly even “In Memory of
the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems“ (202).

4. Wright's comments, in the essay “The Stiff Smile of Mr.
Warren,“ about the dramatically effective formal aspects of
Robert Penn Warren's poems are relevant to Wright's own
practice, and worth quoting at length: "The speaker [in the
poem “The Child Next Door"] is trapped in his necessity of
choice; and yet he cannot choose. Between the necessity and
the incapacity the speaker is driven to a point where the
outraged snarl of an animal would have been justified by the

81

82

dramatic context. But this is where the imaginative course
of Mr. Warren's continuous explorations comes in. Instead
of following the music of his lines and the intensity of his
drama into chaos, he suddenly rides the pendulum back to
formality--but this time the formality of the rhythm
includes the formality of the drama, and I think the
strategy is superbly successful. Instead of snarling, the
speaker acknowledges the horror's greeting. He faces the
horror, and his acknowledgement is a perfect embodiment of
what earlier I called a severe and exaggerated

formality ..... It is the exaggerated formality with which a
man faces and acknowledges the concrete and inescapable
existence of an utterly innocent (and therefore utterly
ruthless) reality which is quite capable not only of
crushing him, but also of letting him linger contemplatively
over the sound of his own bones breaking. And the
exaggerated formality is, in the sound and syntax of the
poem, that violence of language which I have described...
(247-8).

5. It is undoubtedly apparent by now that my understanding
of Wright and his work are heavily informed by Walter
Benjamin's essay “The Artist as Producer."

6. I am wary of beginning a ”reading“ of this text, possibly
Wright's most anthologized poem, because I am aware that my
approach to it flies in the face of much recent criticism
which insists on seeing the poem as a self-contained unit,
complete within itself. I am also conscious of Wright's own
comments about the poem. When asked if he was protesting
the football games or ”pointing toward certain positive
qualities which may emerge from such rituals,“ Wright
responded, “I think that there were positive qualities.
Those games were occasions for the expression of physical
grace” (D8 192). It seems to me that focussing on the
“physical grace“ of football players is among the least
productive ways to enter the poem. I can sympathize with
Adorno when, at the beginning of his radio lecture “On Lyric
Poetry and Society,“ he perceptively observed, “You will
suspect that examination of the conditions under which works
are created and their effect will try to usurp the place of
experience of the works as they are and that the process of
categorizing and relating will suppress insight into the
truth or falsity of the object itself“ (37). Hopefully,
though, my reading of “Mercy,” while attending to
specifically “poetic“ techniques and experiences also began
the process of examining Wright's firm roots in American
culture. I will attempt the same with “Autumn Begins in
Martins Ferry, Ohio.“

83

7. A number of Wright's poems specifically address the
economic situation of the poor and working classes: “The
Poor Washed Up By Chicago Winter“ (153), “In Terror of
Hospital Bills” (151), and “Before a Cashier's Window“
(156), to name just a few.

8. My understanding of Wright's “blindness“ is informed in
part by Paul de Man's Blindness and Insi ht, particularly
the essay “The Rhetoric of Blindness" (102-41). De Man
notes, for example, "It is necessary, in each case, to read
beyond some of the more categorical assertions and balance
them against other much more tentative utterances that seem
to come close, at times, to being contradictory to these
assertions“ (102). He also notes, in a comment appropriate
to my concerns about Wright: “The insight seems instead to
have been gained from a negative movement that animates the
critic's [or the writer's] thought, an unstated principle
that leads his language away from its asserted stand,
perverting and dissolving his stated commitment to the point
where it becomes emptied of substance, as if the very
possibility of assertion had been put into question” (103).

CHAPTER THREE

TEE OPPOSITIONAL LIMITS OF DEEP IMAGERY AND
THE POETICS OP AUTHENTICITY

I look over the white sand
Into the hollow cities of girls,
And backward, into blinds,
The satisfied homes by the river.
”Prayers Under Stone“ (unc 1961)

To speak in a flat voice
Is all that I can do.
“Speak” (157)

The one tongue I can write in

Is my Ohioan.
”To the Creature of
the Creation“ (260)

Wright's negative poetics, which attempt to disturb an
individual's relationship with institutionalized power
structures in contemporary culture, focus on the convergence
of subjectivity and objectivity: that indistinct boundary
where the self and world come into contact, where ideologies
permeate the everyday. As we have seen in “Mercy" and
“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," Wright as a poet in
late capitalism is unable to transcend the culture which
informs and defines him, and as evident in “Autumn Begins in

Martin Ferry, Ohio,“ the poet--as an agent of cultural

84

85
production--is separated from other classes in this
capitalist industrial society. Wright's inability to attain
poetic transcendence is not entirely a personal failing on
his part; the restrictions and contradictions confronting
Wright were (and continue to be) shared by other poets
writing during our late capitalist period. As Wright became
engaged in the poetics of Deep Imagery during the late 50s
and early 608, the focus of his poems frequently resisted
socio-historical engagement and turned inward. In “Prayers
Under Stone“ (unc 1961), for example, Wright's vision of
Minneapolis moves progressively inward and away from the
social arena: back into the homes, behind the blinds, within
the names, and eventually into the various faces of the
self. This artistic ambivalence is not exclusively a
“failure” on Wright's part or an unwillingness to confront
his cultural context. Language itself is involved: if we
consider that language, an embodiment of a specific culture,
is both informed and shaped by that culture as well as
informing and shaping the culture, we can better understand
the precarious position that a poet in late capitalism
confronts. Yet we can find poems in which Wright attempts
to “see" tragic aspects of individual lives--often within
the “I,“ where the poet's own life appears divided as it
exists in opposition to the dominant American culture; or to
approach it differently, language itself embodies the

ideological contradictions embedded within the hegemonic

86
discourse and manifest in individual lives.1 This attempt
to establish a visionary realm outside the dominant culture
and uncontaminated by ideological apparatuses, though always
doomed to fail, is most apparent at two diverse moments in
Wright's work: when he most adamantly distrusts language
functions and when he trusts language unflinchingly.
Elkins, aware of Wright's ongoing struggles with language
comments:2
'Wright's ambivalence about language is one of the
most striking features of these early volumes. He
is unable to decide whether he should ignore
language as unnecessary for true knowledge (as he
often did in The Green Wall), distrust language as
a hindrance to real communication, or praise
language as the only means by which we can be
fully human. (44)
For our focus here we can (somewhat arbitrarily) divide
Wright's career into three parts: his early formalist poems
like “Mercy"; his subsequent engagement during the late 50s
and early 60s, together with Robert Bly, in Deep Image
poetics; and finally his emphasis on a poetics of
authenticity during the 70s. Williamson, in a chapter
entitled “Language Against Itself," observes that Wright and
other poets of his generation--Bly, W. S. Merwin, Galway
Kinnell, and Gary Snyder--demonstrated during the 50s “a

special and in some ways hostile attitude toward language

87

itself. Most of these poets share the view that language is
one of the most powerful agents of our socialization,
leading us to internalize our parents', our world's,
definitions...“ (66). This distrust, often verging on the
desire for absolute silence, becomes apparent in poems like
Wright's ”At the Slackening of the Tide” (61):

I would do anything to drag myself

Out of this place:

Root up a seaweed from the water,

To stuff it in my mouth, or deafen me,

Free me from all the force of human speech;

Go drown, almost.
Yet that overwhelming “force” of language also attracts him:
Wright did not silence himself, he continued to both write
and publish. Williamson attributes this ambivalent
relationship to language, so pronounced in Wright's
generation, to their location in literary history: he sees
it as their response to the impersonal, ironic, and highly
rational ”New Critical” poems of the 40s and 508 and the
poets' resultant distrust of strictly literary and rational
norms in an evaluation of poetic texts (67).

Other and possibly even more pervasive reasons for this
ambivalence can be found in late capitalism itself and the
commodification processes which appropriate language as an
advertising tool in the marketplace, substituting the

exchange-value of language for its originary use-value as

88

utterance. Capitalist society, particularly in the mandated
dishonesty implicit in advertising, has an impact on the
”truth-value” and expressive qualities of language.3 Gary
Snyder offers a psycho-sociological explanation when he
observes, “Class-structured civilized society is a kind of
mass ego. To transcend the ego is to go beyond society as
well" (Williamson 66). Snyder and other poets during the
608 correctly, I believe, perceive language as one point of
mediation between the self and society; they wrongly assert,
however, that distrusting the language allows them to “go
beyond society as well.” My contention is the opposite:
Wright's complex relationship and involvement within society
is most apparent in those poems where he fiercely distrusts
and “abuses“ rational linguistic functions and radicalizes
the self-consciousness of the nuclear “1” within the poem.

One of the ways Wright and Bly demonstrate their
distrust of rational language is in their deployment of Deep
Image poetry (sometimes called American Surrealism, Leaping
poetry, or Associational poetry).‘ Dennis Haskell
observes, ”Deep image poetry deliberately attempts to
heighten emotion and render an acuteness of feeling through
dislocation of the reader's expectations. Purposively
irrational so as to get at one's deepest thoughts, it cannot
be understood by rational analysis“ (144). Robert Bly, in
Lghpihg_£ppp;y, explains this irrationality by observing

that Deep Image poetry has freed itself from a restrictive

89

trend that began in the thirteenth century and linked poetry
to “Socratic intelligence“; now, “some of the psychic
ability to fly has been restored" (6). He characterizes
this leaping poetry by observing:

Thought of in terms of language, then, leaping is

the ability to associate fast. In a great ancient

or modern poem, the considerable distance between

the associations, the distance the spark has to

leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling,

their space, and the speed of the association

increases the excitement of the poetry. (4)
By challenging rational linguistic functions, Bly asserts,
Deep Image poetry can “fly.“ We can examine this aspect of
Leaping poetry by looking at an early--and uncollected--
example of Wright's Deep Imagery, a poem appropriately
titled “Flight” (unc 1960). The most conspicuous element of
the poem, like the use of "therefore“ in “Autumn Begins in
Martins Ferry, Ohio,” is not its associational qualities,
but its rational, almost syllogistic organization in spite
of itself:'

I have heard it beginning

Again, the limp wing of the sea, flapping,

As I lie sleepless.

90
Yet that bird is as far from me

As the locomotives rusting

In the coalyards of my childhood.

Trains move outside.

I doze, and ride off toward a slag-pit

On the pushcart

Of a strange old man.
Tfiae imagery is startling in its rapid and unusual
jlxxtaposing of diverse objects--"the limp wing of the sea,”
and “the coalyards of my childhood“--but those imagistic
{innovations are merely decorous additions to the rational
Thut unsupported generalization, a narrative cliche,
Underlying the poem: unable to sleep, the speaker thinks of
his future only to realize that the future, together with
his past, are ”far from me“; distorted elements of that
past, however, do influence his present consciousness when
he falls asleep. “Flight“ is a failed attempt at “psychic
flying“ and does not empower an enhanced visionary capacity
because the text is hindered by its own “limp wing": the
poem is distrustful yet trusting, at the same time, of the
rational function of language. In a 22 March 1979 journal
entry (written in Verona, Italy), Wright displays this same

uneasiness about “flying“ texts and the demands they make on

readers:

91

It occurs to me that a single wild flight right in

the middle of the most prosaic account is best.

It doesn't hurt to lift the reader about a

thousand feet in the air for a moment, and then

ease him down--don't drop him, he's no good to me

dead--back to earth again. (10)
Wright's distrust of language in poems like “Flight" informs
their startling imagistic juxtapositions, but rather than
disturbing a reader's ideological ”blindness“ (by disrupting
language patterns) and trusting that reader to make new
cognitive associations, Wright insist8--through his reliance
on rational language--on gently returning the reader to her
unchanged life. He is afraid to distrust language and risk
allowing his readers to fly and fall. The innovations, as
manifest in this poem, are superficial poetic devices rather
than radicalized revisions of language, the self, and
culture. The poetics of Deep Imagery, in texts like
“Flight,” illustrate a turning away from history and a
radical social disengagement that privileges surface,
imagistic, and egoistic concerns.

In other poems Wright's imagistic displays manifest a
deeper distrust of the rational, including the rational
functions of language: in lines like these, for example,
from "Many of our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black

Child” (210):

92

The long body of his dream is the beginning of

a dark

Hair under an illiterate

Girl's ear.

”The Minneapolis Poem" (147):
A cop's palm
Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs
Of a light bulb.
The soul of a cop's eyes

Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs

Of Juarez, Mexico.

”Twilights' (131):
Locusts are climbing down into the dark green
crevices
Of my childhood. Latches click softly in the

trees. Your hair is gray.

and “Spring Images“ (137):
Two athletes
Are dancing in the cathedral

Of the wind.

The rapid anti-rational associations in poems like these

require and create a free interplay of seemingly discordant

93
images and objects. Whereas the "industrialized“ language
in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio“ is restricted
almost to the point of becoming inarticulate, in these deep
images, language invokes freedom. Walter Benjamin in his
essay about the French Surrealists maintains that they
understand this freedom; they are the first “to liquidate
the sclerotic liberal-moral, humanistic ideal of freedom,
because they are convinced that ‘freedom, which on this
earth can only be bought with a thousand of the hardest
sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness
without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it
lasts...." (189). This literary struggle for freedom and
liberation, as Benjamin--quoting Louis Aragon--correctly
observes, is based on comedy (the same comedic understanding
that informed Wright's comments on the ninth chapter of the
gospel of John, discussed in the previous chapter): “The
thought of all human activity makes me laugh"(185).s
Benjamin also notes the political possibilities inherent in
Surrealism, particularly in its discontinuities and
ecstasies, as well as its “profane illumination" (190) of
daily life. This political and ideological potential is
based not so much on the explicit content of the texts as on
the demands they make from the reader and their inherent
attitude toward information, an attitude which a reader can

learn from the text. These revolutionary possibilities can

be se

SZCCE

p:0c

94
be seen in more detail by looking at another--and more
successful--Deep Image poem by Wright.

First, though, another way we can approach the
radicalized use of language in these dream-like poems is to
read them in the way that Sigmund Freud “reads“ dreams in
The Interpretation of Dreams.6 Freud analyzes and decodes
ways in which the “latent content“--the unconscious drives--
of an individual is dramatically transformed in the
“dream-work“ as it becomes the actual dream, the “manifest
content.“ Part of the dream-work(the “secondary revision“)
entails rendering the dream into a coherent whole: "Dreams
occur which, at a superficial view, may seem faultlessly
logical and reasonable; they start from a possible
situation, carry it on through a chain of consistent
modifications and--though far less frequently-~bring it to a
conclusion which causes no surprise“ (528). However, since
dreams may contain gaps, inconsistencies, ambiguities,
elisions, or absences, it is precisely at these disruptions
and dislocations that Freud begins the search for the
”latent content“ of the dream.

In Wright's Deep Image poems we can follow a similar
procedure: by looking for those symptomatic places in the
text which will let us “read“ the poem's culturally informed
subtexts, places where the false consciousness, assumed to
be universally true, remains unquestioned and thus becomes

apparent (in ways which Wright could not have intended).

95
We, however, must reverse certain procedures in the Freudian
process: Wright was trying to create, as we have seen,
jarring surface images that grab attention and resist
rational explanation, intending those places to be stumbled
over and briefly pondered for multiple associations; rather
than primarily focussing on those locations, let us examine
areas in the poems where Wright intends the reading to be
“easy“--those places where his distrust of language was less
consciously forced and thus more readily assumed.

Wright's uncollected poem “A Lazy Poem on A Saturday
Evening“ (unc 1961) presents a barrage of consciously
crafted images--no metaphors--which are noteworthy for their
initial discontinuity and jarring disturbance of thought,
but like the earlier poem, this text narrates its own
irrationality. The short poem can be quoted in full:

Right now, I am going on a journey

To the kind voice.

In cold pools, below gray sands,

I want to drink.

A lazy girl laughs at me.

The moon lets itself fall into the dark pines.
I think of that strange star

At the center of a pine twig.

Animals are very quiet

As they follow solitary people down paths.

I lie back in the grass, shameless,

96

And surrender to that voice.

My bare forearms are wet

With dew.
Once more we see clusters of nouns that attract attention: a
journey to a voice, pools beneath sand, and stars inside
twigs. They narrate the poet's quest for an internal
presence offering sanctuary; that voice which he seeks,
though hidden, is also not hidden. He hears it, presumably
after a period of time has passed (since dew settles on him,
as he lays in an open patch of grass). "By accepting a
stance of openness and humility and by recognizing the
interdependence of every aspect of the natural world,”
Haskell observes, “the poet can draw on the energy of the
Gott-natur so as to ‘bring news of the universe'“ (150).
Wright stresses his receptivity to the kind voice of this
“natural world,“ and the poem itself offers up “news of the
universe,“ or so he wants us to believe. The title points
to the passivity and leisure necessary to hear this voice.

The language of the text insists upon narration and

resists Wright's attempts to probe subconscious irrational
associations and impulses. In fact, the dream-like images
work together cognitively, in spite of their jarring
juxtapositions and anti-rationalism; focussing on those
images suggests that Wright--in contrast to the laughing
girl--has (with echoes of Whitman) shamelessly resigned

7

himself to a kind and masterful voice. 'The use of

97
dream-like imagery serves two purposes, as Paul Kameen
observes:
The dialectic of the dream has now come full
circle. The psychological poet begins with the
presumption of the primacy of the inside word
which, in its efforts to make a world,
expropriates the outside; in creating itself it
dissolves the world of things. The psyche, as the
site of the dream, is ubiquitous; a new world
emerges through the vehicle of the poem. By an
opposite inversion the transcendental poet begins
with the presumption of the primacy of the outside
and in his efforts to formulate a self he
distributes outward the spaces of his mind; in
creating the outside he dissolves and abandons
himself. The world, as the site of the dream, is
made whole; a new self emerges through the vehicle
of the poem. (47)
This transcendence and re-creation within the poem seem
plausible until we pay less attention to the intoxicating
Deep Images manifest on the surface of the poem. The text
is a prelude to the “kind voice,“ but just when the voice
should speak, the poem becomes silent. Wright's “secondary
revision," his use of disconcerting images, does not hide
the narrative qualities expressed in the poem. Once again,

his distrust of language is only superficial. By focusing

98
on those areas in the poem which are less consciously
crafted, questions about the position of the "I“ again
arise; what do these passages reveal that Wright was trying
to obscure and repress in the noun clusters and diverse
objects? What repressed voices do they express?

Among the voices resonant below the surface of the text
is the voice of that laughing and lazy girl, enjoying her
lazy Saturday by jeering and poking fun.8 Her's, though,
is not the only latent voice: Wright's own voice echoes
”below the gray sands“ of the poem. The "I“ in the poem is
withdrawing into itself, wanting to hear its own kind voice.
But the poet is not simply listening to a quiet animal voice
within him (”Animals are very quiet / As they follow
solitary people down paths); nor is he just relaxing so as
to hear that ”kind voice.“ The poet's role in this poem is
much more active and alarmed: he withdraws from people,
particularly that lazy laughing girl; it is a rout and he
hastily retreats from the girl and society. He wants to
find a private and socially free space within himself. The
images gathered in the poem are not irrational, unconscious,
and leaping images but frenetic attempts to create that
inner sanctuary. “Surrealism's booty is images, to be
sure,“ Adorno notes in his essay, "Looking Back on
Surrealism,“ "but not the invariant, ahistorical images of
the unconscious subject to which the conventional view would

like to neutralize them; rather, they are historical images

99
in which the subject's innermost core becomes aware that it
is something external, an imitation of something social and
historical“ (89). For Wright, that "innermost core” is
insecure and seeks protection. The Freudian "gap“ we are
looking for is at the beginning of the poem: a hole the poet
did not fill: the phrase “Right now." Rather than serenely
and shamelessly “surrendering” to that ”strange star” and
“kind voice,” the poet frantically and impatiently wants to
escape: he yearns for that voice “Right now“ and asserts, “I
want to drink.“ In ”A note on Trakl" introducing Twenty
Poems of George Trakl (published in the same year as ”A Lazy
Poem on a Saturday Evening"), Wright states that Trakl did
not write "according to any ‘rules of construction',
traditional or other, but rather waited patiently and
silently for the worlds of his poems to reveal their own
natural laws“ (9). On the surface, Wright's poem struggles
to achieve a semblance of that silence and serenity, where
consciousness freely floats--flies even--from potent image
to potent image, but in the “cold pools" beneath the
surface, the poet's desperate efforts to enforce silence on
other voices becomes apparent. Wright's poem is not so much
a heteroglot text attentive to a gentle ”Other“ as it is an
attempt at poetic self-domination designed to repress other
voices. In this poem expressing discovery of a private
“strange“ and ”kind“ self beyond society, Wright reveals the

horrors of society and his desire to withdraw. As in his

100
poem “The Jewel” (122), his very urgency in escaping from
society informs his journey. The “lazy” poem is an active
and escapist attempt to suppress one world and create
another, but language itself, which Wright diligently tries
to subvert, betrays that attempt. Adorno, again in the
essay "On Lyric Poetry and Society,” observes,
The ‘1' whose voice is heard in the lyric is an
‘I' that defines and expresses itself as something
opposed to the collective, to objectivity; it is
not immediately at one with the nature to which
its expression refers.... [The poems'] pure
subjectivity, the aspect of them that appears
seamless and harmonious, bears witness to its
opposite, to suffering in an existence alien to
the subject and to love for it as well--indeed,
their harmoniousness is actually nothing but the
mutual accord of this suffering and this
love“ (41).9
In a poem attempting to defy the rationalist nature of
language and suppress certain meanings, Wright's own
relation with language and society become most clear. The
text, then, operates on two levels: one pointing to certain
intoxicating internal resources and energies that he desires
to find (and to a limited extent does actualize) within
himself, the second--to use Benjamin's expression--is a

“profane illumination“ of this everyday need for protection

101
from a hostile outside world. This combination of shameless
intoxication--in which radically new combinations of
disparate elements can, seemingly instantaneously, appear--
and strategic withdrawal is what gives Wright's most
effective Deep Image poems possible political impact and
allows them to illuminate oppressive aspects of contemporary
culture. In Deep Image texts, like “Eisenhower's Visit to
Franco, 1959“ (129), “The Undermining of the Defence
Economy“ (131), and ”Confession to J. Edgar Hoover“ (171),
Wright uses Deep Imagery to make overt political statements
without realizing the political implications expressed in
all successful Deep Image poems.

Leaping poems, like “A Lazy Poem on a Saturday
Evening,“ reveal a poetic strategy in which Wright attempts
to “go beyond society“ by distrusting rational functions of
language; ultimately, though, it is a strategy which shows
how embedded the poet and language are in the dominant
culture. Wright's Deep Image poem8--by their very attempt
to withdraw into the mythical depths of subjective
privacy"L-lead to a forfeiture of that mythic self and
foreground instead the areas of tension between society and
self. Deep Image texts, when rooted in an anti-rational
freedom, offer a truly oppositional poetics, but when the
texts are informed by superficial novelty, solipsism, and
escapist desires, they merely affirm the impossible desire

to escape contemporary society.

102
By the mid-sixties, Wright's texts were moving

progressively further from the radical anti-rationality of
Deep Imagery on a journey, this time, to a different “kind
voice": the spoken and idiomatic diction Wright remembers
and associates with his childhood in Martins Ferry, Ohio: as
he observes in “To the Creature of the Creation“ (260), ”The
one tongue I can write in / Is my Ohioan.” From the early
708 until his death Wright attempts to create a different
poetics, one rooted in a carefully crafted plain style--'a
flat voice" (“Speak" [157])--of studied artlessness and an
implicit reliance on the powers of language itself.” When
Wright ceases to thoroughly distrust language and decides to
rely on the “pure clear word,“ when he unself-consciously
trusts language and allows language itself to speak, his
later poems provide new attempts to achieve visionary
glimpses.‘12 The “New Poems“ section of the Qpiigghgg_gggm§
includes the text “Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem
by a Black Child“ (210) in which the third section of the
poem, entitled ”Learning from MacDiarmid,“ begins with the
often quoted lines describing Wright's “new“ poetic:13

The kind of poetry I want to write is

The poetry of a grown man.

The young poets of New York come to me with

Their mangled figures of speech,

But they have little pity

For the pure clear word.

103

I know something about the pure clear word,

Though I am not yet a grown man.

And who is he?
Wright, forty-four years old when the poem was published,
questions whether he or anyone else is “grown” enough to use
the "pure clear word.““ His fear of inadequacy is based
on an awareness of the powers of language or, as he observes
in ”Inscription for the Tank“ (149), “words, caught and
frisked naked” can be so gripping that “the plainest thug
who read them / Would cluck with the ancient pity." For
Wright, that clarity entails stripping away "poetic” diction
and formal conventions not appropriately expressive for a
given poem. It is, in a sense, Wright the full-fledged
modern poet (as discussed in chapter one) returning to a
neo-classicism that he rediscovered in the poetics of
Horace; it also includes, for Wright, the possibility of
turning to prose itself and melding prose poems which
privilege a specific level of clarity:15

I would like to write something that would be

immediately and prosaically comprehensible to a

reasonably intelligent reader. That is all. That

is all I mean by being clear, but it is very

difficult for me. This is a Horatian idea. It is

the attempt to write, as one critic said once of

the extraordinary and beautifully strong writer

Katherine Anne Porter, so that “every one of her

104

effects is calculated but they never give the

effect of calculation." (DS 216)
Integral to the issue of clarity is concern for audience: in
a desire to be understood Wright was stripping away those
poetic techniques and devices which he thought would detract
from direct communication with his readers. After years of
writing with consciously shaped formal diction and creating
arational Deep Images distrustful of language, this
acceptance of the ”pure clear word" was an embrace of the
expressivity of language: ”I really do believe that there
is, in language, something like a power to heal itself, to
right itself. Language is a living thing, a part of A
ourselves, and, as such, I think that the notion among the
evangelists of the word as flesh is a very, very complex and
important living idea" (DS 223). Wright offers an example
of that power of language by describing an experience during
one of Mario Procacino's campaigns for mayor of New York
City:16 Procacino, Wright states, while in Harlem addressed
a black audience by saying,

“My heart is as black as yours!” Now he didn't

mean phhp. He didn't intend it to sound the way

it sounded to that audience and to you and to me.

But he said it. It is almost as if the language

cried out, save me. Somebody save me. We do have

a wonderful language in America. (DS 224,

Wright's emphasis)

105
Wright's attempts to save that American language by
foregrounding in his texts the “pure clear word" are notable
for their recognizably simple, colloquial diction and
sentence structure and are evident in the prose poem ”Cold
Summer Sun, Be With me Soon“ (page 205) which begins:
I wanted to write something that you could
understand, as Dr. Williams said.
So naturally the God damned kitchen light
bulb burned out just as it got dark outside.
Here I am, sitting at day break, which is of
course gray. A
It is raining.
Wright--like William Carlos Williams--emphasizes prosodic
clarity and the difficulties of achieving it (”naturally the
God damned kitchen light bulb burned out“); in this text,
the metrical unit becomes that of the sentence, rather than
the line, thus enabling the poet to foreground comprehensi-
bility rather than technical and formal devices. In texts
such as this one, his concern with the “pure clear word"
extends beyond prosody: like Wordsworth and Coleridge (as
well as Williams) before him, Wright attempts to capture the
rhythms of daily speech: the “sense of music in the American
language, the music of speech and the music of song.“"
That does not mean, however, writing poetry devoid of ideas
or complexity. It is, instead, an attempt to affirm the

areas where the individual is embedded in nature, community,

106

and culture; in “Cold Summer Sun, Be With Me Soon“ Wright
attempts to produce a dialogue that includes all three
elements:

It is raining.

You haven't come out yet.

And neither have I.

Where does that leave me?

Where does that leave you?

Oh, come on out, for God's sake.
Though Wright is aware of the absence of an immediate
audience and the presence of inhospitable nature (“It is
raining“), his dialogue breaks down: “I can't write a damned
thing, which was all I wanted to do. / And all I wanted to
do was write something you could understand.“ Though this
text documents a failed attempt to establish contact with
his audience, it also reveals his renewed trust in language,
or as Wright himself expresses it, ”In this kind of poetry
there is involved a willingness on the part of the poet to
trust the language a little more, and perhaps to trust
nature, trust other living things“ (HM 166). What becomes
evident in this poetry of a grown man is the renewed level
of confidence in the power of language to convey both ideas
and establish a personal involvement between poet and

audience; equally evident is a distrust of artificial

107
literary devices which call attention to themselves as being
”poetic.“

This distrust is jarring, at times, when Wright
foregrounds his own resistance to artificiality and the mere
poetic: in “Emerson Buchanan" (253), he notes, for example,
that ”Franklin Pierce will scan“ and “Publius Vergilius Maro
scans“ while Emerson Buchanan “is one half-hendecasyllabic,
/ And almost an amphibrach“; in “She's Awake“ (259) Wright
comments "All I had to do was delete the words lonely and
shadow, / Dispose of the dactylic hexameters into
amphibrachs...," while in “The Offence“ (204) he draws
attention to "the difficult, the dazzling / Hendeca-
syllabic.“ These meta-poetic devices help to create an
illusion of reality, a semblance of transparency, and the
impression of sincerity for both the reader and the poet by
distancing them from the idea of the poem as an artificial
construct (which is what poetry is) and asserting instead
the immediate communicative value of the text. Wright's
relationship with his audience also pushes at the limits of
poetic decorum: besides invoking specific targeted
individuals who are not held in high esteem, like the
convicted murderer George Doty and the drunks of Belaire,
Ohio in “At the Executed Murderer's Grave“ (82), in several
other poems, he verbally assaults his audiencefi“ Like
Brecht's use of “alienation effects,“ Wright attempts to

increase his readers' awareness that they are reading a

108

poem; rather than trying to destroy the illusion of poetic
texts as real and transparent communication, Wright's
attacks (a rear-guard defense) seem designed to display his
sincerity and “win“ readers' trust. By breaking down the
normal author-reader barriers, these hostile outbursts
invoke collaborative reader participation. He demonstrates
this antagonism by directly challenging reader involvement:

Nobody else will follow

This poem but you,

But I don't care.

“The Idea of the Good“ (179)

"Reader, alone, die. Die in the cold”

“Emerson Buchanan“ (253)

Hell, I ain't got nothing.

Ah, you bastards,

How I hate you.

'Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism“ (222)

If you do not care one way or another about
The preceding lines,
Please do not go on listening

On any account of mine.

109

Please leave the poem.

Thank you.

*********

I have a little time left, Jack.

I don't know what you want.

But I know what I want.

“Many of Our Waters“ (210)

This belligerence supports the illusion of sincere and
direct communication, as if the poet is immediately and
unmediatedly present behind or within his transparent words.
The antagonism, however, can also be understood as a
manifestation of the poet's alliance with the poor and
working classes. If his audience is assumed to be
academically informed or affiliated, as we will discuss in
chapters four and five, Wright's confrontational tone
challenges their own complicity with capitalist culture at
the expense of the poor, the marginalized, and the
uneducated.

Once again, though, Wright's stance is not consistent;
though he continues this technique of speaking to his
readers directly, the tone of that apostrophe radically
differs: he addresses, in a variety of poems, readers as

friends and peers:

110
Reader,
We had a lovely language,
We would not listen.

“Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism“ (222)

You, you, if you read this,

I wouldn't have you think

I would give up the kiss

Of strong drink.

“The Last Drunk“ (228)

This use of a benign direct address is possibly more
effective at inviting audience members to participate in the
activity of reading the text than the earlier antagonistic
addresses, but it can also lull them into a passive,
complicitous participation and remove, at least in part, the
indictments previously leveled against them. The kindly
acknowledgement of the audience implies a level of sincerity
and trust between the audience and the poet, but Wright's
vacillations in his relationship with his readers reflect an
uneasiness on his part--a discomfort with that audience and
a dissatisfaction with his bonds to them. It reveals, like
the pursuit of mythic privacy in his Deep Image poems, a
desire to return to pre-industrial relations with his
audience, relations founded on the poet's direct and
immediate communication. This focus on the poetic self as a

privileged site is also an inward turning, positing the

lll
social isolation of the poet. Equally significant, it is a
movement away from public discourses, judged to be false and
illusory; it invokes, instead, an idiomatic and vernacular
discourse that is assumed to be transparent and authentic.
The effectiveness of this poetic stance is limited by the
naivete of its linguistic assumptions about transparency and
the privileging of the personal poetic voice above other

forms of discourse.‘19

If we choose, though, to accept
Wright's belief in the “pure clear word,“ we still need to
address what social practices and ideologies those words
express (and conceal), or, as Eagleton observes, “... [T]he
conformist, ‘transparent' text is in part to be judged in
the light of that to which it ‘conforms'" (79).

In spite of the limitations inherent in this poetics,
Wright's trust in language and abandonment to the “pure
clear word“are important because they allow him to again
confront ideological structures by attempting to “see“ and
present individual lives shaped by the contradictions
inherent in the dominant American culture. That attention
to clarity and sincerity reveals the murky social underbelly
permeating texts like 'Heraclitus' (unc 1975), a poem whose
structure and allusions hinge on contradiction.

On the dust jacket for Tyg_gipigghp (published two
years before "Heraclitus“) Wright states,

Two Citizens is an expression of my patriotism, of

my love and discovery of my native place. I never

112
knew or loved my America so well, and I began with
a savage attack on it. Then I discovered it. It
took the shape of a beautiful woman who loved me
and who led me through France and Italy. I
discovered my America there. That is why this is
most of all a book of love poems. The two
citizens are Annie and I.
In “Heraclitus,” this poem of contrasts, Wright again
discovers America in Europe, but this time it takes the form
of two boys, Harry Schultz and Patsy di Franco. This “love“
poem, like Two Citizens, begins with an attack: ”My
beautiful America, vast in its brutality, and brutal in its
vastness.“ The rest of the text examines the natural and
social aspects of this conflation of vastness, brutality,
and beauty. It becomes an exploratory narrative and an
elegy for the tragic lives quietly forgotten in this
country : 2°

One evening beside the river, only its name.
Only one river, the Ohio, that is the loneliest
river in the world.

Patsy di Franco sank down into the time of
the river and stayed. Joe Bumbico jumped naked
into the suck hole and dragged up Harry Schultz.

I started to cry.
A cop gouged his fists into Harry's kidneys.

He must have thought they were lungs.

113

The Ohio River is, in this text, a malevolent version of
Heraclitus's river, where a person can never step into the
same water twice: it becomes the “loneliest river in the
world,“ and it seeks to fill that loneliness by absorbing
those who are living. For Heraclitus, the river is a
metaphor for benevolent change; it, like time, is always in
a state of flux: constantly emptying, constantly filling.
The Ohio River, though, is less benevolent: while filling
itself with Patsy, swallowing him into its own flux and
time, it empties itself of Harry Schultz, who was rescued.
This perpetual change and incessant activity form a suck
hole that swallows Patsy and Harry. It is an elemental
force--sometimes natural and sometimes social--but it is the
same suck hole that swallows Hobie Johnson in ”The River
Down Home“ (172)

Under the enormous pier-shadow,

Hobie Johnson drowned in a suckhole.

I cannot even remember

His obliterated face.
and Jenny in “To the Muse“ (175) (”...the only way I can get
you to come up / Out of that suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you / What you know”). This
river with its whirling suck holes is like vast and brutal
America, swallowing individual lives.

Change, for Heraclitus, always involves an active--

sometimes warring--interplay of opposites; in the poem, that

114

dialectical war takes on social dimensions: Patsy moves
downward while Harry was “dragged up“; the cop attempts to
save Harry by puncturing his kidneys; the poet's pleasure
trip from Paris to Vienna takes “less time“ than Patsy will
have with ”the time of the river”; the adult poet continues
to relive his own childhood experience. Even the form of
the text brings apparent opposites together: prose and
poetry. When the adult speaks, it is in the flowing lines
of prose, but the boy sputters poems:

Harry couldn't talk plain.

Harry puked. 1

I loved Harry, he was one of my best friends.

Harry, Harry.

Are you still alive?
In “Heraclitus' Wright's “poetry of a grown man“ is
transformed into the prose of adulthood, and it coexists--
rather than merging--with the poetry of childhood: the two
styles are juxtaposed, their contradictions never resolved.
In fact, none of the various conflicting elements within the
poem peacefully combine: the boys continue fighting the
river, swimming all the way across, trying to bridge the
opposite shores with their bodies, though they have to do it
“through a tear on a dead face.“ That “tear“ is the
punctured body of Harry Schultz, and it is a teardrop on
Wright's own “dead face“ when he “started to cry.“ He

mourns not because America is really dead, but because it is

115
still alive, still consuming individuals--those on the
riverbed still fighting upward and those on the top (riding
the waves) still standing on the heads and backs of those
beneath them. The contradictions remain. Adorno observes,
again in “Cultural Criticism and Society,“ that a successful
work "is not one which resolves objective contradictions in
a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of
harmony, in its innermost structure” (32). In “Heraclitus”
opposing forces push the poem apart at its seams, even as
they form the structure, unity, and content of the text. As
an embodiment of late capitalism, the poem contains the same
unresolved conflicts apparent in the culture itself. Mandel
has observed, “The ideology of ‘technological rationality'
mystifies the reality of late capitalism by claiming that
the system is capable of overcoming all the fundamental
socio-economic contradictions of the capitalist mode of
production.... [L]ate capitalism has not, and cannot,
accomplish this“ (505-6).

"Heraclitus' strives for authenticity by foregrounding,
in highly mediated and constructed ways, the "transparent“
personal voice of the poet. What we see in the poem, when
Wright unhesitantly trusts his language by momentarily
forgetting himself and “seeing" Harry and Patsy, are the
stark suck holes and inherent polarities in America itself.
Even the awe-inspiring and the repulsive interchange in the

chiasmas ”Vast in its brutality, and brutal in its vastness"

116
points to those contradictions. When Wright trusts the
“pure clear word" and presents “the river, only its name,“
that name--a word--opens like an umbrella to a frightening
view of isolation ("I swam... with my friends hiphg') amid a
culture that exists by reducing people to their primal
selves (“jumped naked into the suck hole“), forcing them to
save one person and leave another (“Patsy...stayed' / Harry
was “dragged up”), motivating them to combine opposing
forces ("swim all the way across”), and asking the living to
commune with the dead (“Are you still alive? / Who? Me? I
ain't not“). As Adorno has observed, language itself
contains social voices:
...[T]he highest lyric works are those in which
the subject, with no remaining trace of mere
matter, sounds forth in language until language
itself acquires a voice. The unself-consciousness
of the subject submitting itself to language as to
something objective, and the immediacy and
spontaneity of that subject's expression are one
and the same: thus language mediates lyric poetry
and society in their innermost core. This way the
lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in
society when it does not chime in with society,
when it communicates nothing, when, instead, the

subject whose expression is successful reaches an

117

accord with language itself, with the inherent

tendency of language. (“Lyric' 43)
In “Heraclitus” when the poet forgets himself and lets Harry
speak, language talks, almost in spite of Wright's own
mediated presence. Among the many contrasts and opposing
tendencies apparent in ”Heraclitus," that presence of the
poet is not the least: by 1975, when the poem was published,
Wright had been the recipient of numerous awards--including
a Fulbright Scholarship, a Kenyon Review Poetry Fellowship,
the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the Borestone Poetry
Award, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Award, the Brandeis
Poetry Award, the Pulitzer Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation
Grant, an Ingram-Merrill Grant, two Guggenheim Fellowships,
the Longview Foundation Award, the Ohioana Award in Poetry,
the Melville Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America,»
an honorary doctorate from Kenyon College, an invitation to
the White House Festival for poets, an invitation to join
the Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters, and a
fellowship from the American Academy of Poets. He was
living in New York City, but still thinking and writing
about Martins Ferry, Ohio. The man situating himself in
opposition to the dominant American culture and writing
about Harry who “couldn't talk plain" was a full professor
in the English department of Hunter College, active in one

of the institutions which perpetuates that culture.

Notes

1. It has become a cliche in Wright criticism to talk about
his empathy for the socially marginalized, the outsiders;
though that concern is important in his texts, here I am
talking about a much more specific and complex approach to
that work: an analysis of language as a determining agent
for the content of the poem, as well as the construction of
the poet himself, in their relation to the dominant culture.

2. As is true of many issues being addressed here, this
confrontation with language is not unique to Wright. It is
a central issue for all poets, and the various ways writers
attempt to resolve this ongoing struggle are everywhere
evident in their texts. The work of Wright's immediate
peers--including Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin,
and Donald Hall--8hare Wright's mixed involvement and
response to current linguistic possibilities.

3. Hayden Carruth, in a discussion of technological
influences on poetry, observes, “What seems far more
important is a development related to electronic technology,
but fundamentally not a part of it: the growing distrust of
language in general.... Constantly we are told that this or
that commercial product or service, or even this or that
candidate for office, is ‘better,’ when we know it cannot be
true.... Children are taught today, in lessons compounded
every five minutes, that untruth may be uttered with
impunity, even with approval. Lying has become a way of
life, very nearly phg way of life, in our society. The
average adult American of average intelligence and average
education believes almost nothing communicated to him in
language, and the disbelief has become so ingrained that he
or she does not even notice it“ (739, Carruth's emphasis).

In the uncollected foreword to a book of poems by H. R.
Hays, Wright also attests to the impact of advertizing: “I
speak to patriots. Poetry has not yet been a way of life in
these states. It is true that at present we have two or
three great poets among us, in exactly the same sense that
we have two or three great movie stars among us, and two or
three great politicians.... Each of these is the concoction
of advertising. Holy America, who dreamed so well“
(unpaginated).

Marjorie Perloff. in MW
in the Age of Medih, also discusses the effects of
advertising and commercial imaging upon poetry. See
especially pages 60-79.

4. A great deal of critical attention has addressed this
aspect of Wright's and Bly's careers, particularly focussing
on ”the strong influence of poets outside of the

118

119

Anglo-American tradition“ (Elkins 69). A number of the
uncollected translations which I have been gathering support
that view, but since my main point is not the originary
basis for Deep Imagery, I will only discuss Wright's
original poems and their relation to my thesis. For more
information about this topic, see Dougherty, Stein, and
Elkins.

5. Wright repeatedly made the same observation about the
comedy (and sense of freedom) underlying Surrealism. In his
interview with Smith, for example, he states, "The French
Surrealists...understood that Dadaism and Surrealism were
comic reactions to certain preestablished conventions of
rationality in writing. They started to be deliberately
irrational. They were able to write good poems when in one
way or another they were comic. Americans who have tried to
follow the Surrealistic way don't get the joke“ (DS 207).

6. In his essay “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,“
found in On Creativit and the Unconscious, Freud introduces
the idea that a poet's work can be understood as a type of
play, fantasy, and daydream. Following the lead of the
Frankfurt School, I am attempting to cross-fertilize my own
more philosophical interests in Deep Image poetics with a
Freudian, psychoanalytical approach to the texts.

7. That calm silence and attentiveness to an instructive
voice can also be found in a text by a writer Wright greatly
admired. The first dialogue in Jacob Boehme's pihigghgp_gh

the Supersensual Life states:
Disciple How can I hear him speak

Master When thou standest still from the
thinking of Self, and the willing of Self....
...Nothing truly but
thine own willing, hearing, and
seeing...do hinder thee from
coming to this supersensual state.
(quoted in Haskell 149)

8. Diane Wood Middlebrook in her biography of Anne Sexton
discusses a poem Wright wrote for Sexton entitled “Lazy on a
Saturday Morning” (133). It is a text which Wright later
published, with a slightly revised title, but did not
include in his various volumes: “Saturday Morning” (unc
1962). It seems plausible (though insupportable) that “Lazy
Poem on a Saturday Evening” is a companion piece to the
earlier text and that either the “kind voice“ or the “lazy
girl" in the “evening poem“ is Sexton.

120

9. In the same essay, Adorno notes, ”Today, when individual
expression, which is the precondition for the conception of
lyric poetry that is my point of departure, seems shaken to
its very core in the crisis of the individual, the
collective undercurrent in the lyric surfaces in the most
diverse places...“ (46).

10. The best evaluation of this aspect of Deep Image poetry
is in Paul Breslin's essay "How to Read the New Contemporary
Poem.“ Breslin states, for example, ”The ascendancy of the
new [Deep Image] poetry represents a giving up on the
outside world, a retreat from psycho-politics into a
solipsistic religion of the unconscious. ...[It is an]
attempt to recover innocence and faith at any cost, even the
abolition of social reality and the conscious self...“ (45).

11. Hass makes the witty observation that Wright's lines
“The one tongue I can write in / Is my Ohioan" are “based,
presumably, on the well-known Ohio habit of speaking in off-
rhymed couplets“ (51).

12. Wright's emphasis during the 708 on the “pure clear
word“ led to a new “plain style“ poetics that he had begun
to develop since the late 508. This plain style has since
become a norm in itself, a poetic of personal voice
frequently associated with creative writing workshops.
Charles Altieri offers the most poignant criticism of this
“scenic mode“ by describing it as the predominant poetic
style: “A typical contemporary litany is easy to reproduce:
Craft must be made unobtrusive so that the work appears
spoken in a natural voice; there must be a sense of urgency
and immediacy to this ‘affected naturalness' so as to make
it appear that one is reexperiencing the original event;
there must be a ‘studied artlessness' that gives a sense of
personal sincerity; and there must be a strong movement
toward emphatic closures.... The work places a reticent,
plain-speaking, and self-reflective speaker within a
narratively presented scene evoking a sense of loss“ (10).
Altieri accurately observes that “we have paid an enormous
price for our poets' commitments to the expressive norm of
sincerity...“ (200). That price, it seems to me, includes
an effective oppositionality.

13. Wright alludes to a long poem by Hugh MacDiarmid,
entitled ”The Kind of Poetry I Want,” which discusses at
length possible roles of poetry in a scientific, industrial,
and technological culture. MacDiarmid says, in part:

121

A poetry not for those who do not love a gaping pig

Or those made mad if they behold a cat

And least, those who, when the bagpipe sings i' the
nose,

Cannot contain their urine.

...a poetry that stands for production, use, and
life,

As opposed to property, profits, and death.

(1021; 1023)

14. Wright's adherence to a poetic of transparency--'the
pure clear word”--stands in direct contrast to the views of
current theorists and poets like Charles Bernstein and Ron
Silliman; their insistence on the materiality of words is an
attempt, as Bernstein observes, to "make language opaque so
that writing becomes more and more conscious of itself as
world generating, object generating“ (41). Similarly,
Eagleton observes, ”The function of criticism is to refuse
the spontaneous presence of the work--to deny that
‘naturalness' in order to make its real determinants appear“
(101). Also see Steve McCaffery's “Writing as a General
Economy" and Alan Golding's ”Language-Bashing Again.“

Anthony Easthope, from a linguistic perspective, also
challenges the ”transparency” of language: “If signifiers
have an autonomy and determining action of their own, the
signifier is not transparent in respect of the signified,
not merely a passive means of communication“ (10). Also see
Easthope's discussion of transparency in Alexander Pope's
“The Rape of the Lock“ (110-21).

15. The emergence of prose poems during this period, by a
‘variety of stylistically different posts, is an issue far
too large for me to explore here, but its significance to
postmodern poetry needs to be considered. Stephen Fredman
appropriately observes, “I have felt for a number of years
that the most talented poets of my own postwar generation
and an increasing number from previous generations have
turned to prose as a form that, in its pliancy and its
linguistic density, seems to promise ‘a faithful
reproduction of the exquisite and terrible scene that
stretches around us" (1). For more information on this
topic--though not specifically addressing Wright--see

Fredman's Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Versg.

16. Wright also published a poem about Procacino, “The
Divine Mario“ (unc 1975).

17. This quotation is taken from Wright's statement about
his poetics--entitled “From a Letter'--published in hghgg
Poetry. In this “letter“ Wright discusses Williams as well

122

as his own poetic practices: ”During the past few months I
had occasion to read several of Dr. William's discussions of
prosody pretty thoroughly, and I have yet to make any usable
sense out of his phrase ‘the variable foot.’ He had a
perfectly tuned ear; he could write in the ‘musical phrase'
that Pound asked for, though his poems are capable of
including many more different kinds of music than Pound....
I have been trying to grope my way toward something which I
cannot yet describe, but whose interest, if any, is not
limited to the concerns of prosody and form" (287).

18. Much critical attention has focussed recently on the use
of apostrophe in the lyric. See, for example, essays in
Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker's Lyric Poetry Beyond New
Criticism. Cynthia Chase's essay in that volume offers the
following comment about apostrophe: "For what the address
does is to claim the existence of an addressee capable of
hearing it: capable of giving ear, of giving voice, to a
text; passing from a sign to a sound and a sense; passing
between cognition and perception. The trope of address, a
prosopopoeia, institutes the intelligibility of language by
engendering the figure of a reader" (212, Chase's emphasis).
Chase, like Wright, sees apostrophe as a way to invoke the
presence of readers.

19. Much critical attention has focussed on creative writing
workshops as a source for the privileging of the personal
voice, an idea which I will discuss at greater length in
chapter five. Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's “The
Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop“ provides a good
summation of the theoretical concerns underlying my views
about Wright's poetics of authenticity.

20. In “Childhood Sketch“ Wright describes the incident
which the poem is based upon: “Many lives were lost to the
river, and a few were saved. My friend Harry Schultz, who
was in the first-grade class with me at the old Central
School, got caught in a suck-hole one afternoon just above
the Terminal Bridge (long since condemned), and maybe he
'would have drowned; but a strong and courageous boy named
Joe Bumbico saved him. At the same time and place, little
Patsy di Franco was lost. Even Joe Bumbico couldn't find
him...” (332). The poem "A Flower Passage” (354) discusses
one of the divers responsible for pulling people from the
river, and ”Young Good Man“ (230) also mentions the diver
John Shrunk.

CHAPTER POUR

A REAR-GUARD DEFENSE OF THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OP POETRY

I have gone past all those times when the poets
Were beautiful as only
The rich can be.

“In Memory of Leopardi“ (168)

I croon my tears at fifty cents per line.
Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who
Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago
Can do without my widely printed sighing
Over their pains with paid sincerity.
“At the Executed Murderer's Grave“
Saint Judas (82)

As for money, I am mad about it. Let me take
this opportunity to announce to readers of Th;
American Poetr Review, and also to my numerous
acquaintances... that I would be absolutely
delighted to receive any money they would care to
send me, not only for the sake of my stunning good
looks but also for the sake of my irresistible
vivacity and charm. Any denominations will do
just fine, from a penny right on up to a thousand
dollar bill. No cheques, please.1

The 408, 508, and 608 proved to be a time of radical
transformation for the production of American poetry.
Beginning with Robert Frost and continuing with the
generation of Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, poets turned
to colleges and universities for financial support,
primarily as instructors of writing, though also as journal

123

124

editors and teachers of literature (usually courses on
modern poetry).2 By the mid-sixties creative writing
programs employing published poets and writers were common
at academic institutions, and Wright's position as a
“university poet“ was not unique among contemporary American
poets: David Wagoner, Kenneth Koch, John Hollander, Louis
Simpson, William Stafford, Daniel Hoffman, and other
“professional“ poets made their living--like Wright--as
professors of literature. Similarly, poets such as James
Dickey, David Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Eberhart,
W. D. Snodgrass, Richard Wilbur, John Logan, and Robert
Lowell--among many others--were tenured professors of
creative writing (Kostelanetz, Old Poetries 39). This
movement of the production site of poetry to academic
institutions, with their power structures and cultural
capital, has had an impact upon the types and quality of
‘writing being produced, an impact evident in Wright's work.

Wright's precarious position in twentieth century
American industrial society becomes even more complex and
ambiguous when we realize, as Janet Wolff observes, that "it
has hgyp; been true, and it is not true today, that the
artist has worked in isolation from social and political
constraints of a direct or indirect kind“ (27, Wolff's
emphasis). With this in mind, we need to explore in greater
detail one of the major socio-political organizations with

which Wright was aligned: academic institutions, including

125
primarily the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis,
Macalester College, and Hunter College. We must also
consider Wright's involvement in the social and labor
relations within the academic community, as well as his
political and social position as a cultural authority and
producer at a time when the academy was rapidly expanding.3
Concern about the influence of institutions on
literature is not new. In his essay “The Literary Influence
of Academies“ Matthew Arnold bemoans the absence in England
of an institution equivalent to the French Academy because
an institution owing its existence to a national
bent towards the things of the mind, towards
culture, towards clearness, correctness and
propriety in thinking and speaking, and, in its
turn, promoting this bent,--8ets standards in a
number of directions, and creates, in all these
directions, a force of educated opinion, checking
and rebuking those who fall below these standards,
or who set them at nought. (266)
Arnold purports that the value of an institution like this
resides in its ability to create a “sort of centre and
rallying-point" (267) for culture and intelligence and a
“centre of correct information, correct judgment, correct
taste“ (269). He clearly spells out the value of this

authority for defining and maintaining critical standards,

126
but he also points to other repercussions of such an
academy:
It is not that there do not exist in England, as
in France, a number of people perfectly well able
to discern what is good, in these things, from
what is bad, and preferring what is good; but they
are isolated, they form no powerful body of
opinion, they are not strong enough to set a
.standard, up to which even the journeyman-work of
literature must be brought, if it is to be
vendible. (267, emphasis added)
Part of the power for such an institution in a capitalist
economy is its influence and power in the marketplace by
setting the boundaries for what defines an officially
sanctioned poetry.‘

Implicit in Arnold's discussion of the “literary
influence of academies," of course, is the power which that
academy exerts over the formation of literary canons and
issues of hermeneutics. In the last three decades that
power in North America has been exercised not by a central
academy5 but by the professional academic institution. "If
we wanted to describe its actual social existence,“ Frank
Kermode asserts, "we should get involved in a complex
account of its concrete manifestations in universities,

colleges, associations of higher learning; and if we wanted

to define its authority we should have to consider not only

 

127
its statutory right to confer degrees and the like, but also
the subtler forms of authority acquired and exercised by its
senior and more gifted members“ (168-9). Much has been
written about the authority of this loosely organized
”academy" over literary, ideological, and methodological
issues: Kermode, for example, presents a case, though
possibly more reserved than it needs to be, for the social
hierarchy within the institution, as well as the
institution's control over which texts get read and how they
are interpreted.‘

Again, though, the influence of this institution
extends beyond internal hierarchies and exegetical
questions. Universities, as the ”caretakers“ of knowledge
and cultural works, control the reception, interpretation,.
and reproduction of texts. In a capitalist economy they
function as brokers in cultural exchanges and are holders of
a unique form of power--professors exist as authorities
juxtaposed to the more influential monetary agents and other
cultural producers like musicians, artists, and poets.
Pierre Bourdieu, referring to French academic institutions,
describes this position of the academic in late capitalism:

As ghphgpihiph, whose position in social space
depends principally on the possession of cultural
capital, a subordinate form of capital, university
lprofessors are situated rather on the side of the

subordinate pole of the field of power and are

128
clearly opposed in this respect to the managers of
industry and business. But, as holders of an
institutionalized form of cultural capital, which
guarantees them a bureaucratic career and a
regular income, they are opposed to writers and
artists: occupying a temporally dominant position
in the field of cultural production, they are
distinguished by this fact, to differing degrees
according to the faculties, from the occupants of
the less institutionalized and more heretical
sectors of the field (and especially from the
‘independent' or ‘freelance' writers and artists,
as opposed to those who belong to the university).
(36, author's emphasis)
University professors, then, are cultural producers and
intellectual laborers who occupy a social space distinct
from and, he suggests, in opposition to that of artists,
industrialists, and manual laborers. The power that they
have, though, is not only “cultural capital“: it includes
direct financial and socio-political ties.7 In Thg_gpyg§
hiipp, C. Wright Mills argues that in the 508 “the
university, while pretending to be a haven for the exercise
of reason in the pursuit of knowledge, was becoming a
research and development center for big business and the
military. Instead of providing a liberal education...the

universities were beginning to train technicians,

129
concentrating on the skills demanded by the centers of
power“ (J. Breslin 4). Yet it would be inaccurate, as
Bourdieu demonstrates, to consider universities as
homogenous: the various departments and faculties operate
with different critical standards, pay scales, work loads,
and activities; and individuals within a given department
have liberties and options.

A discussion of Wright's position as a “university
poet,“ then, must involve confining our perimeters of study
even more and focusing on English departments as specific
production sites within universities. Evan Watkins in flggh
Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural
yhihg discusses the complex relations of English departments
to culture. He situates English departments within the
university structures:

...English typically is one of the larger
departments in both secondary- and university-
level educational institutions. And at some
point, almost everyone is required to take a
course in English. In another sense, however,
that size is deceptive. For just as typically,
English is not intra-institutionally as powerful
as its size would suggest, and English faculty on
the university level are not paid on the same
scale as faculty in a great many other depart-

ments. Further, the size of English is rarely if

130
ever proportionate to the total amount of labor
time--student, faculty, clerical, administrative--
generated by courses in literatu;e....
[L]iterature and literary study is highly
privileged work for permanent faculty in
English.... (20)
Within institutional politics, Watkins asserts, English is
not as powerful as certain other disciplines: Bourdieu
points to law and medicine faculties in France as being more
prominent dealers of cultural capital (55-59). Wright's
position in the academy as a professor of literature,
primarily nineteenth century British fiction, is a
privileged position, more “powerful“ than the position of
professors teaching creative writing.8 'Though the
“cultural capital,“ to use Bourdieu's term, can assist in
the reproduction of the values and ideology supporting the
dominant classes, that authority can also be used to promote
cultural resistance. Wetkins localizes English departments
within the institution and addresses the specific nature of
the work being done there:
English, however, is situated in a perhaps unique
position to function as a place of educative
pighhhgpp of knowledge and strategies, to affirm
and encourage a multiplicity of directions, of
work resistances elsewhere--to educate a support

structure, including ourselves, for resistance.

131
For there is perhaps nothing else located to do
that job in quite the same way. That is, the very‘
pervasiveness of English departments in the social
circulation of people in the United States, if
necessary to the distribution of race, class, and
gender positions, can also be made a weapon to
support multiple practices of resistance. (28)
Those oppositional sites are possible, Watkins acknowledges,
but their existence is contingent upon English departments'
success “in the education of a support group” (28). Though
Watkins discusses the potential for political and
revolutionary work within the English department, he more
practically addresses their value in immediate daily
routines:
...[T]he [English] class itself can be understood
as a social organization of work, a particular
complex of relations among students and the
instructor engaged in the study of ghpggip§_hgpp.
Further, these relations are organized in a way
that continually “produces value.“ It's not value
in quite the same sense as one might speak of the
value of Milton's altering the conventions of
English blank verse. But unless you imagine that
the whole process of drawing up a syllabus,
assigning readings and papers, making comments on

the results students generate, “translating“ those

132
comments into a number grade, and filing a grade
report at the end of the term is just a
meaningless ritual, then the social relations that
exist in the classroom represent an organization
whose result is ”value“ in some sense. (17)
An English classroom as a site of cultural exchange,
political resistance and support, and social organization is
the environment--the production site--in which we have to
consider Wright's work. Also, we must address his position
within the larger and subtler issues of universities and
English departments as sources of economic and cultural
power and domination.9
During his interviews, Wright was consistently
conscious of his position within the academic institution;
he tells Andre, for instance, ”Well, I'm an academic person
after all” (MA 137). Although his relations with university
English departments were complex and at times precarious,
Wright was aware of English departments as sites of cultural
reproduction:
I worry about it endlessly, for our system of
public education is a fragile thing, and if we
destroy it, or allow it to bedestroyed, it won't
automatically reappear. Huge numbers of young
people have got to be shown-~not just the social

need, but the personal--for an orderly life and

133

for what Irving Howe beautifully calls a life of

disciplined hope“ (BB 189).'10
The educational system is for Wright, at least in part, a
cultural means for establishing social order. Within
contemporary culture, then, academia is a two-edged sword: a
tool in the hands of the hegemonic culture for shaping “an
orderly life“ (Who defines what is "orderly?” How is that
order implemented? What happens to those who position
themselves outside the order or those who are cast out?) as
well as a tool for resistance groups, empowering them to
fight back. Wright's complex relations with universities
can be situated in this ambivalence about education as an
enriching gift and education as cultural constraint. Wright
directly addresses in several texts issues related to this
two-fold aspect of teaching. At the end of his prose
memoir, "The Infidel,“ which recounts a childhood incident
when an atheistic hobo shares some conversation and roasted
potatoes with a group of boys, Wright describes a short poem
which an Iraqi poet translated and read to one of Wright's
classes. Though the poem perplexed his students, for Wright
it was both understandable and personally meaningful:

To me, the poem was instantly perfectly

accessible.... It is possible that Ghazi's poem

reached out and touched, as with a kindly and

understanding hand, my half-buried memory of that

strange infidel, the hobo with the unwashed eyes,

134
who stepped out of the sumac trees near the
railroad track just above the Ohio River so long
ago and shared with my friends and me a little of
his time, a little of our time, some serious
conversation we only partly understood, a few of
our lies, a couple of mickies, and the social
comfort of our August fire.
Here is the poem that Ghazi translated:
As I drifted near shore
In the first light of morning,
I saw my country
Hunched over in a blackened boat,
A fire between her knees. (328)
Wright's account illuminates his perspective on the English
department at Hunter College as his work site. He confronts
a situation in which his students do not appreciate a poem
which he, the instructor, values. In his capacity as
teacher, he faces the dilemma of either imposing his taste
upon them or creating a context in which various (possibly
even contradictory) criteria for evaluating the poem can be
presented and compete in the classroom. Ghazi's poem was
significant for Wright because he could relate it to an
experience and perceptions that he valued--the poem “reached
out and touched, as with a kindly and understanding hand, my

half-buried memory of that strange infidel.'v He is by his

135
choice of subject matter imposing certain views, or at least
subjecting students to those views.

At the same time, though, the text contains images of
American culture that challenge current social and labor
relations. Within the memoir, Wright presents concrete
details about America during the Depression: it is a place
where men who wanted to find jobs could not (though he says
nothing about women's even more restricted roles), a place
where children would steal potatoes to eat, a place where
religious non-conformists were ostracized. It is a place
described as an industrial waste land, where an ”open sewer
from Martins Ferry poured into the river about a mile
upstream; and a little further up, such factories as
Wheeling Steel, Laughlin Steel, and the Blaw-Knox Company
were constantly presenting their modern contributions on
which the health of our American economy continue to
depend.“ It is a place where a railroad detective “might do
anything“ to a child caught illegally inside a freight

car.11

Finally, it is a place where an unemployed man can
be so hungry he will instantly eat a hot potato that had
been cooked for so long “its entire crust must have been
charred half an inch thick.“

The poem, then, that Wright was teaching reproduces his
image of America, even as that text questions the social,

political, and economic forces which could create such

inequity: “I saw my country / Hunched over in a blackened

136
boat, / A fire between her knees.” Wright's class was a
chance to reinforce his own authority; but it also provided
an opportunity, returning to Watkins's terminology, to
educate a support structure of cultural resistance and
create value by probing social and labor relations as they
existed (and continue to exist) in the workplace and in the
classroom. Additionally, Wright as instructor was--by
allowing students to say they “could never understand the
poem in a million years“--challenging authoritative models
of student-teacher relations, as well as allowing and
encouraging students to form their own opinions. He was
creating a classroom which supported cultural resistance:
“What English produces is, precisely, a ihhg; process, which
is then available to function in the social circulation of
people as one basis for the distribution and certification
of human capital through the terms of evaluation“ (Watkins
251, author's emphasis).

Immediately following this memoir, as it appears in
American Poets in 1976 and later in gpiipgppg_ggppg, is an
untitled but dated prose piece (It was written on 25
February 1974, three months before "The Infidel“). It is, I
believe, a prose poem:

This afternoon, after I had lectured for an
hour or so, a girl came up to me and exclaimed, “I
feel so shaken! How can you go on and on so

passionately about the poems of Robert Herrick? I

137
think he's too--too pretty. I don't think I like
him.“

Ears small and delicate as the inside of a
monarch butterfly's wing; her nostrils seemed
strong and careful enough to catch something
beyond ancient Cornwall. I would have liked to
ask her to take her shoes off and walk across the
floor of that dismal classroom. I don't know how
I know, but I know that her toes would have been
as sure and strong as the horns of a snail.

Anthea, Julia, Electra, why do I love
Herrick?

I don't know. Lucky, I guess. (328-9)

In this piece, like the other memoir, Wright presents a view
of his work site and labor relations within the English
department. In this second example, he again provides a
model for authority. Rather than silencing the student (who
seems, he implies, as slow and hard-headed as the “horns of
a snail“), he does two things: he recognizes her as a
beginning student not to be authoritatively “corrected“ but
gently encouraged to extend beyond her limits: “Ears small
and delicate as the inside of a monarch butterfly's wing;
her nostrils seemed strong and careful enough to catch
something beyond ancient Cornwall.“ Second, he positions
her within the very process she challenges. ‘By allowing her

to express resistance, Wright encourages resistance; by

138
listening to and respecting her views--though he has the
last word--he presents a model for student-teacher relations
that is not based exclusively on domination. In comments
addressed to individuals working within English departments,
Watkins says:
For one use at least of what socio-cultural values
we can force into circulation is not to identify
with the work of others, but to change the
conditions of all our work. It is, by whatever
means are available in whatever specific
locations, to destroy the organization of labor as
it exists and construct one that values the lives
and energies of people to each work for each other
in a society. (276)
By creating a comfortable classroom environment where a
student can resist authority, Wright allows for the creation
of a new type of relation: one that hopefully can extend
beyond the classroom to other work places and meaningfully
engage with the inequities documented in Wright's hobo
narrative. .

Other works by Wright also explore labor relations
between student and teachers--including the two poems,
published seventeen years apart, about the death of his
former teacher at Kenyon College: “In Memory of Charles
Coffin“ (238) included in Typ_§ipiggh§ and “A Dream of

Charles Coffin's Voice“ (unc 1956). In both instances the

139
teacher is an image of cultural authority which Wright, the
student, places in a privileged position and adamantly tries
to understand. In “A Dream...“ Wright uses a formal rhyme
structure, resembling a sestina, in which the last word of
the last line in each of the six stanzas is always “hear.”
The poem emphasizes the importance of listening to this
teacher; only death eases the obligation to listen: "He
fades, a dream of music now, so I / Walk to his patient
trees, absolved of fear / That he might speak and I should
fail to hear.“ The social relations presented in these
poems foreground the love and humble submission of an
inferior before the voice of authority--a relationship
contrasting with the image of Wright as teacher in “the
Infidel."12 This intense devotion is disturbing, not only
for psychological reasons, but also because of the implied
power relations, the social and educational hierarchy, and
ways in which Wright as a student silenced himself before
authority.

In the poem “To my Teacher, After Three Years" (unc
1961), Wright again presents that complex bond between a
dead teacher and former student; in this poem, though, that
unhealthy relation ends with Wright's realization that there
exists a darker side to their association. Wright refuses
to continue mourning for the teacher: “I was a fool to mourn
you, now you need / Nothing at all that I know how to give.“

The poem concludes with an allusion to Wright's second book,

140
Saint Jugas and its many poems focussing on death, the
dying, and the dead:
I took three years to write

One book of leaves that darken under rains

All over hell's half-acre. Now the blight

Turns back to fight the worm's deliberate waste:

We rend each other, murderers to the last.
His intense devotion to the dead teacher “turns back“ on the
poet; he perceives the last three years of his life as being'
wasted. The teacher has become more than just an
intellectual sparring partner for Wright: they destroy and
mutilate each other. Their adversarial bonds, consistent
with models of labor and management relations within
capitalism, ruin them both. Wright demonstrates in this
poem and the two for Charles Coffin a power structure,
modelled after capitalist relations, that is both dangerous

and destructive.13

His works which directly touch on

issues concerning the social organization and labor
relations (student-teacher) within college and university
English departments reveal a commitment to those academic
institutions, even as he tries to redefine in liberal terms
his own position within them. He ambiguously presents
glimpses of the university as a source for resistance and as
a site for the reproduction of power relations.

As we have already seen in poems like “Mercy," “Autumn

Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,“ and “Heraclitus,“ Wright

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conducts a frontal attack on the hegemonic culture, while as
a teacher he offers a rear-guard defence of academic
institutions which perpetuate that culture (“social order,“
as he calls it), even as he uses his classroom to support
possible resistance. His ambiguous relationship within that
university environment becomes more apparent and problematic
in light of the larger issues raised by Arnold, Kermode, and
Watkins, issues which address universities as sites of
power, cultural reproduction, and agents for socialization
beyond the immediate institutional setting.

Wright's entrance into academia as a full time
assistant professor began in 1957--the year The Green Wall
was published--when he accepted a position at the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where Allen Tate and John
Berryman also taught. As Robert von Hallberg indicates,
Wright entered into the profession at a time when the number
and prestige of universities and faculty members were
rapidly increasing:

Within only ten years, from 1950 to 1960, the
number of college teachers had nearly doubled (to
just under 200,000), and the indirect influence of
this occupational group increased as the number of
college students did. During the entire postwar
period the number of colleges (now about 3000),
faculty, and students grew tremendously. In 1940

some 1.5 million students were registered in

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colleges. By 1968, when Lyndon Johnson withdrew
from the presidential campaign, that number had
increased fourfold. Now there are about 10
million college students and 600,000 faculty. By
1979 about 30 percent of the adult pOpulation had
some college training, and half of these people
held college degrees. The political influence of
this rapidly expanding sector of the population
increased throughout the cold war years--
especially after the Soviet success with Sputnik
in 1957--and with few complaints from anyone after
McCarthy's demise. (120)
Wright's place within the academy and the accompanying
increase in cultural capital and authority which that
position entailed further complicate his position as a poet
writing texts which engage in social criticism. He was
aware of the powers that accompanied his professorship, but
he was equally aware of the responsibilities that ensued,
particularly for language use: “Well, expressions of
language in a context of power do have important
consequences, always. And it seems to me just a matter of
life and death for writers to pay special attention to this
phenomenon and at least try to think clearly and to keep the
language in close contact with reality“ (HM 165). As we saw
in the previous chapter, presenting a language “in close

contact with reality“ ultimately means, for Wright,

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privileging the poet's private voice over public discourses.
As a poet whose production centered around universities,
Wright was situated, though in a marginalized manner, in a
position of cultural authority in state supported
institutions. Scholars like Ron Silliman have explored the
complex financial and social relations between academia and
poetry and the ways those relations have impacted the
production and study of poetry:
The primary institution of American poetry is the
university. In addition to its own practices, it
provides important mediation and legitimation
functions for virtually every other social
apparatus that relates publicly to the poem. The
university provides the context in which many, and
perhaps most, poetry readers are first introduced
to the writing of our times; it may even be, as
has sometimes been argued, the context in which
the majority of all poems in the U.S. are both
written and read(“
This institutionalization of poetry during the 508, 608, and
708 (and, of course, into the present) may itself be a
significant symptom of the pervasiveness of the social
totality within late capitalism: it also raises questions
about economics and cultural capital, issues regarding the
power structures which control textual interpretation, and

concerns about the production and dissemination of poetic

144
texts. Fredric Jameson goes so far as to see the movement

of the arts into the academy as a defining characteristic of

postmodernism.15

This institutionalization also entails
questions about the poetry audience. Hallberg notes,
”...the audience for contemporary poetry can be identified
to a considerable extend with one particular set of social
institutions: colleges and universities" (22)“. During
the same period that Wright was becoming established as a
university teacher and poet, the audience for poetry
publications was not only forming around academic
institutions but also rapidly increasing.‘17

Among the many characteristics of that expanding
audience(s) for poetry and serious literature--as noted by
Nicholas Zill and Marianne Winglee in their study of three
demographic surveys of American reading habits from 1982 to
1985--are the following:18 audience members tend to have at
least some college education, have parents who were college
educated, are white collar workers, have incomes of at least
$25,000, live in large metropolitan areas, and usually are
white. Individuals with less than a high school education,
earn annual incomes below $10,000, work in blue collar
occupations, and belong to a racial minority are under-
represented among the audience members for literature,
especially poetry.‘19 If we accept the results of Zill and
Winglee's study, Wright's poetry audience includes those

people who either belong to or aspire to belong to the

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dominant social classes. His poetics positing questions
about power structures and repression within late capitalism
were primarily being heard, read, and appropriated by
individuals who were actively participating in the very
social, economic, and political organizations which he was
hoping to implicitly subvert. The results of Zill and
Winglee's analysis raise disturbing questions about Wright's
relationship with the dominant culture and the working
classes. '“The Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, /
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, /
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel" were
probably not among Wright's audience, though we can
speculate that his ”plain style“ and poetics of
authenticity--with their emphasis on clarity and immediate
comprehensibility--were stylistic attempts to include the
working classes in the audience for his poetry.

One way of assessing Wright's position in relation to
working class people is comparative: how do his means of
production and printed texts compare with those of other
workers' poets? One model we can examine is socialist. In
1926, after actively embracing socialism, the Russian poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky attempted to formulate a revolutionary
aesthetics in hpy_h;g_yg;pp§_hhggz Mayakovsky suggests
approaching artistic work as production, similar to other
forums of material production, with the connection between

the two modes being explicit. He concludes his study with

146
twelve conclusions about the “mysterious techniques of this
productive process,“ including: i

1. Poetry is a manufacture. A very
difficult, very complex kind, but a
manufacture....

6. Don't set in motion a huge poetry factory
just to make poetic cigarette lighters. You must
renounce the uneconomical production of poetical
trifles....

7. ....A knowledge of theoretical economics,
a knowledge of the realities of everyday life, an
immersion in the scientific study of history are
for the poet, in the very fundamentals of his
work, more important than scholarly textbooks by
idealist professors who worship the past....

10. You mustn't make the manufacturing, the
so-called technical process, an end in itself.
But it ip this process of manufacture that makes
the poetic work fit for use. It's the difference
just in these methods of production that marks the
difference between poets, and only a knowledge, a
mastery, an accumulation of the widest possible
range of varied literary devices makes a man a
professional writer. (56-7)

Mayakovsky replaces the romantic “mysteries" of poetic

creation with a focus on modes of literary production*which

147

transform raw materials by a materialist means of production
into cultural products; poetry becomes the work of a
craftsman and artisan. Rather than attempting to bury
ideological choice, Mayakovsky's model foregrounds its own
social and economic alliance with laborers and specific
means of production. During the second half of the
twentieth century, however, poetry and poets like James
Wright are centered around academic institutions;
universities, including creative writing programs, are major
influences defining the social impact, parameters, and
audience for poetic production.20

We can, as another means of helping us assess Wright's
relationship with his audience and the working classes, also
examine the work of other American poets at this time;
Hallberg observes, “From the end of World War II until the
early 19608, American poets had little to say about the
differences between the intelligentsia and the working
classes“ (122). He continues by noting, “Instead of
examining the strains and contradictions in the relation
between workers and intellectuals, poets tended to write
about the very poor and the well-off, which often meant
servants and their employers” (126). Hallberg's study,
American Poetr and Culture 1945-1980, though, does not
address Wright's poetry nor his relationship with, on one
hand, "American intellectuals, among whose growing numbers

were nearly all readers of poetry“ (122), and, on the other,

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his emotional, familial, and intellectual connections to the
poor and working classes.

Wright's awareness of his problematic relations with
his audience can be illustrated by examining the version of
"At the Executed Murderer's Grave“ (82) contained in §§ihh
ghghp. In that poem Wright clearly identifies himself--“My
name is James A. Wright, and I was born / Twenty-five miles
from this infected grave, / In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where
one slave / To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father'--and
clearly situates himself as one of the "slave“ class. This
insistence on providing his name, though, separates Wright
from that class: in mass production (like large classrooms),
the identity of individual laborers is never attached to the
finished commodity. Wright's name at the top of the text as
well as within it identifies the text as being his own
construct, tied to his personal and communal history, and
expressive of his views. This very display of “freedom“
contrasts with that of the working class.21 The poet
continues by identifying himself with the convicted murderer
George Doty; in the same way that Doty was “a thief“
stealing people's lives, Wright made his ”loud display“ and
stole the “language on a dead man's voice.” When addressing
Doty, however, the poet casts doubt on the sincerity of his
own commodified verse, even as he implies authenticity:
"Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead. / I croon my tears

at fifty cents per line.”-2 As if turning his poetry into

149
capital proved he was at least alive, Wright shows himself
neither removed from the system which murdered the murderer
nor better than Doty: “If Belmont County killed him, what of
me?“

In the same poem Wright proclaims, “no love's lost
between me and the crying / Drunks of Belaire, Ohio.“ But
he does, indeed, recognize and bemoan the distance which
separates him from them, in that those ”drunks“ and
“giggling muckers who / Saddled my nightmares thirty years
ago / Can do without my widely printed sighing / Over their
pains with paid sincerity.“ Throughout the text, the poet
evinces an awareness of the socio-economic considerations
that separate him from them. Wright foregrounds his own
ambiguous position and once again situates himself in the
midst of contradiction: his poetry is both a commodity and
not a commodity. In the sense that his poems are produced
and exchanged for money, they are commodified, but to the
extent that they are expressions of personal “sighing“ and
“sincerity“ they resist fully participating in commodity
capitalism.” .

In a similar way, the poem “In Memory of Leopardi'
(168) confronts these same contradictions; this time,
though, the poet tries to sever (or at least cover) his ties
with monetary influences. He combines his voice with that
of the Italian Romantic poet Leopardi, who--like Wright--was

an academic.a' The poet's alliance with the poor is

150
foregrounded, even as he recognizes that historically poets
and poetry have relied upon and attached themselves to a
different class: “I have gone past all those times when the
poets / Were beautiful as only / The rich can be.“ In these
texts, Wright--though conscious of the irony in his stance--
addresses himself to the conditions of the poor and working
class, even though the audience for poetry remains centered
around universities and are members of the middle and upper
classes. 'Wright attempts, though, to join the “collective
undercurrent” which Adorno observes:
A collective undercurrent provides the foundation
for all individual lyric poetry. When that poetry
actually bears the whole in mind and is not simply
an expression of the privilege, refinement, and
gentility of those who can afford to be gentle,
participation in this undercurrent is an essential
part of the substantiality of the individual lyric
as well: it is this undercurrent that makes
language the medium in which the subject becomes
more than a mere subject. (“Lyric' 45) .
Wright's poems demonstrate his effort to resist active
complicity in those expressions of “privilege, refinement,
and gentility“ manifest by previous poets. At best, though,
he expresses an ideological alliance: Wright the poet

Continued “crooning” his poems for money in a capitalist

151
system even as he defended the academic institutions which
perpetuate that system.

Another way of approaching and defining this
contradiction in Wright's poetry is by examining the stark
contrasts evident in his changing sociological positions.

In his interview with Smith, Wright talks about his‘
educational status within his immediate family:
I think that with the family I came from, a very
good people, there was no tradition of education
in the family. I had one distant cousin who had
gone to college but except for him no one else.
My mother had to leave school when she was in the
sixth grade, my father had to leave when he was in
the eighth grade. He went into the factory when
he was fourteen and my mother went to work in a
laundry. All of my relatives were working people.
Back in the thirties I would have called them
working class. My older brother Ted, who is now a
photographer in Zanesville, Ohio was, except for
that distant cousin, actually the first one of us
who ever graduated from high school. (DS 198-9)
When Wright speaks about his brother as the “first one of
us“ to receive a diploma, Wright manifests the ideological
bonds he shares, even as late as 1979 (when the interview
was conducted), with his family as well as the "working

People.” For a celebrated poet--who had a doctoral degree

152
and affiliations with various universities and colleges, who
was a recipient of several federally subsidized grants, who
received paid sabbatical leaves to support his frequent
travels in Europe, and who wrote and published for an
audience that was primarily middle and upper class, as well
as academically informed--that bonding if considered as
something more than emotional or historical seems
problematic, to say the least.

E. L. Doctorow, an undergraduate friend and classmate
of Wright's at Kenyon College, offers one way to focus on
these contrasts which Wright embodies. Doctorow states,
“...the group to which Wright and I sociologically belonged;
and to whose standards we aspired.... [was] a variety of
exotics--Jews and Irish Catholics from New York and
Philadelphia, the first two black men ever admitted, foreign
students, homosexuals, farmhands, and a fair number of
unprepossessing boys given to social afflictions like acne
or stuttering“ (12). Wright's and Doctorow's shared
aspirations--whether for ideological reasons, comfort,
friendship, or possibly even status--included joining the
“community” of marginalized individuals, that academic
”crowd of solitudes.“ For Wright, though, this inclusion
with social and economic outcasts was not a studied
affectation: it represented a continuity with his past.

Doctorow poignantly describes that past by recounting a trip

153

he made with Wright to Martins Ferry, in which they stayed

at the house of Wright's aunt:
She was a gracious and very humble woman clearly
made uncomfortable by the collegiate ambience we
brought with us. The house was quite small, a
worker's one story cottage in a street of them.
Our sleeping arrangements consisted of the parlor
floor beside the wood stove, with newspapers for
blankets. In the morning we went to a diner for
breakfast and then crossed the river into
Wheeling, West Virginia, where we attended an
afternoon concert of the Wheeling Symphony
Orchestra, sitting for a dollar each in the almost
empty, wooden balcony of this hall where it seemed
as if there were more people playing on stage than
listening in the audience. It was not an event I
would have chosen for myself--the child of music-
loving parents in New York who had made him a
familiar of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan
opera House. But I was incredibly moved. 'How
hard these people played, and how they struggled
to do well, and how well they did, and what a
profound isolation it was to long for beauty and
grace in the industrial heartland of the United

States. (20)

154
“How hard these people played, and how they struggled to do
well, and how well they did“ seems an ample description of
Wright's life and achievement, but Doctorow's description
also reveals Wright's attempts to combine his roots among
“poor country people" (11) with his experience and interests
in high culture. The image of Wright bringing home his
“cultured" New York friend--who notices Wright's “inevitable
cigarette between the wrong fingers” (22)--to sleep on the
floor with newspaper blankets predates and anticipates the
opposing social forces apparent in Wright's poetry.‘25
Stitt, in the introduction to James Wright: The Heart
of the Li ht, provides yet another context for examining
Wright's past and his connections with contemporary culture:
The valleys of the Ohio River present everywhere a
landscape of stark contrasts, but perhaps nowhere
more than on the border between West Virginia and
Ohio.... The surrounding fields and hills are
sylvan and beautiful--Eden and the wilderness
intermingled. The base of the valley itself,
however, is heavily urban.... [Factories] line
the river, pollute its waters, and provide a
gritty contrast to the surrounding landscape.‘
(1-2)
Elsewhere, Stitt points out another significant contrast in
Martins Ferry, the economic disparity: "Life was tough there

in the thirties, the people generally poor, thanks to the

155
Depression. Perched on the hills at the top of the town,
however, were large Victorian houses occupied by shopowners
and by the managers of the glass factories and steel mills“
(James Wright: A Profile 7). Wright's ambiguous position
between undisturbed nature and scarred industrial waste
land, between rich and poor, informs the social and
political context for his poems and his life. In many ways,
it is only appropriate that in his texts the idiomatic
Ohioan speech, the people and places in Martins Ferry, and
his childhood experiences should exist in discomfort and
conflict--seldom blending together--with the life and
experiences of the educated, well travelled, and cultured
poet-professor.

The poem ”Heritage“ (unc 1964) draws these opposing
forces into the text itself, but is--once again--unable to
resolve them: the pastoral and antipastoral, the poet's
identification with the poor while being conjoined with the
cultural elite, the educated with the uneducated, and high
culture with life on the streets. The poem begins by
[exploring the relationship between Wright's grandfather and
grandmother:

Brooming the streets, sick drunk he hated life.
Winter after winter, his whining wife

Forgave him about midnight, and then she prayed,
John, 3-16. Pure slag-heap, smoldering his bed.

One winter afternoon of snow and smoke,

156

Fuddled by horses, traffic lights, and drink,

He tripped on old horse manure, and sprawled

Along the curb, favoring his broken back,

Chuckling through rot-gut fumes.
The text appears to rise out of the streets themselves. By
dragging his feet as he reluctantly plods home, the old man
sweeps the pavement; but he eventually plunges into that
street himself (and it may have been more accommodating than
his bed). Later a crowd of the dead and living parade not
just down his street but all city avenues--and eventually
lead us back to this same dung-filled street.

That the old man “hated life” is evident even before
his entrance into the poem: the two adjectival phrases
("Brooming the streets, sick drunk“) point to the avoidance
techniques he uses in order to cope with life in an
industrial society. The text explores the old man's
familial and social relations by probing socioeconomic
factors; his faltering trip home is partially due to his
complaining, pietistical wife.“’ Like “Autumn Begins in
lHartins Ferry, Ohio,“ the lives, sexuality, and homes of
these working class people are bound inextricably to their
dehumanizing jobs: there is a “Pure slag-heap, smoldering
his bed." This slag heap is the same industrial refuse that
scars eastern Ohio and informs Wright's psycho-poetic

landscape in “Stages on a Journey Westward" (124), “Two

157
Poems about President Harding“ (127), "Chilblain' (334),
"Flight“ (unc 1960) and “To Build a Sonnet” (unc 1964).

The old man's wife also feels the residual heat from
that slag-heap as it sears their lives and the remains of
their marriage. Her attempts at Christian forgiveness,
though, only exasperate both of their lives: each winter she
”forgave him about midnight.” Either she has forgiven him
in the middle of the night, when he is presumably either
dead drunk, passed out, or asleep, so her forgiveness is
never communicated; or she forgives him for midnight--
because of the darkness he brings, in which case she frees
herself of the burden by squarely placing it upon him.
Though she prays, what love John 3:16 offers is not enough
for her to extinguish their smoldering slag-heap. The
isolation between her and the old man becomes ever more
apparent: when he dies and is buried, her absence from the
poem becomes conspicuous.

Industrial residue permeates the cityscape just as it
‘penetrates their home; even a snowy afternoon isvfilled with
“smoke.“ Nature itself, like the old man, seems to become
intoxicated with whatever it can: the smoke-filled afternoon
is “fuddled by horses, traffic lights, and drink.“ In the
same way, the old man is both befuddled and fuddled by the
demeaning conditions his life has assumed--the ”horses,
traffic lights, and drink.“ By falling over dried horse

dung (which in this poem, unlike “Lying in a Hammock...“

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(122), has not turned golden), the old mean reveals his
reason for sweeping the streets. His life, never far above
the level of those streets, is “sprawled / Along the curb,“
where rather than bemoaning his proverbial “broken back,“ he
favors it and chuckles. Death itself, he suggests, is
better than this industrialized life of ”rot-gut fumes.“27

The old man is wrong, however: possibly the only
experience worse than living in a late industrial society is
dying in that society, where death itself is commodified by
morticians who “offered bids," “priced his molars,
calculated sums.“ The poet attacks with acerbity these
“Pink graduates from morticians' colleges“ who 'Giggled
together if they cracked his thumbs, / Threaded the cat-gut,
and sewed up his gums.“ Working class people, such as the
old man and his wife, are isolated and entrapped in
unfulfilling lives, while these college graduates--“like
roaches out of septic tanks'--feast upon the dehumanized
lives of these laborers. Just as the morticians 'haled him
[the old man] out of sight,“ they try to hide and “bury“ all
of the poor. '

The vehemence of this attack on both the old man and
the graduates, as well as the emphasis on their differing
socioeconomic backgrounds, points to the overwhelming
presence of the poet in the poem. This is a class struggle
quite different from the relationship between servant and

employer which Hallberg comments on: it is a struggle in

159

which the poet is not so much caught between the two classes
he is most closely affiliated with as it is Wright himself
warring against both classes. The repulsive college
educated morticians are reduced to imperviousness by the
nursery-rhyme quality of:

They priced his molars, calculated sums,

Giggled together if they cracked his thumbs,

Threaded the cat-gut, and sewed up his gums.
The triple masculine rhyme not only dehumanizes them--it all
but reduces them to "roaches“--but also characterizes them
as being only “sums," “thumbs,“ and “gums." Like the
grandmother, these morticians vanish as abruptly as they
appeared: the poet severs his relations with them.”8

In the same way, though, the poet presents an

unflattering and simplistic view of the old man and his
wife, even withholding the fact that they are his
grandparents until the final stanza. The emotional distance
from the old man that is evident in this poem resembles that
of the early text “The First Glimpse of Death (unc 1961)
which states: “My paternal grandfather is laughing drunk
underground, / Beating his head at doors, / Refusing all
shelter.“ This anger contrasts, however, with the
acceptance and identification evident in “A Poem of Towers“
(248):

I am becoming one

Of the old men.

 

160
I wonder about them,
And how they became
So happy.
Wright observes in "Heritage“ that the old man “tripped on
old horse manure, and sprawled / Along the curb“; but in
“Well, What are You Going to Do?“ (256) the poet offers a
more sympathetic account of his own scatological experience:
And there was a pile of horse manure
'I couldn't evade, and so by God
I did not even try.
All I could do was fall
From time to time.
Wright's callous description of his grandfather and the
morticians evidences an unwillingness to loosen or
strengthen his connections with either class. He denies
having any heritage at all.

The final two stanzas narrow the focus of the poem to
immediate familial relations: brothers to brothers, parents
to children, grandparents to grandchildren. These
relationships draw the poet further into the text and
demonstrate an awareness of at least one part of his
heritage, his familial connections, but these bonds are
nebulous, inexplicable, and disturbing.

He loved his brother, Christ alone knows why.
Christ and his family know he never told.

One evening, when his time had come to die,

161

My father said since I was four years old

I might as well get used to something now:

I had the old man's brother's name, and so

The dead drunk, wallowing in death, loved me.
The grandfather's love for his brother provides the
strongest emotional and intellectual commitment in the text,
but the poet, rather than affirming that bond, is concerned
that the old man never articulated his reasons (as if
reasons are necessary). Without words, the poet implies,
their love is meaningless. This absence of words forms a
still point in the middle of the poem, a conspicuous silent
vacuum that will recall our attention. The poet, brought as
a child to the old man's deathbed, learns that he was named
after his grandfather's beloved brother, "so / The dead
drunk, wallowing in death, loved me.“ The silent,
incommunicative old man puts his faith (and love) in a word,
the name of his brother, but for the poet that single word
is not enough. The unarticulated love between him and his
grandfather seems neither real nor binding.

The poem concludes by exploring these ambiguous
familial and social relations which are the poet's heritage:
I have nothing to live for but my death:

Alone, last of a crowd of solitudes,
Half-wondering where I am and how I came
To carry a beloved dead man's name.

Lashed to the wall by pain, half stupefied

162

By dreams of liquor, my grandfather died

Hoping to hang his fearsome love on me.

All right, he did so; now I let him be.

And, though, I know the comfort of a lie,

I pray to keep my mouth shut when I die.
These familial bonds are contradictory in almost every
conceivable way: they are both comforting and fearsome,
disrupted and continuous, as well as binding and isolating;
they entangle the living with the dead, life with death, and.
the present with the past. The silence of the old man
isolates the poet from his grandfather, “the dead drunk,
wallowing in death,“ but it also is embraced by the poet: “I
pray to keep my mouth shut when I die.“

The poet's heritage may be nothing more than his own
unarticulated and inexplicable connections to all the
individuals in the text, this ”crowd of solitudes' that
includes both his family and the morticians. Like “Lying in
a Hammock...“ (122), this poem reduces the poet to his
nuclear self; here, though, it is that self as it is
disconnected yet bound to complex social and familial
relations. The desire for human bonds is everywhere evident
in the text, including its rhythmic pattern and rhyme
scheme. The final rhyming couplet, for example, is like a
maliciously distorted childhood prayer, with the adult poet
knowing that his vow of silence at death, like that silence

of the old man, is itself "a lie."” This prayer harks

163
back to the recitation of John 3:16 by his grandmother. The
poem is an exploration of the absence of those verbal
manifestations of love; the allusion itself offers “the
comfort of a lie.”

The absences and silence within the text suggest the
poet's own inarticulateness, and they disrupt the attempts
at artificial closure which the masculine rhymed couplets
try to impose. Wright's use of slant rhyme, on the other
hand, illustrates relationships which are real and forceful.
In the first stanza, for example, the rhyme words “smoke,"
“drink,“ and "back“ have an indirect, implied connection:
the industrial wastes, including the ravages of the old
man's home life, do lead him to drink, and his final “dreams
of liquor“ ultimately cause his broken back and death. What
interests me most right now, however, are the conspicuous
silences in those lines which have no rhymes: the words,
like the poet, beg for some connection (even as they
disparage the forced artificial rhymes): "I had the old
man's brother's name, and so / The dead drunk, wallowing in
death, loved me.“ This lack of a real bond resonates
throughout the poet's depiction of his grandfather, and
Wright places part of the blame for that on the industrial
society. In the same way, the couplet beginning the last
stanza (a stanza notable for the artificiality of the
rhymes: 'came'/““name'; 'me"/"be'; “lie”/“die“) is

disturbing because of its lack of firm connections (“I have

164
nothing to live for but my death: / “Alone, last of a crowd
of solitudes") as well as its implied connection, that being
isolated and alone is itself a type of death. This crowd of
isolated individuals, like Baudelaire's crowd, leads us back
out into the streets where the conflict between individual
and industrial society and the conflict between academic and
laborer continue to be unresolved. This “crowd of
solitudes,“ consisting of academics as well as the working
class, can only keep growing and wandering aimlessly,
tripping over dried horse manure. This crowd consists of
both internal forces and external elements: it is the
multiple, jostling, and contradictory elements within the
poet himself, and it is that very real and wayward “crowd of

solitudes' created by late capitalism.

Notes

1. This quotation is taken from a letter Wright wrote to the
editors of the American Poetry Review (Vol. 3.3); the letter
is a snarling, ironic defence (I particularly enjoy the
British variant “cheques“) against the faulty perceptions
that the poetry audience and critics have about poets,
poetry, and readings. I discuss this letter in more detail
in the following chapter.

2. I know of only two sources which trace in detail the
historical development of creative writing programs on
American campuses, and these two texts provide stimulating,
but occasionally contradictory, information: Stephen
Wilbers's The Iowa Writers' Workshop: Origins, Emergence and
Growth and D. G. Myers's dissertation titled “Educating
Writers: The Beginnings of ‘Creative Writing' in the
American Universityi“

3. My indebtedness to Robert von Hallberg will very quickly
become evident, though--to be honest--I must acknowledge
that my own preference for oppositional poetics differs
radically from his political espousal of accommodating
poetry, so my interpretation of much of his data often runs
counter to his own. In that light, the absence of an
extended discussion of Wright in his book bolsters my
thesis.

4. Arnold, though, does not stop with issues of national
economics. “This zeal,“ he observes, “for making a nation's
great instrument of thought,--its language,--correct and
worthy, is undoubtedly a sign full of promise,--a weighty
earnest of future power“ (260). That future power is, of
course, not restricted by national borders: it can be
transported and translated into cultural imperialism.

5. Robert von Hallberg argues, though, for the importance of
understanding New York City as the cultural center of the
United States after World War II, a position which, if true
in the past, is certainly not the case today.

6. Kermode, too, points to social relations in which
universities, like Arnold's much admired French Academy,
have influence and maintain elaborate initiation procedures:
”It is, however unemphatically, however modestly,
hierarchical in structure, because its continuance depends
on the right of the old to instruct the young; the young
submit because there is no other way to the succession. The
old, or senior, apply at their discretion certain checks on
the competence of those who seek to join, and eventually to
replace them.... [T]he possession of interpretive power,

165

166

power of divination, is tested only by reference to the
tacit knowledge of the seniors, who nevertheless claim,
tacitly as a rule, that they can select candidates capable
of acquiring these skills, and have the right to certify
that they have achieved them” (169).

7. My views on the relationship between education and power
structures are informed by Michel Foucault's
Poweranowledge, as well as a number of recent Marxist
studies, especially Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's
Schoolin in Ca italist America, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-
Claude Passeron in Reproduction in Education, Society, and
Culture, Michael W. Apple's Education and Power, and Martin
Carnoy's essay "Education, Economy, and the State.“ Richard
Ohmann's English in America specifically addresses the
relationship between the work being done in English
departments and what he describes as “the Military-
Industrial Complex.“ He problematically, for example,
asserts that English teachers “have traditionally attempted
to teach: organizing information, drawing conclusions from
it, making reports, using Standard English (i.e., the
language of the bourgeois elites), solving problems
(assignments), keeping one's audience in mind, seeking
objectivity and detachment, conducting persuasive arguments,
reading either quickly or closely, as circumstances demand,
producing work on request and under pressure, valuing the
intellect and its achievements. These are all abilities
that are clearly useful to the new industrial state, and, to
the extent that English departments nourish them--even if
only through the agency of graduate assistants--they are
giving value for society's money” (301-2). The most
poignant critiques of Ohmann's work that I am familiar with
are Gerald Graff's “English in America,“ William E. Cain's
”English in America Reconsidered: Theory, Criticism,
Marxism, and Social Change,” and Frank Lentricchia's
response to Cain, "On Behalf of Theory.”

8. Ohmann observes,"There is just no sense in pondering the
function of literature without relating it to the actual
society that uses it, to the centers of power within that
society, and to the institutions that mediate between
literature and people. In other words, the function of
literature and the role of English teachers cannot be
understood except within the context of a given society and
politics“ (303)

To locate Wright within the historical context and
power struggles of academic literary studies, see Gerald

Graff's Pgofessing Literature: An Institutional Histogy.

9. Among the most helpful materials I have read about the
opportunities the English classroom provides for resistance
are Robert Con Davis's "A Manifesto for Oppositional

 

167

Pedagogy: Freire, Bourdieu, Merod, and Graff," Henry
Giroux's Border Crossing: Cultural Workers and the Politics
of Education, Wayne Burns's Journe Throu h the Dark Woods,
particularly the chapter “The Teacher as Revolutionary,“ and
Bruce Henricksen's essay “Teaching Against the Grain.“

10. I suspect Wright's view here is at least partially
informed by Ortega y Gassett's Revolt of the Masses, a book
and an author Wright frequently reread (Collected Prose
174); if this is the case, Wright is using education in this
instance as a way to protect individuals from violence by
the ”masses.”

11. Wright states, “For the benefit of readers unfamiliar
with the idiom of southeastern Ohio and the West Virginia
Panhandle, I should point out that the word ‘anything,’ as
commonly used, is neither an abstraction nor a vague
generalization. The term has a specific meaning. I am not
going to define it here. I don't like to think about it. I
know a boy who got caught by two railroad dicks and they did
something to him. He didn't die. I am old enough to
realize that the process of human dying is sometimes very
long and painful. But it is easy to be dead“ (325).

12. Wright's complex relation with his other ”teacher,“
Horace, is also worth pursuing. See especially ”Prayer to
the Good Poet“ (227), also in Two Citizens, and “Imitation
of Horace“ (unc 1958) and “To Horace“ (unc 1975).

13. Wright had a number of prestigious teachers: while an
undergraduate at Kenyon College, his teachers included John
Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Philip Timberlake (for whom he
wrote the elegy “A Winter Day in Ohio“ included in Shint
Judas), and--of course-~Charles Coffin; Robert Penn Warren
and Robert Lowell were visiting instructors; at the
University of Washington, Wright studied under Theodore
Roethke and Stanley Kunitz (James Wright: A Profile 145).
It may also be interesting to note that The-Green Wall is
dedicated to Roethke, among other people; Saint Judas is
dedicated “To Philip Timberlake, my teacher, and to Sonjia
Urseth, my student”; and To a Blossoming Pear Tree is
dedicated to Helen McNeely Sheriff, Wright's former high
school teacher.

Wright's correspondence during the late fifties with
Roethke also sheds light on Wright's views of the social
organization of universities and the cultural authority of
professors, as well as his personal relations with both
Roethke and Ransom.

14. This is quoted in Hank Lazer's ”Poetry Readings and the
Contemporary Canon“ (69). It is also interesting to note
that in a telephone conversation with me on 24 February

168

1992, Silliman emphasized that his own experiences as a poet
parted ways with academia when he was an undergraduate at
the University of California, Berkeley: he left school and
did not complete his bachelor's degree.

15. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society" Jameson
observes: “Indeed, one way of marking the break between the
periods and of dating the emergence of postmodernism is
precisely to be found there: in the moment (the early 19608,
one would think) in which the position of high modernism and
its dominant aesthetics become established in the academy
and are henceforth felt to be academic by a whole new
generation of poets, painters, and musicians” (124).

16. Other authors have probed the complex intertwining of
the publishing and book marketing industries with academic
institutions. Ron Silliman, for example, states, “...the
relative efficiency of trade distribution virtually
guarantees its predominance on college course reading lists,
which is the largest single market for books of poetry, with
2500 colleges and 200 writing programs in North America“
(30, Silliman's emphasis).

17. Hallberg notes, “...[T]he audience for all serious
poetry, established as well as avant-garde, grew during the
early 19608. In one year, between 1963 and 1964, the total
distribution of Poetgy magazine jumped by almost 50 percent
to just under 10,000. And no one needs to be reminded just
how many small poetry magazines have appeared in the last
twenty years.... One of the consequences of this growth of
po-biz was that a young poet starting out in the 19608 stood
a good chance of selling as many copies of his or her first
book as T.S. Eliot had sold, forty years earlier, of Thg
Waste Land“ (14).

18. I am here only presenting, in summary form, the
analysis of the data that the two authors provide. The
statistical and demographic infermation from which they
based their analysis, as well as information about the
surveys themselves, are interesting and valuable in their
own right.

19. Zill and Winglee do not discuss in detail the complex
interconnections between the various factors determining the
audience for poetry. An individual, for example, whose
income and career possibilities have been restricted by
education and race will not have the luxury of developing
the reading habits which a person from a dominant class
would have.

169

20. In “Patria Mia,“ Pound develops an extended analogy of
the capitalistic cultural production which differs radically
from Mayakovsky's: "As the factory owner wants one man in
his employ to do some one mechanical thing that he can do
almost without the expenditure of thought, so the magazine
producer wants one man to provide one element, let us say
one sort of story and another articles on Italian cities and
above all, nothing personal“ (111). When Mayakovsky presents
the analogy of the artist as a producer in direct relation
to her readers (and listeners), the poet is fully cognizant
of her relation to the means of production and an economic
base, and she consciously engages in the manufacturing
process; Pound's analogy, however, reveals the delimiting
role of publishers in capitalist societies, where they
function as middlemen mediating between writers and their
audience and imposing stylistic standards. As Lentricchia
states, "...the very materiality of capitalist culture,
according to Pound--which is the sign of that culture's
insidiously intimate economic setting of human behavior--is
necessarily also the index of capitalist culture's
degradation, of our severely diminished capacity, under
capitalist conditions...to be human“ (”Lyric“ 77).

21. Contrast these opening lines of “At the Executed
Murderer's Grave“ with Wright's later “Names Scarred at the
Entrance to Chartres“ (251) which begins: “P. Dolan and A.
Dolan / Have scrawled their names here.“ Wright both aligns
himself with the Dolans and distances himself from them:

I have no way to go in

Except only

In the company of two vulgars,

Furies too dumb to remember

Death, our bodies' mother, whose genius it is

To remember our death on the wet

Roads of Chartres, America, and to forget

Our names.

22. During the late fifties, Poetry (Chicago), which
published an earlier version of this poem, was paying fifty
cents per line of poetry.

23. Silliman's essay “The Political Economy of Poetry” in
The New Sentence is a particularly insightful discussion of
the commodification of poetry.

24. In the interview with Andre, Wright relates an
interesting story about Leopardi in which an aristocratic
women rejected the poet's advances; when asked for her
reasons, she simply responded, "My dear, he stank' (MA 146).

170

25. Doctorow describes Wright as being “the kind of student
with whom a professor would associate“ (16), yet he
attracted and relished an entourage of “the weirder students
of the community" (17).

26. Once again--as on the dust jacket for Saint Judas--
Wright returns to the Gospel of John. Wright's sermon notes
contain several references to the writer of the fourth
gospel: “A. John is to my mind the dark lyric poet of the
Gospels. .. B. Yet he is not an ornamental poet, His [sic]
chps. short, his words blunt. Not blunted but sharp. C.
His accounts of Jesus' life, episode by episode are more
brief than those of the other three who, in their way, were
more skillful storytellers.. .. Yet in John's account there
is a ferocity of swiftness, a clear mind almost pouncing in
medias res upon the meaning of Jesus' most complex actions.
In John, as in Jesus himself, I have always sensed something
that could almost be called a contempt for false rhetoric"
(126).

27. Reading these and other poems by Wright always bring to
mind a different literary tradition with which these texts
have much in common. I am thinking of those poems included
in Dan Tannacito's “Poetry of the Colorado Miners: 1903-
1906,“ the poems in Jack Salzman's two anthologies Sociai

Poetpy of the 19308 and Years of Protesh, and the recently

reprinted American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse by
Members of the Federal Writer's Project. The poems in these

collections, like Wright's, insist on being read as more
than autotelic, literary niceties.

28. In ”The Refusal“ (78) Wright presents an equally gloomy
portrait of morticians: “Preacher and undertaker follow the
cars; / They claimed the comfort of the earth, and lied.“

29. Contrast that couplet with Wright's rhymes and rhythms
in this contorted and highly monosyllabic version of the
prayer for children:

And when I lay me down to die

Let me call back I might have used

The woman of a girl who loved me

Enough to let me let her lie

Alone in her own loneliness,

And mind her own good business.

'80 She Said“ (192)

CHAPTER FIVE

NRIGHT'S ECONOMIC CONNECTIONS WITH OFFICIAL VERSE CULTURE1

This poem frightens me
So secretly, so much
“To the Creature of the Creation" (260)

If these lines get published, I will hear
From some God damned deaf moron who knows
Everything. The dead are nothing.
And he will be right. -

“At the Grave” (239)2

Wright's poems foreground conflicts between classes and
within social formations in late capitalism, and the poet
ideologically aligns himself more with workers than
intellectuals or the wealthy; in this context, Williamson
refers to Wright as being “characteristically bodily,
proletarian“ (67) while James Breslin points to Wright's
depictions of 'sub-middle-class existence“ (172). The
oppositional nature of Wright's social poetry creates two
problems concerning his relations with academia and official
verse culture: first, conflicts relating to his peripheral
involvement (his status as both an “insider“ and an
”outsider“) in creative writing programs--as they emerged on
university campuses during the 608, occupied a unique

171

172
position in the socio-political formation of the academy,
and established poetry networks which he had access to--
second, problems arising from his choice of publication
outlets within those "po-biz" networks, outlets which have
their own complex economic connections with the dominant
culture.

Because American poetry is currently centered around
academic institutions, especially creative writing programs,
colleges and universities are major influences defining the
social impact, parameters, distribution, and audience for
poetic production: as Bettina J. Huber notes, ”four-fifths
of the undergraduate English programs in the United States
have courses in creative writing and ...close to half have
degree programs“ (173), and D. G. Myers observes that “At
last count there were more than 300 degree-granting programs
in creative writing disgorging as many as 1,000 graduates
yearly” (5).3 Mayakovsky's manufacturing model for the
production of poetic texts can be juxtaposed with the
current institutionalization of poetic production, as
described (rather caustically) by Philip Levine:‘

As for those of us here in the United States of
America in the second half of the twentieth
century, we have developed something called
Creative Writing, a discipline that not only
flourishes on hundreds of campuses but has even

begun to invade the public schools. It has

173
produced most of the poets--for better or worse--
now writing in the country. One can only regard
it as one of the most amazing growth industries we
have. Thus, at the same time as we've made our
society more racist, more scornful of the rights
of the poor, more imperialist, more elitist, more
tawdry, money-driven, selfish, and less accepting
of minority opinions, we have democratized poetry.
Today anyone can become a poet: all he or she need
do is travel to the nearest college and enroll in
Beginning Poetry Writing and then journey through
the dozen stages of purgatory properly titled
Intermediate Poetry Writing and Semi-Advanced
Poetry Writing, all the way to Masterwork Poetry
Writing, in which course one completes her epic on
the sacking of Yale or his sonnet cycle on the
paintings of Edward Hopper, or their elegies in a
city dumpster, and thus earns not only an MFA but
a crown of plastic laurel leaves. (533-4)
Levine relates this institutionalized model of poetic
production, a miniature capitalistic enterprise--a "growth
industry'--to failings within the dominant culture itself,
and he denigrates the achievements possible from such an
"apprenticeship,“ as well as the final products: the Yale
and Hopper epics and the dumpster elegies. Levine's attack

on the nature and value of creative writing programs

 

174

resonates with the same type of criticism leveled against
those programs by literary academics and other poets,
including Bly's frequent harangues and Donald Hall's
description of workshop poems as "McPoems."5

Richard Hugo in his essay "In Defense of Creative-
Writing Classes“ describes--in a graphic overstatement--the
awkward relationship between creative writers and the
literature faculty: "...in many of our large state
universities, creative writers suffer a status something
like Japanese prisoners in World War II' (57). Hugo
defines, among the numerous reasons for that status, an
underlying economic tension: ”Today the department budget in
most state universities is based on enrollment statistics.
A department may not get more budget line positions if the
enrollment goes up, but it might very well lose positions if
the enrollment goes down“ (59). Because creative writing
workshops remain popular and continue to sustain high
enrollments, these same economic interests ensure writing
programs a future position among the English curriculum;6
but that popularity also aggravates the social organization
within the department: as Hugo observes, the declining
enrollment in literature courses “hardly endears creative
writing to the average academic that ...has spent years of
hard work getting the Ph.D. degree, involving himself deeply
in scholarship and criticism, and now his position depends

on the presence of people who don't care about his

175
expertise“ (59). This idea may partially explain the source
of internal tensions experienced by an academic poet, like
Wright, who primarily teaches literature, but Hugo's
argument, valid though it may be, ignores other primary
points of disagreement between creative writers in the
academy and other English faculty, not the least of which
are theoretical issues regarding the predominant poetic
style taught in contemporary workshops and its emphasis on
personal Voice over craftsmanship.
When asked about Roethke's methods as a creative
writing teacher during the 508, Wright responded:
He taught mainly the craft, and he, like Berryman A
and Lowell, was an entirely conscious craftsman.
He understood that the relation between the craft
and the mysterious imagination is not what we
conventionally think it to be. There are some
people who think that a very careful, conscious
craftsmanship will repress your feelings. And
Roethke understood that it is careful, conscious
craft which liberates your feeling and liberates
your imagination. (PS 198)7
‘Like Mayakovsky, Wright sees poetic production--ultimately
involving complex social relations between writers and
readers of poetry--as the application of poetic
craftsmanship to raw materials (interestingly, he carefully

avoids the economic connection): in a poem addressing Horace

 

176

(“Prayer to the Good Poet“ [227]), Wright observes that “I
worked once in the factory that he [Wright's father] worked
in. / Now I work in that factory that you live in.”5 1
Writing poetry entails participation in a manufacturing
process which Wright describes as “liberating“; and
involvement in creative writing workshops--like those
conducted by Roethke--can serve as an apprenticeship period
for learning the poetic craft necessary for that
manufacture. In “Willy Lyons" Wright talks about his
“uncle, a craftsman of hammer and wood“ who ”planes limber
trees by the waters / Fitting his boat together,“ while in
“To Build a Sonnet“ (unc 1964), Wright defines himself as a
craftsman and laborer:

I had not gone back there, because to go

Meant pouring moonlight of a skinny kind

On slag-heap, that my mother used to know:

Slow smoldering hell, shrunken, and hard to find.

Now I have gone back there, it is no dream;

It is broad walking; I have leave to go.

But not of anybody's goodness now.

It is my native rocks I go back to.

And build a sonnet. Laboring as I hide
Behind the shadow of this great hinge flung wide
Where Clare, John Ransom, Robinson stepped forth

I lift my slight wall, yawing to one side,

177
My spine a splinter between winds, yet worth
More than the losses of my life on earth.

This poem has an odd reflexivity regarding Wright's
relationship with academic institutions: the poem was
published in the Macalester College student literary
magazine while Wright was a teacher at the college. The
hybrid Petrarchan sonnet narrates its own construction and
the “building" of sonnets; it reads like an instructional
manual--a concept implicit in the title--and was presumably
published for Macalester students. The poem's consciousness
of its own history within the sonnet tradition is matched by
the poet's awareness of his own presence in the poem and his
relationship with such earlier sonneteers as Thomas Wyatt,
John Clare, E. A. Robinson, and Wright's former teacher,
John Crowe Ransom. In this notably educational context,
however, Wright foregrounds his connections to the working
classes and distances himself from academia. In the same
way, though, his self-consciousness both conjoins him with
laborers and craftsmen as well as establishes his essential
differences from them. If we accept Anthony Easthope's
assertion that iambic pentameter and sonnets are aligned
more closely with the higher social classes than with common
laborers (77), Wright appears to be stranded between the two
classes and between industrial and poetic production.

The octet consists of two independent quatrains: the

first one establishes Wright's reluctance to go home because

178
of the industrial labor conditions there: "to go / Meant
pouringmoonlight of a skinny kind / On slag heap.“ As we
have seen in several previous poems, he often personalizes
these impersonal industrial practices by contextualizing
them within family life and revealing their destructive
effects. This time, however, the searing domestic evidence
is difficult for the poet to detect: it is a ”slow
smoldering hell, shrunken, and hard to find.“ The line
itself is hesitant (the two long /o/s and two caesuras),
prolonged (eleven syllables), and metrically irregular. The
evidence, though difficult to pinpoint, is subtly embedded
in the parataxis and the gaps which unite that “hell” and
its "shrunken" residue.

The second quatrain confirms that the poet did indeed
make the trip home, only to recognize (or hope, at least)
that he differs from the industrial laborers there--he can
walk away; he is not a slave indentured to some capitalist's
goodness; he is not “one slave to Hazel-Atlas,“ as he
describes his father in "At the Executed Murderer's Grave”
(82). Yet he is not completely free: the final two lines,
lacking the masculine rhymes present in the rest of the
poem, end with slant rhymes: “But not of anybody's goodness
now. / It is my native rocks I go back to.“ He maintains an
indirect connection to his family in the first quatrain; but
he also anticipates his departure from home and introduces

his interest in poetic production by parodying the final

179

stanza of Thomas Wyatt's poem “They Flee from Me,“ which
states in part:

It was no dreme: I lay brode waking.

But all is torned, thorough my gentilnes

Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking;

And I have leve to goo of her goodeness,

And she also to vse new fangilnes.
While Wyatt laments his present circumstances and remembers
when he was actively pursued by both Lady Fortune and women
in the court, Wright views his past as something he must
escape (he is “broad walking"). He wants to believe that
his change in fortune is an improvement “worth / More than
the loses of my life on earth,“ but he is as uncertain of
his future as he is of his past. Claiming that his trip
home was not a dream, he also implies that he was--again
unlike Wyatt--not “brode waking.“ His interest in building
sonnets is a dream, both a nightmare of what life within
industrial conditions is like, as well as a dream that
remains unbounded by mines and industrial mills. “Dream“ is
the only unrhymed word in the poem, and it suggests his
freedom from the “slow smoldering hell," even as it is
itself tainted by industrialization.

That dream which is born on his “native rocks“ directs

him toward a second type of work: sonnet-writing, the type
of labor which Wyatt helped to establish in England. It,

too, is not ideal work--or he would not be hiding in a

 

 

 

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180

shadow and building a wall which threatens to destroy his
equilibrium. This time, he is apprehensive and hiding from
a past he cannot claim for his own: it belongs to Wyatt,
Clare, Ransom, Robinson, Frost, Hardy, and other poets who
may have flung the doors of poetry wide open, but Wright
remains too uncomfortable to simply walk in. Just
mentioning "Clare, John Ransom, Robinson" disrupts his
metrical line--even more than the “smoldering hell" in the
octet. Wright, a laborer's son, the builder of sonnets, the
teacher modelling his finished poetic product for his
students, the descendant of other sonneteers, remains
connected to these laborers, teachers, poets, and students.
Yet he is equally disconnected. As we have seen many times
already, Wright's texts are engagements in his own negative
dialectical method; he situates himself in the tense spaces
where contradictions crash together, those awkward positions
where he is neither free from restraint nor completely
disconnected; he is torn between nothingness and an inhumane
fullness. He begins as an industrial worker and crafts
himself into a literary laborer, never allowing himself to
be fully comfortable with either.

The fact that Wright, the poetic craftsman, taught
British fiction rather than poetry workshops raises

questions about his involvement with creative writing

181
programs. He responded, when asked about the “real value“
of those programs:
I took the master's in creative writing to get it
the hell out of the way. Don't you have to learn
every essential thing by yourself.... I wanted to
be a serious teacher and I wanted to get the M.A.
out of the way so I could get down to the serious
work of the doctorate, which I did. And I wrote
it on Dickens. My subject as a teacher, my main
subject, is the history of the English novel.
(PS 198-9)9
Like Berryman and Levine, Wright stresses the importance of
self-learning in regard to poetry (again confirming his
belief that the production of art is a solitary process),
and he goes even further by separating his creative thesis
from “the serious work,“ his dissertation on Dickens.
Wright's peripheral relationship with creative writing
programs--a familiarity and involvement with them, yet
eagerness to separate himself from them--while allowing him
advantageous access to “both parts“ of English departments,
also left him without secure connections to either. His
peers did not know what to make of a scholar who wrote
poetry.
This pattern of inclusion and exclusion that we have
seen in so many other contexts continued as he began

teaching full-time. The creative writer chose not to teach

I‘-

182
creative writing: “I tried it [teaching creative writing]
once and failed at it completely because all I could do was
sit and talk to the class. And someone would ask me a
question, how I worked on something, and all I could do was
grunt“ (198). When teaching a poetry workshop, Wright
failed to do what he most admired about Roethke's class: he
. did not teach poetic craft but focussed instead on his own
idiosyncratic means of production. Ignoring the labor
practices which, at least early in his career, he felt were
essential, left him in an uncomfortable and strained
relationship with his students and creative writing programs
in general. Bly observes,
He didn't think of himself as a creative writing
teacher, and didn't want to teach it. He loved
Sterne, Dickens, the English novel.... [H]e
wanted to be a good teacher of the English novel.
He was in that sense at home in the university.
In one book jacket he said, “I am a bookish man.”
He was uneasy about the relationship of
universities to living writers, and to the
practice of poetry.... [H]e respected the
academic personality and he was determined to be
polite. But felt some black humor in “the poet in
the university.“ (13)
Wright, then, was loosely affiliated with creative writing

programs because of his one course with Roethke“o and one

183
failed attempt at teaching a writing workshop; after these
two experiences, he distanced himself from creative writing
workshops and established his career as a professor of
literature. The precariousness of this academic position in
some instances hurt him: at the University of Minnesota, for
example, where Wright was unwilling to teach creative

writing, he was denied tenure.11

I belabor this point to
show Wright's tenuous position in creative writing programs
and within the university itself. Yet as a publishing poet,
even this marginalized status situated him within an
influential network of poets, administrators, and editors--a
network with important connections for publishing his
poems(” Wright's letters to Roethke in late 1957 and early
1958, which I am unable to quote, suggest his knowledge of
this network, his desire to be initiated into it, and his
connections with editors and established older poets.

Wright already at this early point in his career was
concerned, for a variety of reasons--including money and the
development of his career--about editorial “networking,“
reviewing, poetry readings, and establishing publication
outlets for himself: ”success“ as a poet necessitated that
he be attentive to the literary, social, and economic
practices relating to poetic publication.‘13 A8 Watkins

notes, the material means of production for contemporary

poets like Wright were easily accessible, so poetry became

184
subjected to two new systems of control from within the
publishing industries:
On the one hand, there was a complicated selection
process centered in the editorial offices of book
and journal publications, and the apparatus of
reviewing and the like, which continually
monitored how and what poems circulated in print.

And on the other, there was an increasingly more

 

complicated and structured process of cultural
education that differentiated from the whole
susurrus of poetic-like-sorts-of-writing what was
“genuine poetry,“ that is, which elaborated in
great detail the refinement of cultural means of
writing poetry. (40, Watkins's emphasis)
My present concern includes Wright's involvement with both
of these systems and particularly the ways in which his
connections within the poetry apparatuses undercut the
effectiveness of his poems{“

Because there are thousands of poetry readings in the
United States each year, with an audience in the tens of
thousands, the reading circuit is now--in Donald Hall's
words--”the chief form of publication for American poets'
(56). The NTC Poetry Calendar and Eggpiy_gih§h out of the
San Francisco Bay area, to give just two examples, suggest
the extent of this circuit by listing hundreds of readings

each month at various sites.15 Besides being economically

185
lucrative for ”star” poets, readings (often sponsored by
colleges and universities) contribute to the process of
defining the parameters of official verse culture, or as
Hank Lazar notes, “The poetry reading, as presently
constituted, and especially on American university campuses,
plays a small but significant role in legitimizing, judging,
and promoting certain varieties of poetry" (64). That role
is accomplished by “filtering“ which poets can read at a
particular campus and by the publicity and actual

6 Poetry

introductions, during the readings, of the poets.1
readings, then, have contributed to the institutionalization
of poetry and the maintenance of official verse culture.
Hall comments on this interrelation between readings and
poetic “networks“:"
The poetry reading can become a commodity for
trade. I had not been teaching long when I had a
letter from a poet on another campus suggesting
that he and I exchange readings next year. It
seemed a friendly notion.... Suddenly I realized
that he proposed an impropriety: that we each use
our influence to spend the taxpayer's money (or
endowment income) for the other.
And money is not the only item of trade.
Sometimes when I visit a campus, I discover that I

am invited not because I am so admired, alas, but

because I am considered useful--to recommend my

186

host for a Guggenheim, to write a review, to print

poems in a magazine which I edit, or to write a

blurb for the jacket of a book. (69)
Readings provide an opportunity--especially for a young
poet--to ingratiate herself into publication networks.
Wright's interest in poetry readings was not motivated
exclusively by money or connections, but in his readings, as
well as his publications and correspondence, he carefully
entrenched himself in the upper stratum of official verse
culture and was not unwilling to use that position to his
advantage.

Wright's numerous letters in the late 508 and early 608
to Roethke, Heilman, and Wayne Burns frequently contain
comments about his financial and personal reasons for giving
readings and writing critical essays and reviews; he states,
for example, in a 19 November 1958 letter to Burns: “next
week I must leave to give a series of public readings at
Tufts, Connecticut, Wellesley, Buffalo, and several others.
I'm doing it for money, of course, but I'm a ham actor too,
of course“ (106). Ultimately his hard work paid off: his
readings on the eastern campuses provided a prestigious
symbol of achievement and success in the literary
marketplace.

Wright frequently returns in his letters--always
ambivalently--to the issue of money. In the ironic and

sometimes bitter letter to the editors of the American

 

187
P etr Review, quoted in part in the epigraph to chapter
four, Wright demonstrates that discomfort; he makes
bristling comments about his involvement with poetry
readings, his interest in financial matters, and his
relationship with some members of his audience. He
describes being approached by a callous young man who
exclaimed that Wright's latest book was being lambasted by
critics. The stranger unabashedly observed that he would
like to hear Wright read. When Wright informed the man that
he no longer gave poetry readings, the aspiring critic
observed that another author had recently said the same
thing and was now on the reading circuit again, collecting
between one thousand and fifteen hundred dollars a reading.
Because that unidentified man walked away before Wright
could respond, he offers his comments in the letter:

I have nothing against readings. On the
contrary, they have given me some of my happiest
moments....

As for money, I love it very much. In my
boyhood long ago, I even managed to pull out one
of my own teeth prematurely with a pair of loose
pliers. In accordance with the custom of those
quaint Depression times, I virtuously and bloodily
presented both sections of the snaggled tooth to
my parents, who, of course, bound by tradition,

placed the fragments of the tooth under my pillow

188
that very night. In the morning I naturally found
a dime had replaced the tooth. I liked that dime
so much that, so help me, I didn't even spend
it....

Reading my own work in public is a threat to
my health, and, after careful consultation with my
family doctor, I have decided to retire from such
readings indefinitely. (69)

Though Wright, of course, did not retire from readings, his
comments reflect his ambivalent involvement with the
economics of poetic success. If poetry readings endanger
his health and are like pulling teeth, the idea that he
found them to be “some of my happiest moments” is
disturbing--but probably true. Wright again is caught
within a web of opposing forces. In a dialectical spirit
that Wright (as well as Adorno and Benjamin) would have
appreciated, Hall offers two observations in ”Public
Performance/Private Art“: '(1) poetry readings are
narcissistic exhibitions devastating to poet, audience, and
American poetry; (2) poetry readings are the best thing that
ever happened to poet, audience, and American poetry“ (66).
Wright's response to readings seem almost as bi-polar: he
uncomfortably acknowledges their complicitous material base,
but he also indicates their oppositional potential. Before
noting in another letter to Burns his own “chatter[ing] to

hangers-on“ (110) at readings, Wright comments on his

189
willingness to use poetry readings as sites of interference:
Bly put me up to a dirty trick which, I hereby
swear to God, I am going to carry out: this early
winter I'm going to tour eastern schools, reading
poetry (Tufts, Wellesley, Harvard, Buffalo, Poetry
Center NY, etc.). At the academic places, I'm
going to read aloud an extremely and stunningly
beautiful poem out of Rexroth's book The Signature
of All Things. Then I'm going to let the audience
applaud. Then I'm going to tell them who wrote
it. I'll let you know what happens. Rotten
tomatoes. (98-9)
In poetry readings, as in so many other matters central to
being economically and critically successful as a poet in
late capitalism, Wright was torn: between his desire to read
at the prestigious schools and his distrust and fear of that
academic audience; between his love for poetry and his
awareness that certain poets and types of poetics were
unfashionable and unacceptable in high brow eastern academic
institutions; and between his desire to make money through
his poetic work and his repulsion by the economic system.
Wright felt uncomfortable within the system and promoted the
types of poetry it excluded, yet he continued to actively
market his poetry and himself. As Bly notes, '...[H]e felt
some black humor in ‘the poet in the university.‘ And he'd

laugh about a trip: ‘Oh Jesus Christ, I just came back from

190
such and such a university (groan). Don't go to that onel'"
(13).

During the late 508 and early 608, when Wright was--
however ambiguously he may have felt about it--becoming
established as a university teacher and poet, the audience
for poetry publications was rapidly increasing (Hallberg
14), but Wright's success with this growing audience began
long before this expansion; Ransom's acceptance of the poems
”Lonely“ and “Father“ for publication in the Kehygn Rgview
for Autumn 1951 was a stamp of approval--Doctorow calls it
“akin to a Nobel Prize“ (16)--not just at Kenyon College but
in other national and international publishing markets as
well.

By 1954, three years before the publication of his
first book (as W. H. Auden's selection for the Yale Series
of Younger Poets Award), Wright's poems were appearing in
some of the most influential poetry magazines: Poet ,
Sewanee Review, Ken on Review, New Yorker, and hotteghe
Oscure, among others.‘18 Levine observes that by 1954,
Botteghe Oscure was “the best-paying and most prestigious
literary magazine in the world“ (540).‘19 Similarly,
Wright's poems challenging social values of the dominant
culture were regularly being published between advertise-
ments for furriers, champagne, and imported cars in the hp!

Yorker. Texts like “Vain Advice at the Year's End” (unc

 

.1955), "The Private Meeting Place“ (unc 1959), “To a Young

191
Girl on a Premature Spring Day“ (unc 1959), and “To a
Salesgirl, Weary of Artificial Holiday Trees“ (unc 1959)
appear on the glossy pages of the New Yorker, having passed
through the ideological and aesthetic filters of the
magazine.

Oddly enough, this last text, an appropriate poem for
the New Yorker, is positioned beside a cartoon which depicts
an escaping prisoner climbing down one of the prison's
external walls; immediately below him stands a frowning
guard, with a rifle ominously aimed at the prisoner's head.
The balloon caption above the sheepish prisoner reads,
“Shall I just climb rightback into my cell?” If this
cartoon had been juxtaposed with “At the Executed Murderer's
Grave,” for example,” the possibilities for cultural
neutralization which Wright's publication practices have
incurred could be clearly seen. Instead, we can find the
poem “Saturday Morning" (unc 1962) with its "racket of
trucks“ and “gulls poised“ squeezed between an effervescent
women swinging her own racket--this one designed for playing
tennis-~and a more poised advertisement for Evyan's
Baroness; “Micromutations' (unc 1965), which begins with “A
million years of death“ and concludes “on the frozen floor
of hell" is comfortably drifting between an ad for fine
whiskey, a holiday cruise to St. Croix, and the delights of

the Chateau Madrid--not the daily fare, I suspect, for the

192
“drunks of Belaire, Ohio,“ Harry Schultz, Patsy di Franco,
or Joe Bumbico.

In an interview reprinted in Talking All Morning,
Robert Bly comments on the New Yorker's privileged position
within literary culture. He describes it, by appropriately
using military terminology, as the epitome of official verse
culture:

Someone told me a wonderful story about the Iowa
workshop. A mood of anxiety had settled over the
place--it was a few years ago. And one man set
himself to trace the source of it, which he found
to be a poet who was in the habit of saying that
publishing a poem in Poetry was like being a
colonel--if you publish in a mimeographed magazine
you're a private--you see--and publishing in a
magazine like Prairie Schoohe; is being a
lieutenant...but publishing a poem in the hp!
Yorker was like being a generhl.
(178, Bly's emphasis).
Wright's decision to publish in the hpy_xp;hg; suggests a
desire to achieve poetic success by marketing his texts in
the upper publishing echelons. Much can be said, of course,
about the larger readership of that magazine in comparison
to small press publications, as well as the contradictory
nature of the fiction, poetry, and political writing it

publishes. Despite these characteristics--however favorable

193

they might seem--the New Yorker is itself an institution
firmly connected to the social and cultural forces Wright's
poems confront, and his choice to publish in the magazine,
while advancing his poetic career, also posits his texts
within the very hierarchical structures he criticizes.

Leonard Kniffel provides what he describes as a
"calculable and meaningful" (103) analysis of the most
influential American periodicals publishing poetry and
fiction--those magazines which, he thinks, libraries should
order. In hopes of determining “this country's best
original fiction and poetry“ (103), Kniffel tabulated which
periodicals publish the most award winning poems and
fiction. His results can be construed as support for Bly's
story: out of the 426 magazines included in Kniffel's
research sample the “resounding leader in this survey is the
New Yorker, with a total of 164 published stories and poems
published in the collections examined" (106). The closest
competitor was Poetr , which was a distant second, garnering
73 prized works. Though this research method strikes me as
a dubious way to determine poetic quality, particularly for
texts which are socially critical, it reveals the pivotal
location of the hgy_Tp;hg; within literary culture.

The poet who wrote "I croon my tears at fifty cents per
line“ and comments on his "paid sincerity“ and “widely
printed sighing“ possibly does have reason to be concerned

about the connection between his subject matter and

194
publication practices. This interrelationship between the
aesthetic and the economic implies a complicitous
involvement in the very capitalist social structures which
he resists, as well as a perpetuation of the contradictions
he himself remains caught in. In 1963, for a man undergoing
a divorce, being paid fifty cents a line for a seventy-seven
line poem like “At the Executed Murderer's Grave“ (let alone
three different versions of the poem published in three
different outlets), would help buy needed groceries, but for
a poet who vehemently attacks college educated morticians
for being roaches feeding on the life of the poor, that
complicity suggests a moral deviation. Wright's poems about
working conditions for the poor are themselves disenfran-
chised from the lower classes and become commodities for an
academically informed middle and upper class, or--as Herbert
Schiller observes in Culture Inc.:
What distinguishes their [the various arts]
situation in the industrial-capitalist era, and
especially in its most recent development, are the
relentless and successful efforts to separate
these elemental expressions of human creativity
from their group and community origins for the
purpose of gpiiihg_phph to those who can pay for
them. (31)
Wright's poems become, through his own publishing practices,

commodities which are both material objects and cultural

195

products;a’and he seems uncomfortably aware that his

published poems, reviews, essays, and books are commodities

with direct economic ties to the very system he

challenges.

21

The use-value of Wright's texts is, to an extent that

we will have to examine in more detail, superseded by their

exchange-value in the marketplace. Wright's involvement in

the commodification of his poetry raises questions not only

about his personal position, but (once again) the restricted

role of poets inlate capitalismd” Charles Bernstein has

written several articles about “official verse culture“; in

the essay “The Academy in Peril“ he defines and explores

that concept at some length:

...[B]y “official verse culture“--I am referring
to the poetry publishing and reviewing practices
of The New York Times, The Nation, American Poetry
Review, The New Yprk Review of Books, The hew
Yorker, Ppetry (ChicagO), Antaeus, Parn ssus,
Atheneum Press, all the major trade publishers,
the poetry series of almost all of the major
university presses.... Add to this the
ideologically motivated selection of the vast
majority of poets teaching in university writing
and literature programs and of poets taught in
such programs as well as the interlocking

accreditation of these selections through prizes

196
and awards judged by these same individuals.
Finally, there are the self-appointed keepers of
the gate who actively put forward biased, narrowly
focussed and frequently shrill and contentious
accounts of American poetry, while claiming, like
all disinformation propaganda, to be giving
historical or nonpartisan views. In this
category, the American Academy of Poetry...stands
out.... What makes official verse culture
official is that it denies the ideological nature
of its practice while maintaining hegemony in
terms of major media exposure and academic
legitimation and funding. (247-9)
Bernstein's list of publishers, awards, and university
positions comprising official verse culture are an apt
description of Wright's publishing practices and literary
achievements, beginning with his early publications as an
undergraduate student of Ransom's_and continuing until his"
death. Ironically, Wright's poetry was published in these
culturally powerful outlets: for example, “In a Warm Chicken
House“ (unc 1961) was published in the New York T'mes; ”A
Late Afternoon in Western Minnesota” (revised as “Brush
Fire“ [164]) appeared in the hhpigh; and “Romeo, Grown Old“
(unc 1974) was published in the hmppiggh_gpppgy_§gyipy.
Wright's publication in these authoritative periodicals

suggests that connections and political maneuvering within

 

197
the apparatuses of official verse culture define which poems
are published, reviewed, and critically appraised:23
Kalaidjian notes,
In fact, much executive tampering enters into the
decisions about where and under what circumstances
poets will be published, what awards will accrue
to them, which organizations and performing
circuits will underwrite their public readings,
and how critics will cultivate their audiences.
Verse writing in the postmodern era, it is
plausible to claim, is less a visionary or
sacramental art than a highly competitive
industry. (15)
To the extent that Wright's texts comply with that
competitive market, they risk sacrificing the very spiritual
and prophetic vision which he aspired to attain in poems
like "Mercy“ and “At the Executed Murderer's Grave.“ Even
the fact that his poetics were so readily accepted and
absorbed by the most prestigious periodicals raises
questions about the actual resistance these texts offered.
Wright did not actively seek the commercial and popular
success which poets like Robert Frost, for example,
courted.“’ In fact, the opposite is more easily
supportable: Wright defined himself as a “literature
teacher” (itself a privileged position, as Watkins notes),

with an avocation for poetry, and when asked if he was

198
bothered "that the audience for poetry in America seems a
small and an academic one," he responded, “No. I like that
very much. At least I like a comparatively small audience.
If indeed we can say that there is an audience for poetry“
(DS 234). Wright's decision to publish in prestigious mass
circulation magazines does, however, register support for
the official verse culture and in turn the dominant culture
itselffiu The same can be said about Wright's various
books of poetry: his first five collections were published
by major university presses (Yale and Wesleyan) and the
remaining collections, published after 1971, were printed by
large commercial houses. After winning the Pulitzer, Wright
seems to have become more attractive to Random House and
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Richard Kostelanetz notes that
”Perhaps the most ‘prestigious' American poetry publisher is
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, whose junior partner, Robert
Giroux, was also T. S. Eliot's American editor. His firm
features the chiefs of that generation now between fifty and
sixty--Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and
Randall Jarrell...' (13). Because of his success in the
literary marketplace, together with the aesthetic qualities
of his work, Wright must have seemed a suitable peer for the
“chiefs" already publishing with Farrar. Again, Wright was
positioning himself squarely in the ranks of the official
verse culture. It is also important to consider that both

the commercial and the university presses, which are

199
partially subsidized by state and federal monies, are
equally imbedded in the dominant culture.“

Wright's active involvement in that hegemonic culture,
small and insignificant as the role of a poet may seem, is
connected to larger commercial and economic concerns. His
publication with Random House, for instance, connects him
with a three billion dollar publishing enterprise owned by
Rupert Murdoch. It is an empire which includes, as

Kalaidjian notes, the Times of London, the New York Post,

 

the Boston Herald, New York Ma a ine, 20th-Century Fox
Corporation, New Woman magazine, £22; magazine, Salem House,
Ltd., Times Books London, William Collins and Sons, John
Bartholomew, and Bay Books (19).”' J. Kendrick Noble Jr.,
in turn, identifies the following imprints owned by Harper
and Row: Basic Books, T. Y. Crowell, A. J. Holmon, and J. B.
Lippincott (140), while Benjamin M. Compaine notes that
Harper and Row Inc. publishes a variety of business and
trade magazines (including specialized professional
publications like the American Journal of Pathology and
Laboratory Medicine) with a total of 376,300 paid and unpaid
subscriptions (192).28 Wright's financial association with
multi-national publishers like Harper and Row, though
increasing the availability of his texts, raises broader
issues concerning his complicity in the reproduction of

values and power structure supporting the dominant classes

200
at the social, psychological, and financial expense of the
lower classes.

As we have discussed, Wright demonstrates in various
texts a conscious awareness of those social groups which
constitute his audience, as well as those individuals and
groups unlikely to be readers of his texts, and he
frequently foregrounds his own uneasy relationship with that
upper class audience: the poet establishes monologues with
and about the poor and working class individuals, draws
attention to his own authenticity and “sincerity,” exhibits
antagonism toward an audience unwilling to cooperate with
his sympathies, and courts illusory personal bonds to create
and attract a more benevolent audience. Wright, while aware
that his poems and books are themselves commodities (filled
with ”paid sincerity” and “printed sighing“), implies that
his authenticity and poetic strategies justify his
complicitous publication and distribution practices. Yet,
that insistence was not always convincing, even for himself:
in ”A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place,“ he observes,

I renounce the blindness of the magazines.
I want to lie down under a tree.

This is the only duty that is not death.
This is the everlasting happiness

Of small winds.

Suddenly,

A pheasant flutters, and I turn

 

201

.Only to see him vanishing at the damp edge

Of the road.
What is that ”blindness of the magazines"? Why does the
poet want to escape it? Is it the inability of magazine
publishers to recognize good poems? Is it their
unreasonable and incorrigible expectations for poets? Is it
the writing conditions--and the need to "sell“ their wares--
that are forced upon poets? Is it an insular quality, an
artificiality, of human commodities in the face of nature?
Is it a failure on the part of editors and publishers to
”see" their own position in the capitalist market? 18 it
simply that one of the poet's texts had not been properly
appreciated by magazine staff members? Whatever that
blindness of the magazines may be, Wright (though with some
humor) identifies himself as a seer who is neither “self-
blinded”--as in “Mercy'--nor blinded by the marketplace: he
recognizes that literary market for what it is, and he has
transcended the materiality and commodification of magazine
publication. Because of his vision, the poet renounces the
marketplace, or at least hopes and prays that he may. If
Wright is turning to nature for comfort as he withdraws from
magazine publication, his solace is short lived: the sudden
“vanishing” of the pheasant (which interrupts his
“everlasting happiness") is itself a variant of the cliches

“A man and his money are soon parted" and “Riches have

202
wings.“ Not only can the transcendent seer not escape, he
can neither transcend nor “see.“

The literary marketplace, blind as it may be, also
blinds those who cannot escape it. Desiring a larger
readership is not in itself a negative attribute for a post,
but publication practices entail more issues than just those
of audience quantification. “Success“ in that market late
in the twentieth century necessarily involves marketing
one's poetic wares. But active participation in the
literary market, and--more specifically--with official verse
culture, can adversely affect the nature of poetry by
establishing narrow poetic boundaries which restrict what
poetic texts attempt and achieve. Official verse and
workshop poems, with their emphasis on subjectivity, risk
reproducing ideologies and values supporting the dominant
culture. By turning inward toward the nuclear self and not
engaging in the social arena, these texts accept the ideo-
logical status quo and do not “see“ nature and social life,
except as they are defined by current ideological
structures; instead, they opt for a culturally mediated
vision, itself an example of the ”blindness of the
magazines.“

Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio“
critiques--in an implicitly subversive way--our advanced
industrial society even as it reveals the poet's complex

involvement in that society. Another of Wright‘s frequently

203

anthologized lyrics, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's
Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,“ offers a different example
of the poet's ambiguous cultural work.29 This text
provides another view of the nuclear poet, the essence of
self, in relation to a social and external world:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year's horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.
Hass describes one of Wright's texts as being “an American
poem... [abbut] an American place, so the people who have
will and force are Puritans, the hard-sleepers, enviers of
pleasure.... Maybe the worst thing about American
Puritanism is the position it forces its opponents into“
(30). “Lying in a Hammock...“ reveals Wright at yet another
impasse in his confrontation with American history and

culture: he has aligned himself with Puritanism, even as he

 

204

pits himself against it. His attention to the details of
natural life have their roots in the Puritans' attentive
observations of nature coupled with their introspective
symbolizing: their persistent attempts to read natural signs
as indications of divine election and the will of God. As
Puritan texts frequently reveal, no detail is too small to
be attended to, nor too trivial to have significance in a
person's life. It is this purposive examination, even while
”relaxing” on a hammock, that informs Wright's pursuit of
natural symbols, and it is precisely in a symbolist vein
that the poem needs to be read. The contradictory readings
of this text by Bruce Henricksen, R. J. Spendal, and David
Jauss agree, in certain respects, on the range of
interpretations possible for these symbols, and these
critics see this range as being defined by sensory
perceptions of natural and physical objects. I choose to
address, instead, ways in which these symbols are mediated
through language, poetic structures, and literary culture;
the symbols in this text say less about astute natural
observations than they do about Wright's skills for cultural
reception and his willingness to pursue a versified culture
at the expense of natural and social engagement.

Wright's observations, meditation, and final response
to the objects on Duffy's farm are informed in part by

Rilke's “Archaic Torso of Apollo.“ Robert Bly in his

Selected Poems of Rainer haria Rilke narrates a brief

205
exchange between Rilke and the sculptor Rodin: "When Rilke
confided one day that he hadn't been writing lately, Rodin
did not advise him to change diet or find a new
relationship; he suggested that Rilke go to the zoo. What
shall I do there? Look at an animal until you see it“
(133). Rilke, according to Bly, followed Rodin's advice,
and this exercise at the zoo involved prolonged observations
of an object (or animal) until it could be ”seen,“ stripped
of its superficial features. Rilke's attempts to penetrate
beneath an object's surface characteristics eventually led
to those texts, including the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,“
which Bly refers to as “seeing“ poems. In this meditation
on an ancient, fragmented sculpture, Rilke displays a
complex process of “seeing“ that begins with physical
description, but rather than noting those characteristics of
the torso that are still intact and visible, the poet
describes what is absent. Bly's translation begins, “We
have no idea what his fantastic head / was like....“ The
text then focusses on the aesthetic effects the sculpture
has on a viewer, notably that the statue itself has become a
flaming light that ”gleam[s] like the fur of a wild animal”
and “send[s] out light from every edge / as a star does.”
Rilke's exercise in ”seeing" does not conclude, though, with
these descriptions: like Wright's text, this poem asserts
that the poet and the reader are engaged in a process of

self-examination: “there is no place at all / that isn't

206
looking at you. You must change your life.“ Rilke's
attempts to “see,“ to strip objects of their ideological
trappings, ultimately involve readers in a process of re-
visioning and redefining their own lives.

Wright's poem, on the other hand, while demonstrating
attempts to "see“ a butterfly and horse droppings and to
hear the distant cowbells, immediately invokes their
absence: rather than penetrating beneath superficial
qualities to “see“ the objects, Wright understands,
interprets, and transforms what he has seen and heard into
images which are informed by literary culture. As David
Jauss indicates, the first three lines present typically
"poetic“ images: butterflies and flowers. They are ”staples
of sentimental poetry about the beauty and peace of nature“
(165). Besides illustrating his revelry in natural beauty,
Wright's appropriation of these images serves his poetic
agenda: the natural objects around him are both informed and
obscured by his poetic prototypes, including Rilke's
“Archaic Torso of Apollo.“ The butterfly sleeping on a tree
trunk, for example, becomes more than an observation of a
real butterfly when Wright's vision is conjoined with the
goldsmith's work in Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium“:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

207

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Wright's presence in “Lying in a Hammock...“ resembles that
of the “Grecian goldsmiths“ in Yeats's text: both transform
natural objects into aesthetic images that can be propped on
”a golden bough to sing.” The butterfly Wright observed
becomes metamorphosed into a cultural object, the "bronze
butterfly.“ This transformation of reality into “literary“
images permeates Wright's presentation of all the objects he
presents in the text. Just as Yeats's artisans make golden‘
birds to sing before the drowsy emperor, Wright (resting on
a hammock) transforms last year's horse droppings into
"golden stones.“ Even the ”black trunk“ becomes more than a
description of a natural object when we remember the second
line of Pound's “In a Station of the Metro“: ”Petals on a
wet, black bough.“3° Wright, like Rilke and the speaker of
Yeats's poem, is stepping ”out of nature“ and removing the
“bodily form from any natural thing," but--unlike Rilke--
Wright does not engage in this process to free the objects
from their culturally mediated interpretations. Instead, he
removes them from nature specifically to impose cultural
images upon them. In a similar way, the last line of the
poem becomes less a naturalistic statement than a culturally

informed artistic pose: A. Poulin identifies it as an echo

208

of the final line in Rilke's ”Archaic Torso of Apollo"
(692), while Alan Williamson sees it as a quotation from
Rimbaud's “Song of the Highest Tower“ (70)--in Paul
Schmidt's translation, that quotation is rendered, “Lack of
heart / has cost my life.“ Regardless of its originary
source, or its conflation of these and other sources, the
final line--like the rest of the poem--reveals Wright, true
to one facet of his Puritan background, attempting to
interpret these natural images, but his interpretations are
informed by the value he places on cultural products
(including the texts by Rimbaud, Rilke, Yeats, and Pound)
rather than an appreciation and observation of the natural
objects themselves. He is prioritizing literary culture
over the natural order, or his acceptance of official verse
culture prevents him from “seeing“ objects except as that
culture allows them to be perceived and valued. In that
sense, Wright's poem is an example of “false realism'--to
borrow Fredric Jameson's description of contemporary art.
Jameson notes, “False realisms, they are really art about
other art, images of other images” (“Consumer Society” 123).

Wright's casual, leisurely tone in the poem also places
him in opposition to his Puritan roots. Rather than seeking
divine election and heeding his salvation, he decides to
“lean back“ in his (or, more plausibly, William Duffy's)
hammock, even as he realizes he has “wasted his life“ by

being disengaged from it and passively presenting “images of

209
other images.“ After its original publication in the spring
1962 issue of the Sixties, the poem was reprinted--along
with poems by Bly and William Duffy, as well as other Wright
texts--in the chapbook The Lion's Tale and Eyes: Poems
Written thhof Laziness and Silence. The deliberate
flaunting of their “laziness,“ in the face of the Puritan
work ethic, implies a revisionary approach to American
culture, as Bly observes on the dust jacket, “In all of the
poems, there is an effort to resist the Puritan insistence
on being busy, the need to think of everything in terms of
work.“ This resistance, as Hass has observed, forces Wright
into the position of trying to assess his life and transcend
the cultural influences that have informed him even as he
relies upon the language and cultural products imbedded in
that culture. Wright's poetic texts which offer levels of
resistance to the dominant culture ultimately have their
revolutionary status undercut by their own reliance on other
cultural forms; in this case, products of literary culture
are given predominance over ”the Puritan insistence on being
busy.“ Wright's terms of opposition are themselves defined
by the dominant culture, and the solitary “I” who is “Lying
in a Hammock“ is a metamorphosed product of that culture.
His engagement with Puritan history is posited in recycled
British, German, American, and French images.
Fredric Jameson in his essay “Postmodernism and

Consumer Society” provides a theoretical framework for

210
assessing Wright's process of transforming reality into
culturally-informed literary images. Jameson describes
postmodern works of art as being “pastiches,“ and he
contrasts these pastiches with traditional “parodies.“
While parody involves a comic satirizing of recognizable
forms, pastiche is parody "without the satiric impulse,
without laughter, without that still latent feeling that
there exists something normal compared to which what is
being imitated is rather comic“ (114).31 Wright's “Lying
in a Hammock,“ as Jameson suggests, is not so much a
conscious parody of poetic discourse as part of a larger
echoic discourse that is determined and defined by its
reliance upon the past. The text not only contains but is
the various muffled resonances that inform it:
[I]n a world in which stylistic innovation is no
longer possible, all that is left is to imitate
dead styles, to speak through the masks and with
the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.
But this means that contemporary or postmodernist
art is going to be about art itself in a new kind
of way; even more, it means that one of its
essential messages will involve the necessary
failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of
the new, the imprisonment in the past. (116)
Wright's pastiche, rather than confronting Puritan history,

is constrained by its use of literary images which make that

211

history unapproachable and immediate social engagement
problematic. Wright's reproduction of the literary past
imprisons and prevents him from directly encountering and
“seeing" the physical objects around him. “Cultural
production,“ Jameson observes, “has been driven back inside
the mind, within the monadic subject: it can no longer look
directly out of its eyes at the real world for the referent
must, as in Plato's cave, trace its mental images of the
world on its confining walls“ (118).:32 Wright's confron-
tation with American culture in “Lying in a Hammock...” can
be characterized by an inability to probe historical and
cultural forces. The text is informed by those elements of
the dominant culture which it attempts to redefine, until it
finally reproduces those elements even as it resists them.
Wright again keeps one foot on both sides of the proverbial
fence--or maybe I should say Frost's “Mending Wall.“

Wright's ambiguous, self-divided position in late
capitalism can also be seen by examining the publication
possibilities which he chose not to follow. In his essay
”The Few Poets of England and America,“ he acknowledges the
presence of commodified literature (for which he coins the
term “consumeritem') as well as the availability of
publication and marketing options which enable contemporary
poets to resist commodification. While discussing Robert

Creeley's poetry, he observes:

212
I doubt if Mr. Creeley himself is very deeply
troubled by the fact that his work as an artist
has not been transformed into something like Mr.
Kerouac's--that isva consumeritem, to be
considered less the work of a struggling artist
than a mass-produced fantasy designed to mirror
the escapist daydreams of middle-class people who
despise their own everyday lives with sullen
despair. (270)
Creeley, by escaping entrenchment in the literary
marketplace and resisting the forces of commodification, has
earned Wright's respect, though Wright conjoins that
resistance with the Romantic myth of the “struggling
artist.“

From the late 508 until his death Wright maintained
personal and poetic connections with Robert Bly, and that
relationship provides other examples of publishing practices
which Wright could have adopted. As is evident from even a
quick perusal of Bly's Eiipigp, giipips, and §gyghhig§,
Wright was often involved in its various literary aspects--
translations, original poems, and critical essays”--and
was frequently associated with the publication. But the
radical nature of that journal and Bly's own publication
history reveal how far Wright's publishing practices are
from being exclusively oppositional. The acknowledgements

for Bly's Slee ers Joinin Hands, for example, reveal prior

 

213
publication in small press magazines such as Kaygh,

Lillabulero, Field, The Falcon, The Lamp in the Spine, and

 

other alternative magazines: a list that differs
considerably from Wright's own practices and is notable for
its lack of participation in the apparatuses of official
verse culture. Also, the combative relationship of the
Fifties to literary culture, academic institutions, the
book-reviewing and marketing industry, and other socio-
political institutions reveals the possibilities for
resistance and interference which were readily available
during the years Wright was actively writing and publishing.
After Bly stated “The Order of the Blue Toad is
herewith awarded to Norman Cousins, editor of the §h§urday
Review,“’for putting out a boring,stupid magazine. His
list of reviewers is enough to make anyone die of
boredom...“ (Fifties 3: 57), he did not consider his
strategies for interference exhausted. He subsequently
attempted to use the capitalist system to supplant the
literary dominancy of both Cousins and the review: he placed
an advertisement in the §gphgghy_hgyigy itself announcing
the award. As could be expected, the advertisement was
refused, so Bly printed the refusal notice in the following
issue of his magazine. Bly's attack on what seemed at the
time a powerful and established literary institution, the
Saturda Rev' w, was an upstart revolt by a young editor

(who was a former Harvard fellow) against the official verse

214
culture that Cousins and the Saturday Review represented,
printed, and supported through positive reviews of books by
“its“ authors. Similarly, the first issue of the Fifties
includes a heated interview, conducted by Bly, with the
Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times Book Review,
discussing issues such as the subtle (and not so subtle)
pressure for favorable reviews from book manufacturers; Bly
explored the same topic in the Fall 1960 issue.

Bly's political tactics were not, however, restricted
to struggles against literary publishers and literary
issues: he recognized the need for poets to confront
national and world political concerns. The 1959 issue of
the Fifties addressed directly the relationship between
poets and public policy:

We have received letters asking why, if we are
oets, we concern ourselves with the activities of
the Atomic Energy Commission. We believe that
artists above all are not exempt from fighting in
national issues. The greatest poets, Yeats among
them, have opposed their government, or any organ
of it, which was harmful to the people....
Condonement of the policies of the A[tomic]
E[nergy] C[ommission] would be a poor show of love
for the United States. (51, Bly's emphasis)
Poets, Bly asserts, “are not exempt from fighting in

national issues“; instead, because of their cultural status

215

and because of the various forms of resistance available to
them, they ”above all” can and should effectively express
their views. Once again, Bly did not simply state his
position and then remain quiet and passive. Perceiving a
connection between poetry, militarism, and universities, he
printed in the Summer 1968 issue a full page reproduction of
a letter from the journal's manager--his wife--to 31
universities. I print the letter in its entirety because it
addresses issues relevant to Wright's own social criticism
and involvement in the economics of publication:

We are canceling your subscription to The Sixties

magazine, and/or back-ordered Sixties Press Books.

We are not accepting trade from institutions we

know to have money from the C.I.A. or the armed

services for research on chemical and germ

warfare.

Of course the university library isn't the
agency in question, and of course we know how tiny
our flailing against such powers must appear, but
I think universities should be made to know the
revulsion that private citizens feel against
institutions they once trusted.

Even libraries shouldn't really expect to do
“business as usual“ when such elaborate cruelty as

the proliferation of disease and torture through

216
chemical poisoning is being worked up on the same
campus.
Please find attached a statement of your

account with us, and where indicated, a refund

against monies due you. (76)
Bly's resistance against “such powers“ as the universities
contain was a confrontation--financially and politically
ineffective as it certainly must have seemed--with the
militarism endorsed by bureaucrats and intellectuals:35 It
was also a rebellion against those poetry institutions which
aligned themselves with that militarism. This interference
in public policy by the literary practices of “private
citizens” provides yet another model of resistance that
Wright did not pursue.

I do not want to suggest that Robert Bly's personal,
political, and poetic decisions should have been adopted by
Wright nor that those stances were completely altruistic.
Bly's subsequent marketing of himself as a guru deserving of
reverence undermines, I believe, the efficacy of those
positions and questions the possibility of sustaining such
views. His actions do reveal, though, that American poetry
during the 608 and 708 did not have to be dominated by the
institutional practices and views of the official verse
culture; as Wright indicated, literature is not exclusively
a “consumeritem.” Though he did not have to be as

aggressive and overtly confrontational in his poetic

‘ ‘ Li
1 ; .‘,
INIiII|IlAlIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIillllllllllllllllllliilhii

217
positions as Bly was, Wright did have a range of publishing
possibilities open to him. We can assess the situation of
his texts within contemporary culture by considering his
actions, words, and decisions in relation to what he could
have done, written, or said.“’ His turning from the
“blindness of the magazines" to “lie down under a tree”
seems, at the least, escapist and suggests his own
complicitous involvement with the culture industry, or (to
borrow his own words) in “a mass-produced fantasy designed
to mirror the escapist daydreams of middle-class people who
despise their own everyday lives with sullen despair“ (”Few

Poets“ 270).

 

Notes

1. I borrow the phrase “official verse culture” from Charles
Bernstein. Later in this chapter I provide his full
definition of the phrase. For the time being, let me simply
present another extended definition that he offers: "The
official cultural apparatus, as it applies to American
poetry--what I've called ‘official verse culture'--is most
clearly revealed in the publishing and reviewing practices
of the New Yorh Times, New York Review of Books, New Yorker,
American Poetr Review, and a number of old-line literary
quarterlies; by the Pulitzer Prize, the National Books
Awards, and the Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships; by the
poetry lists of the major trade publishers; by such
presenting organizations as the Poetry Center of the 92nd
Street Y in New York and the American Academy of Ports; and
by the poets on the tenured faculties of the major U.S.
universities. While the type of work supported by these
institutions is diverse, and subject to a variety of
pressures that encourage such diversity, the bulk of this
verse tends to be blandly apolitical or accomodationist,
neoromantic, and (often militantly) middle-of-the-road or,
as it is now called, ‘suburban'. [sic] Moreover, what is
most striking is not the relatively unsystematic quality of
the inclusions but the systematic nature of what is--with
important strategic exceptions--excluded: almost all of the
formally active poetry developing out of New American Poetry
contexts, the many divergent small-press tendencies, and the
poetry of gays, blacks, and hispanics, as well as the
variety of ‘ethnic' poetries that reject standard English as
their dialect (categories that should be seen as overlapping
rather than as distinct)“ (Tpghigp 93-94).

2. I cannot help but wonder if Wright had horrible
premonitions about me while he was writing “At the Grave.”
I hope not. I have some consolation, though, knowing his
poems frighten himself, as much as me.

3. Myers comments on the academic institution as a
monolithic presence for the majority of publishing poets:
“Of the 134 poets reprinted in two recent anthologies, for
instance--Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten's New American
Poets of the 80's and Dave Smith and David Bottom's Mogrow
.Anthology of Younger American Poe§8--nearly eighty percent
are affiliated with the enterprise of creative writing in
one way or another, either as graduates of a writers'
‘workshop or as professors of creative writing. Typically
they are both. Their post graduate education and academic
employment seem often to be the only life they have lived.
Those who fought with the U. S. Army in Vietnam or were
trained as lawyers or work as psychotherapists cannot but

218

 

219

stand out from the ranks of poets who have spent the better
part of their adult years taking and teaching classes in
creative writing“ (5).

4. Though beginning his essay with an attack on writing
workshops (and his bad experience in Robert Lowell's class),
Levine also discusses his one semester of study with John
Berryman: “I had one great poetry writing teacher, I had
studied with him diligently for fifteen weeks. From now on
I had to travel the road to poetry alone or with my peers.
This was his [Berryman's] final lesson, and it may have been
the most important in my development" (551). Levine's
concluding sentiment would be shared, I believe, by Wright.

5. In recent years numerous similar attacks on creative
writing programs have been published, including Bly's ”Where
Have All the Critics Gone?“ and his interview with Wayne
Dodd ”Knots of Wild Energy,“ both found in American Poetgy:
Wildness and Domesticity. In the first of those essays, Bly
observes, "What I'm suggesting then is that there is a
curious link of workshop creativity with white-color
work...” (260). Also see Bruce Bawer's “Poetry and the
University,” Donald Hall's “Poetry and Ambition,“ Dano
Gioia's “Can Poetry Matter?" Hank Lazer's "The Crisis in
Poetry,” Greg Kuzma's “The Catastrophe of Creative Writing,“
Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's ”The Cultural Politics
of the Fiction Workshop,“ Ted Solotaroff's essay “The
Literary Campus and the Person of Letters“ in h_§py_§ggg
Voices in My thg, and Joseph Epstein's “Who Killed
Poetry?“

More positive assessments of writing workshops can be
found in Wallace Stegner's essay ”New Climate for the
Writer“ in Thp_fl;ipg;_ih_hmp;igg, Richard Hugo's “In Defense
of Creative-Writing Classes,“ and Stephen Wilbers's 222.1212

Writers' Workshop.

6. Hugo also offers an historical justification--which Myers
(correctly, I believe) refutes (16-7)--for the presence of
creative writing programs on university campuses: ”For
around 400 years it [creative writing] was a requirement of
every student's education. In the English-speaking world,
the curriculum for grammar and high school students included
the writing of ‘verses.’ In the nineteenth century, when
literary education weakened or was dropped from elementary
and secondary education, colleges picked it up, all but the
creative writing. Creative writing was missing for 100
years or so, but in the past 40 years it has returned“ (54).
This historical context places the emphasis on exposing
students to the writing of verse, as “civilized” activity,
rather than establishing sites for the production of high
culture.

220

7. Roethke describes some of his methods for teaching poetic
craft in his essay “The Teaching Poet.“ Richard Hugo,
another student of Roethke's, in his essay "Stray Thoughts
on Roethke and Teaching” also describes exercises and
assignments Roethke would use to teach craft. See also
Wright's interview with Smith (202-3). Wright's workbook
for his class with Roethke, during Spring Quarter 1954,
supports the image of Roethke as a teacher of craft: it
contains exercises in writing imitations, six-syllable lines
with caesura on the first and third syllables, triads with
nouns, monosyllabic lines, participial phrases, three and
five beat lines, epigrams, and diverse stanzaic forms.

8. In a recent essay addressing the need for restructuring
creative writing workshops, Alan Shapiro--like Wright--turns
to Horace and the value of poetic imitation as a possible
solution for the weaknesses of creative writing programs.

It may be interesting to note that Wright's poetry workbook,
submitted to Roethke during Spring Quarter 1954, contains a
number of imitations.

9. Wright's M.A. thesis, ”Mr. Mould's Horses: Elegies and
Occasional Poems, 1954,“ is dated August 3, 1954. Several
poems from that thesis are included in The Green Wali;
others were published but not included in his various
collections.

10. Wright's relationship with John Crowe Ransom was not in
the context of a creative writing workshop. Doctorow says
about that relationship: “I have no way of knowing, but I
assume he [Wright] showed a lot of his work to the older
poet and received the benefit of Ransom's just and serenely
disinterested critical taste" (20).

11. Donald Hall, in "Lament for a Maker,“ states, “In 1963,
the year he published The B anch Will Not Break, James
Wright was fired by the University of Minnesota. Among the
professors voting to deny him tenure was his friend the poet
Allen Tate, which was hurtful. Jim missed classes because
he got drunk; Jim got into barroom fistfights and spent time
in the drunktank. It may be noted that Professor Berryman
taught, not in the Department of English, but in the
Department of Humanities“ (xxxiv).

12. The extent to which this informal but highly integrated
network extends into academic institutions can be seen by
examining the appendix to Wilbers's study of the Iowa
Writers' Workshop; Wilbers notes, "Many Iowa Workshop
graduates presently hold teaching positions in American
colleges and universities. Although they are too numerous
to mention here, it ih possible to give an account (by no
means complete) of the programs founded and presently

 

221

directed by former Workshop students.... [T]here is at
least some connection between Iowa and a significant number
of writing programs in this country“ (137). Wilbers proceeds
to list those programs which were either founded or are
currently directed by Workshop alumni or both (137-139).

Kingston and Cole in their discussion of a survey of
published authors (which they acknowledge contained few
posts) offer the following observations about contacts
between poets: "The only other group which matched this
level of regular professional contact was the small number
who identified themselves as poets.... [B]y comparison to
nonacademic writers of prose, poets appeared to be somewhat
more inclined to talk about their writing with fellow
authors" (116) and “The writers of academically oriented
nonfiction and the very few poets stood out as the most
likely to have personal connections to fellow writers who
have influenced their own work. That almost a third of the
poets had a friend who has had an important influence, more
than double the overall rate, was especially remarkable.
Indeed, the poets represented the only genre in which a
majority of the writers claimed at least some personal
connection to an influential contemporary, a fact further
supporting Wilson's sense of poets as an ‘extended family'”
(136).

13. The recently published Spreading the Word: Editors on
Poetry asks poetry editors to explain the editorial policies

of their respective literary magazines and their own
editorial practices. The editors frequently offer comments
like these by David Wojahn, "Editors will profess to having
no ‘party line' of the imagination, no biases toward a
particular sort of writing. As I sat down to write this
essay, however, I began to feel uneasy about the last point
I have listed. As much as I would like to state that the
choices we make at Crazyhorse are based on quality over any
other basis of selection, I have to admit that our concept
of what constitutes quality is very particular, very strict,
and is, for all practical purposes, a set of biases“ (11).
Similarly, Richard Foerster observes: “It is all too easy,
for me at least, to be biased from the outset, either for or
against a poem by such things as the writer's fame or
obscurity, a publishing record outlined in a cover letter,
or even the condition of the paper the work is typed on“
(5). Finally, Dabney Stuart comments, “There's no mystique
to selecting poems for Shenandoah, and I wouldn't want to
write as if there were. I choose what appeals to me, what I
like“ (72).

This list of biases and personal appeal can be
supplemented by looking at the biographical sketches of each
editor. With only a few exceptions, all of them are
themselves practicing poets, publishing their works in other
magazines and journals run by poetry editors who are also

 

222

poets. The incestuous circularity of these editorial

policies is, I suspect, a factor in determining what poems
are published.

14. Much has been written about the value of networks and
artistic alliances in creating supportive communities of
resistance. See, for example, Charles Kadushin' 8 ”Networks
and Circles in the Production of Culture,“ Michael
Davidson's The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and

Community at Mid- -Century, and Alan Golding' 8 ”Little
Magazines and Alternative Canons: The Example of Origin."

15. Hall, in the essay ”Public Performance/Private Art,“
provides the only attempt that I am aware of to narrate--
however briefly--a history of twentieth century poetry
readings.

l6. Lazer conducted a survey of 28 colleges and universities
about the number, type, and sources of funding for their
poetry readings, and he requested, as well, a list of the
poets who read.

17. Kostelanetz in his essay "Poetry Readings” in Thg Old
Poetries and the New is critical of readings and in several
comments approaches our concerns here. He notes, for
example, a factor pertinent to Wright's poetics: “Most poets
in performance try to be charming and ingratiating; however,
most great poems, even of recent years, are more provocative
than ameliorating, more challenging than charming, more
disturbing than ingratiating. In more respects than one,
the values upheld in poetry readings are quite different
from those that inform the best contemporary poetry writing“
(80).

18. One of the most amazing facts about Wright's uncollected
poems is the surprisingly high number of them from early in
his career that were published in influential and
prestigious journals. I am basing much of my information
about Wright's early publication history on Belle M.
McMaster's “James Arlington Wright: A Checklist.“

In his dissertation, Wright makes astute comments about
Dickens's ability to determine what his audience wanted.
These comments seem equally applicable to Wright: ”What
seems to happen is that an author determine8--for whatever
motive--just what it is that his audience expects of him.
Then he provides it. If the author in question happens to
be a highly trained hack like Herman Wouk, he determines the
intellectual climate of his audience at a certain moment by
some process which I do not know--perhaps it is genius--and
then, having figured out just what his audience wishes to
hear, he plays the tune” (230-231). Playing a tune the

 

223

crowd wants to hear is not often, however, an effective
oppositional tactic.

19. In his biography of Roethke, Allan Seager briefly
discusses the history of Botteghe Oscure and its founder and
editor Princess Marguerite Caetani (177-9).

20. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin make explicit the
economic basis for all publications: “From its earliest days
printing existed as an industry, governed by the same rules
as any other industry; the book was a piece of merchandise
which men produced before anything else to earn a living....
Thus it was vitally necessary from the outset to find enough
capital to start work and then to print only those titles
which would satisfy a clientele, and that at a price which
would withstand competition. The marketing of books was
similar to that of other products. To the manufacturers who
created the books--the printers--and to the business men who
sold them--the booksellers and publishers--finance and
costing were the key problems“ (109).

21. In her essay ”How Dignified Can We Be,” Laurel Speer
offers an opposing (and somewhat self-serving) view of
commodification: “To apply the principles of the marketplace
to poetry is like trying to fit an irregular and constantly
changing shape into a perfectly rectangular mold. Which
brings us back to Wright. What poet in this country even
working at the peak of his form, doesn't feel a sense of
uselessness in the attitude of the other (non-arts)
producing members of the population? Since the country,
from its beginnings, has always gauged ‘success' by the
tangible factors of monetary reward no matter the quality of
the product, and since poetry has never been rewarded in
this way, it stands to reason though we know our own
intangible importance to at least part of the world, still
as the larger world turns and looking at ourselves through
their eyes, we'd have to feel we'd ‘wasted' our lives in
devoting ourselves to poetry” (172-3).

22. A great deal of important work has been done in the past
few years to explore the commodification of American
literature. A historical context for this transformation of
literature from a use-value to an exchange-value can be
pieced together by reading Michael T. Gilmore's hperigah

Ro anticism and the Market lace, Christopher P. Wilson's Thg

Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Proggessive
Era, and James L. W. West's American Authors hug thg
hitegary Marketplace Since i200.

23. Once again, see Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetgy.

Also, in ”The Role of Critics and the Emperor's New
Clothes in American Poetry,“ Jed Rasula presents a year by

224

year listing of those poetry books reviewed in the
“prominent” presses from 1968-1981. He notes, “What I have
attempted to do is to chronicle the attention lavished on
certain poets whenever their books appear, and to indicate
by immediate juxtaposition within each year books of
considerable merit which were overlooked” (159). Wright was
among the ”lavished“ few: Shall We Gather at the River, for
example, received twelve reviews in 1968 compared to books
by David Antin, Edward Dorn, and Robert Kelly which each
were included in only one review. Rasula's study suggests
the ways in which the official verse culture promotes the
work of its "members,“ while excluding others.

24. In his article "Lyric in the Culture of Capitalism,“
Frank Lentricchia contrasts two modern attempts to redefine
the relationship between poets and the literary marketplace:
that of Frost and that of Pound. “Pound was defining his
literary life as an oppositional intention to shape a career
that would violate the tired literary inheritance incarnated
(for Frost, Eliot, and Stevens as well) in the genteel guise
of that contemporary poetry which young American writers who
would become the important modern poets experienced while-
still youths in the first decade of this century. And in so
violating established literary culture, Pound would
inaugurate another intention, not separable from his
literary desire, to make social change: the transformation
of the economic structure itself which (Pound was convinced)
had produced the literature he would displace, the very
literature which Pound would argue was nothing less than his
society's symptomatic expression in the realm of culture of
its totalitarian direction“ (64).

Frost, on the other hand, attempted to reconcile
aesthetics and capitalist economics because, to quote
Lentricchia, "he thought he could work within its dominant
commercial system of literary production" (66). He wanted
to reach a wide audience, be financially successful, ghg be
appreciated by the modernists: “Frost's desire to reach a
mass audience, by becoming---among other things--acceptable
to mass circulation magazines like the hpihhpig, shaped his
rhetorical literary relations to his imagined ordinary
reader; he could become a poet by fashioning an accessible
and seductively inviting literary surface that would welcome
the casual reader of poetry (as opposed to the
intellectually armed scholar of modernism), while
simultaneously burying very deep the sorts of subtleties
that might please those accustomed to Pound's aesthetic
caviar“ (83).

25. For a discussion of the ways high culture aids in the
perpetuation of dominant classes see Paul DiMaggio and
Michael Useem's “The Arts in Class Reproduction.“ Also see
Albrecht Wellmer's "Art and Industrial Production.“

225

26. Silliman points out, “...[B]eginning with the creation
of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the
Arts in 1966, state subsidies for poets and the publication
of poetry became an active force...“ (27). Those subsidies
have included underwriting some publication costs for
university press titles.

27. Ted Solotaroff's essay “What Has Happened to the

Publishing Business“ in A Few Good Voices in My Head

provides a personal perspective on how “the corporate

mentality infiltrate[s] a publishing house“ (269); he

discusses the effect of a corporate takeover on New American

Library publications. Curiously enough, though, Solotaroff

“exclude[s] Harper 8 Row, my present employer, and Bessie

Books, my publisher, from the discussion“ (269). '

28. In The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Poiitics in

Ame ica, Richard Kostelanetz documents (by naming names) the
power structures determining publication practices: he
discusses, for example, the dubious financial and editorial
relations between Random House-Vintage and The New Tork
Review of Books. Besides noting their financial
interrelationship, Kostelanetz notes that the periodical
included more positive notices for Random House-Vintage than
other presses and frequently assigned review/essays of
Random House-Vintage books to other authors who published
with the firm. He implies that the New York Review of Books
was, in a sense, an in-house publication of Random House-
Vintage.

29. My use of the term “cultural work” is informed by
Adorno's views of culture in ”The Culture Industry
Reconsidered': “Culture, in the true sense, did not simply
accommodate itself to human beings; but it always
simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified
relations under which they lived, thereby honoring them“
(129).

30. Bly, appropriately, quotes this line by Pound in the
introduction to the chapbook where Wright's poem appeared.

31. It may be interesting to consider a parody of “Lying in
a Hammock...” which Wright included in a 20 September 1979
letter to Richard Hugo. This parody raises questions about
the possibility of parodying pastiches.

32. In the revised version of “Postmodernism and Consumer
Society“ included as the title essay in Postmodernism, or,
The Cultural Lo ic of Late Ca italism, Jameson reworked this
passage somewhat: "Cultural production is thereby driven
back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the
old monadic subject but rather that of some degraded

226

collective “objective spirit“: it can no longer gaze
directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction
of a past history which was once itself a present; rather,
as in Plato's cave,'it must trace our mental images of that
past upon its confining walls. If there is any realism left
here, it is a ‘realism' that is meant to derive from the
shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming
aware of a new and original historical situation in which we
are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images
and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever
out of reach“ (25). '

33. Beginning with the second issue of the Fifties, Wright's
translations of Trakl, Goethe, Neruda, Vallejo, Lorca,
Storm, Hernandez, and Jimenez appear often, as do Wright's
own poems and essays, including “The Work of Gary Snyder,“
published under the pseudonym Crunk.

34. Wright had, of course, published in the Saturday Review.
It is also interesting--and disconcerting--to consider that
the Saturday Review discussed Bly's first book very
positively, describing a "rare and attractive cleanliness to
his style“; eventually extracts from this review were
reprinted as blurbs for the paperback edition of Silence in
the Snoyy Fields. Bly's radical stances were even
appropriated by those industries he most criticized.

35. Hallberg observes “intellectuals as a group
enthusiastically supported the one American president who
most explicitly avowed such [an interventionist] policy--
John Kennedy; furthermore, it was the Democratic liberals
who regarded the university as central to American society“
(139).

36. Much more can be said, of course, about Bly's use of
literary politics to create resistance against the dominant
culture, including his famous speech during the acceptance
ceremony for the 1968 National Book Awards when he
disparaged his publishers' unwillingness to take actions
defying the Vietnam War and turned over his award money to
an anti-draft group. Bly's speech at the ceremony,
“Acceptance of the National Book Award for Poetry,“ can be
found in his Talking All Morning (106-8).

Other examples of oppositionality can also be
mentioned, including Gwendyln Brooks's decision to
discontinue her association with Harper and Row and publish
exclusively with African-American presses (Kalaidjian 19).

CONCLUSION

TOWARD AN
COMPLICITY

EVALUATION OF NRIGHT'S CULTURAL
AND RESISTANCE

I would lie to you
If I could.
But the only way I can get you to come up
Out of that suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you
What you know.
“To the Muse“ (175)

I want to write about Felix Jacoby because I
want the folks up on Elm Street to know that he
existed. In the days before the uniformed
sanitation engineers, the piles of ashes and
rotten tomatoes and sanitary napkins were there
one summery afternoon behind the rose trel-
lises.... The next afternoon the trash had
disappeared, and through the magical powers of
money it seemed as though the junk had been waved
away by silvery-winged creatures who came in the
night on their tippy-toes.

I asked my father how he could sit down with
[Jacoby] in his yard. It stank. “Oh, I know,“ he
would say, "I know all about it, I know it stinks.
The man works hard.“

A Secret Field (10)

The diverse American poetries being written in the

second half of the twentieth century embody, to varying

degrees, the pervasive presence of the literary marketplace;

the culturally sanctioned forms of violence; the institu-

tionalization of poetic production, dissemination, and

227

228

interpretation; and other aspects of contemporary culture.
The content and poetic techniques in Wright's social texts
that we have examined--with their exploration of his blurred
identification with various classes, their presentation of
sexuality as a site for ideological conflict, their frequent
confrontations with domesticated violence, their insistence
on presenting individuals like Felix Jacoby to "the folks up
on Elm Street,“ and their fierce examination of American
political, economic, and social formations--not only reveal
opposing elements within the poet, but also illuminate the
ambiguous position of those texts (and poetry in general)
within the dominant culture. During an era when economics
create a ”suckhole' absorbing oppositional and accommoda-
tional elements alike, an era when “the magical powers of
money“ provide an illusory new aura for cultural products,
this ambivalent position and displacement provide one avenue
for understanding and evaluating the social poetry of James
Wright.1

Among those "magical powers of money“ is the ability of
the literary market to elicit, absorb and finally institu-
tionalize those texts which assist in the reproduction of
dominant ideologies. Because of the aesthetic and cultural
“filtering“ inherent in commercial publishing enterprises,
as well as Wright's willingness to market his poems in
conjunction with those outlets, his texts risk being

consumed by the marketplace and transformed into corporate

229
expression. Herbert I. Schiller states, ”As the cultural
industries increasingly occupy pivotal positions in the
social, political, and even economic power in the latest
period of capitalist development, their symbolic outputs,
however entertaining, diverting, aesthetic, or informative,
are essentially elements of corporate expression“ (44).
Though Schiller raises a valid point, the complexity of this
issue as it applies to aesthetic products is not as easily
resolved as he implies: saying Wright's poems are
commodified and thus only “elements of corporate expression“
is too reductive.

Literary texts cannot without qualification be labelled
as either oppositional or accommodational;2 texts like
Wright's exist in the boundaries between these categories,
dialogically torn between their impulse for freedom,
transcendence, and cultural escape and their desire for
communal inclusion. Even though the use-value of his texts
offers resistance to the hegemonic culture--confronting
industrial work conditions, inequitable social formations,
and other element8--his active cooperation with the
apparatuses of official verse culture, mass circulating
publications, and academic institutions implies a
complicitous responsibility for the degradations resulting
from the actions (and inactivity) of those structures in
their relation to the dominant culture. In spite of that

commodification, however, the use-value of his texts is not

230
totally neutralized. Their literary and political status,
even when institutionally absorbed and commodified, is
reduced but not completely diminished. They still
effectively demonstrate, in Lentricchia's words, “our
severely diminished capacity" ('Lyric” 77).

Wright's uncollected and collected poems which
addresses the political, socioeconomic, and psychological
conditions impacting the lives of individuals in late
capitalist societies also address their own symbolic
position within those societies. We have briefly discussed,
for example, the commodification present in “Saint Judas”
(84) when the apostle-betrayer recounts “bargain[ing] the
proper coins“ and assisting a stranger “for nothing.“ In a
related poem, "Son of Judas“ (225), Wright confronts those
critics who would define his texts as being only corporate
expressions or 'consumeritems.“

Alluding to the story of Judas, the poet again indicts
both America and himself in--to borrow Williamson's
description of the poem--'a Blakean critique of the
possibilities of good and evil in a society that presents no
real counterforce, political or religious, to acquisitive
greed“ (85). ”Song of Judas“ again localizes cultural
effects within individuals' sexuality. In this text,
though, there are not slag heaps smoldering in bedrooms or

workers socially and sexually isolated from their spouses.

231
Instead, industrialists like the strip miner Mark Hanna
illustrate a different metaphoric sexual outlet:
. Mark Hanna and every other plant

Gatherer of the grain and gouging son

Of a God whonks his doodle in the

United States government of his hand.
Their masturbatory response (which is both unspeakable and
childish as evident in the diction: ”whonks his doodle“)
suggests their social isolation and insatiable hedonism at
the expense of nature and direct social contact. The poet,
while asserting the destructiveness of their response, also
distances himself from industrialists like Hanna and accepts
his inability to change them or society: “I don't damn Mark
Hanna or anyone else / in hell.“ “All I wanted to do/ Was
get out.” Attempting to escape from “our severely
diminished society,“ Wright pursues an alternative to this
inward turning masturbation, but his alternative is as
dismal, self-serving, and sterile as that of the
industrialists: he withdraws into a “nature“ that he has
created for himself.

In poems like Frost's 'Birches' and other texts by
Wright, physical contact with trees becomes symbolic of both
sinking deep into the earth and freely rising into the sky,
above the human. “Son of Judas” focusses specifically on a
sycamore tree, a choice rich with biblical allusions.3 iNot

only is Wright, like Zacchaeus, attempting to transcend his

 

232
situation so as to see more clearly and escape, he is--like
Judas--carrying his own rope and risking suicide. While
retreating from self-serving industrialism, the poet rises
“out of my body so high into / That sycamore tree that it
became / The only tree that ever loved me.”‘ His
withdrawal into nature is, metaphorically, another
misconstrued sexual relationship: the sycamore becomes ”That
tree I made my secret love to.“ The poet, though,
recognizes that this second option is as lifeless as the
first; the tree, after all, is “the dead sycamore,“ and as
“the one wing, / The only wing,“ it is unable to lift him
out of this industrial wreckage and provide the escape and
transcendence he desires.

Confronting the two escapist options that contemporary
culture offers--a sterile withdrawal into the self or an
impossible (and fruitless) retreat into nature--the poet,
like Judas, wants to wipe the blame from his hands and
return his tainted pieces of silver. He renounces his
complicity in economic affairs:

I have bought your world.

I don't want it.

And I don't want all your money
I got sucked into making

Either.

233
Here's your money.
I didn't even count it.

This refusal to conspire with economic structures, though
noble, is itself an acknowledgement of his guilt and, at the
same time, another manifestation of his desire to return to
pre-industrial relations; but he cannot (and we cannot)
withdraw from the exploitative, financial basis of
capitalism, as if it could be taken away “by silvery-winged
creatures who came in the night on their tippy-toes.” It
will only be transformed through the actions of individuals
--even a "crowd of solitudes'--willing to confront the
system and its inherent problems. Wright's text does that,
in part, even as it seeks escape: it foregrounds its own
material and economic base while it resists being absorbed
into those structures. The poem concludes with Wright
suspended in a defiant but helpless indecision: “hovering
between the dead sycamore“ and the abandoned strip mines.
He struggles to be free (“I'm getting out, this time"), but
even consciousness of his own economic complicity cannot
separate him from that industrial society and a ravaged
nature. He cannot simply sever his ties and return the
money.5

Wright's relations with economic and cultural institu-
tions are as ambiguous, problematic, and contradictory as
his other relationships: he at times actively pursues

financial markets for his literary texts, while on other

234
occasions, as in ”Son of Judas,” he regrets and renounces
his participation in those economic structures. Early in
his career the poet established high moral and aesthetic
goals for himself--”To me, poetry in this age is the art of
stating and examining and evaluating truth“ (Saint Judas,
dust jacket)--but his means of poetic production and
aesthetic considerations of truth were subsequently
impacted by his pursuit of success in literary networks.
The very foregrounding of financial tension in his texts
suggests an awareness of the aesthetic integrity he sought
but was unable to sustain. In “The Culture Industry
Reconsidered,” Adorno presents a historical context which
may help us assess Wright's complicity and resistance to
late capitalism:
The entire practice of the culture industry
transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural
forms. Ever since these cultural forms first
began to earn a living for their creators as
commodities in the marketplace, they had already
possessed something of this quality. But then
they sought after profit onl indirectl , over and
above their autonomous essence.... Cultural
entities typical of the culture industry are no

longer also commodities, they are commodities

 

through and through. (129, emphasis added)

 

235
Texts like ”Son of Judas“ and ”At the Executed Murderer's
Grave,“ among many others, are not ”commodities through and
through“: they resist (even as they invite) their own
connections with the economics of publication, and they
yearn for that pre-industrial era when cultural products
were only inadvertently present, if at all, in the
marketplace. But that nostalgic desire, as we have seen, is
impossible to actualize in late twentieth century American
culture.

Ultimately, Wright's critics must consider that his
uncollected and collected poems, while engaging in social
criticism, are texts reluctantly imbedded in late capitalist
culture and, at the same time, commodities he often actively
marketed in publications supporting the dominant power
structures; his poems depicting the isolation, inequity, and
suffering experienced by working class and poor individuals
both implicitly subvert conventions and reveal the poet's
own complicity with inherited forms. A comprehensive
evaluation of his poetry must consider, I believe, his
renunciation of commodification as well as his complicity
with it; it must include his means of literary production
and his ambivalent involvement with those literary networks
and institutions which interpret and disseminate his texts;
it must explore his honest appraisals of economic and
political inequity as well as his support for those social

hierarchies which mandate inequality; and it must examine

236
the specifically literary qualities and aesthetic integrity
of those texts. Because these factors are intricately
interrelated, they need to be considered simultaneously and
in conjunction with each other; the poems cannot be
approached as autotelic texts free of social consideration.
In Dialectic of Enli htenment, Adorno and Max
Horkheimer--like Pound, Bernstein, and others--argue that to
resist the "culture industry“ art must be radical in two
ways: it must subvert traditional artistic forms and resist
the commodification present within the contemporary
production of art (123). Wright's poems are ambivalent
about both. In this way, then, his texts undercut their own
effectiveness, but that judgement itself needs to be
qualified, and most appropriately by using Wright's own
words about Robert Penn Warren's poems:
My speaking of “failure“ in a poet of so much
stature is of course tempered by my statement of a
conviction which constantly grows on me: that a
failure like the [poem entitled] "School Lesson”
is worth more than the ten thousand safe and
competent versifyings produced by our current crop
of punks in America. I am spared the usual but.
boring critical courtesy of mentioning names by
the fact that we all know who we are.

(“Stiff Smile“ 242)

 

237
Because texts able to withstand appropriation and
commodification cannot exist in late capitalism, Wright's
limitations are not simply failures on his part; they are
symptomatic expressions of the position of poetry within
twentieth century American culture. His historical position
in late capitalism necessitates that his cultural production
be situated and eventually appropriated into that all-
consuming society, though he could have resisted that
process or, at least, less actively participated in it.

Just as Wright and his use of language cannot be wholly
separated nor removed from the dominant American culture,
his cultural products must, by necessity, be imbedded in
that culture as well, even as they resist it;6 or, to use
Benjamin's famous expression, “There is no document of
civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism“ (“Theses“ 256). All oppositional forces can be
(and indeed are) converted, to some degree, into a commodity
by capitalism, as is evident by the position of Pound's
texts within postmodern discourse. Bly's own literary ‘
resistance has been appropriated by industry--most recently
in his publications with firms like Harper and Row, who
capitalize on his outrage regarding their policies. The
commodification of the social poetry of Pound, Bly, and
Wright reveals that all texts can be appropriated, including
those which offer resistance. Even civilized acts which

resist barbarism are eventually consumed by that barbarism--

238
but, hopefully, they create discomfort even while being
digested.

Wright's direct contributions to the commodification of
his texts imply a level of failure for his poetics and
undermine their effectiveness, but that does not preclude
those texts from being a social product with real, rather
than merely symbolic, significance in confronting the
conflicting forces evident in late capitalism. They still
maintain their truth-content, and that content--even when
absorbed by economic systems--still exists as a potent
(though impure) presence in late capitalism. As Mandel
argues, oppositional literature cannot be completely “value-
free“ or “neutral“ for individuals; even items mass
distributed through the literary marketplace--like Wright's
books and poems--influence "the mass formation (or
heightening) of anti-capitalist consciousness. Ideological
production that becomes a commodity in this way threatens to
lose its objective function of consolidating the capitalist
mode of production, because of the nature of the use-value
sold” (507-8). Wright's poems, then, maintain their
resistance to social inequities even as they circulate
within the capitalist system.

We can speculate that the use-value of his texts might,
in fact, at this point in our advanced industrial society,
he most directly and profitably consumed by the

intellectuals as well as the middle and upper classes who

239

comprise his reading audience. Just as Jesus, in Luke 19,
addresses Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this
house.... The Son of Man has come to search out and save
what was lost“ a socially critical poetics needs to address
those who are "lost" and most in need of understanding (and
changing) problematic social formations and labor practices:
those aspirants to the economic and social power structures
gathered in and around academic institutions. English
departments within those institutions can function as sites
of resistance and use the institutionalization of poetry as
an opportunity to introduce conflicting voices into the
hegemonic discourse. Possibly Wright's texts specifically
need to address those who will be able, from their future
positions of power, to change current social practices.
Donald Kuspit in his essay “The Artist and the University,"
observes:

...[I]n our society, where everything is sooner or

later turned into bourgeois capital, art must

address itself, as Baudelaire said, however

ironically, to the bourgeois. They, after all,

are "the majority in number and intelligence,“ And

therefore the social “force“ which must be

ministered to. Thus, what better place to produce

and show art than in the bourgeois university?

Who better to present it to than bourgeois

intellectuals? (29)

240
Who better, indeed? Wright's implicitly subversive texts
can and do continue to oppose the dominant discourse by
marching, as a "crowd of solitudes," into those institutions
which have the power to both perpetuate and resist cultural
practices: universities and colleges. When Harry Schultz,
Patsy di Franco, the "ruptured night watchman of Wheeling
Steel,“ the "gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at
Benwood,” the “Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,“
George Doty, Joe Bumbico, Felix Jacoby, the laughing lazy
girl, and other individuals from these texts parade down the
crowded streets and into university curricula, then the real
human oppressed, the poor, and the working class people--the
most important “crowd of solitudes"--might be heard and
empowered in their struggle to alter their own social and

working conditions.

Notes

1. Terry Eagleton makes a similar assertion about Charles
Dickens, William Butler Yeats, and other “major“ nineteenth
and twentieth century British authors, saying they were
displaced from the dominant culture. "By some conjuncture
of elements (class, sexuality, region, nationality and so
on)," he states, "these writers were contradictorily
inserted into an hegemonic bourgeois ideology which had
passed its progressive prime“ (180).

2. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson suggests that texts
either legitimate or undermine the dominant culture,
depending upon how those texts are employed: “For Marxism,
however, the very content of a class ideology is relational,
in the sense that its ‘values' are always actively in
situation with respect to the opposing class, and defined
against the latter: normally, a ruling class ideology will
explore various strategies of the legitimation of its own
power positions, while an oppositional culture or ideology
will, often in covert and disguised strategies, seek to
contest and to undermine the dominant ‘value system'“

(84, Jameson's emphasis).

3. Luke 19:1-10 relates an account of Zacchaeus, a wealthy
tax collector, who was both curious and sought after truth.
As Jesus--surrounded by a crowd--was approaching, Zacchaeus
could not see Jesus so the wealthy man “first ran on in
front, then climbed a sycamore tree which was along Jesus'
route, in order to see him.“ When Jesus reached the tree,
he asked Zacchaeus to come down and ultimately be rewarded
for his efforts.

4. Wright's narration is informed not only by biblical and
industrial allusions, but also by a personal mythology. He
refers, for example, to the tree as "the Jenny sycamore.“
Because the nature of that mythologizing is beyond the
context of our discussion here, I will not pursue the
relationship between this text and Wright's other “Jenny
poems.” For more information about Jenny and these texts,
see chapter five, "The Jenny Poems,“ in Stein's James

Wright.

5. I have not been able to find the publication outlet where
this poem was originally printed, if it was published at all
prior to its inclusion in Two Citizens, but the list of
acknowledgements for that book indicates publishers which
again have strong economic and ideological connections
within this society. That list includes such small presses
as Rapport, Choice, and Chelsea, as well as publications
like Har er's Ma azine, Es uire, the Nation, the hp!

241

BIBLIOGRAPHY

242

Republic, the Minnesota Review, and--of course--the hp!
Yorker. These acknowledgements suggests that Wright
possibly was not irreversibly severing his financial
connections, or--worse--that he was actively marketing his
renunciation of money.

6. Wright's ambivalent poetics is itself, as Adorno notes,
bound to society: “...[T]he traditional lyric, as the most
aesthetic negation of bourgeois convention, has by that very
token been tied to bourgeois society“ ("Lyric' 45).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Achugar, Hugo. ”The Book of Poems as a Social Act: Notes
Toward an Interpretation of Contemporary Hispanic
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Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theggy. Ed. Gretel Adorno and
Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. C. Lenhardt. London:
Routledge, 1984.

---. “Commitment." Trans, Francis McDonagh. I£§_§§§£§£i2l

Frankfurt School Readeg. _Ed. Andrew Arato and Eike
Gebhardt. New York: Continuum, 1982. 300-318.

---. “Cultural Criticism and Society“ Prisms. Trans.
Samuel and Shiery Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
17-34 0

---. “The Culture Industry Reconsidered.” Trans. Anson G.
Rabinbach. Critichl Theory ghd Society: A Readeg.
Eds. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner.
New York: Routledge, 1989. 128-135.

---. “Lyric Poetry and Society.“ Trans. Bruce Mayo.
Critical Theory and Society: A Rghder. Eds. Stephen
Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner. London:
Routledge, 1989. 155-171.

---. Notes to Literature. 2 vols. Trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press,
1991-2.

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