82 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
BOOKS
MAKE IT OLD
Charles Wright’s poetry marches forward while looking back.
BYDAN CHIASSON
ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL
C
harles Wright’s massive new vol-
ume of selected poems, “Oblivion
Banjo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is as-
sembled from nearly fifty years of his
“small words,/ Out of the wind and the
weather.” The poems are banked im-
pressions, like snowdrifts after a bliz-
zard, or deposits left by a receding tide.
In them, “places swim up and sink back,
and days do,” leaving behind their res-
idue. Amid the ordinary gains and losses
of the calendar year arrive the vivid en-
vois of the past: a country drugstore, the
“kamikaze Fiats” of Rome, a statue of
Dante under alpine snow.
Wright was born in 1935, in Pickwick
Dam, Tennessee. He attended Davidson
College and the University of Iowa and
served in the Army, in Italy. He taught
for many years at the University of Vir-
ginia, publishing volumes of poetry at
regular intervals. Everything Wright
touches takes on his style, a vernacular
scavenged from place-names in Tennes-
see and Italy, the songs of the Carter
Family and the cadences of the blues,
and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hop-
kins, Li Po, Dante, Emily Dickinson,
and others. The name of one of his works,
“Poem Almost Wholly in My Own Man-
ner,” describes many of his others, too.
Even the title of this volume gives a
taste of Wright’s method of blending
vocabularies: the word “oblivion” boasts
a provenance in Western philosophy and
literature, while the sound of the banjo
brings back the “tinkly hymns” of Wright’s
Southern childhood. The resulting “coun-
try music” is the distinct twang of one
mind, remarkably constant despite some-
times audacious changes of form. A prose
poem, a sprawling free-verse composi-
tion, and a sequence of economical ses-
tets: they sound little like one another,
but they all sound like Wright.
W
right’s second collection, “Hard
Freight,” from 1973, includes a
prank manifesto that almost instantly
entered anthologies and syllabi. “The
New Poem” begins on a pugilistic note:
It will not resemble the sea.
It will not have dirt on its thick hands.
It will not be a part of the weather.
The poem is nine such statements in
nine end-stopped lines. Although it is
sometimes taken at face value, the new
poem that Wright describes is certainly
not “The New Poem,” which, despite
its austere rhetoric, is full of yearning.
It’s nothing like Wright’s mature work,
but it makes clear that he will be one
of those poets, like Wallace Stevens,
who bring sumptuous particulars into
the world by negation.
Wright began to read and write po-
etry in Italy, while he was in the Army.
It was, he later told The Paris Review,
the “form that seemed suited to my men-
tal and emotional inclinations.” He said
that he was “trying to write about what
I’d been seeing—Italy—in terms of what
I was reading.” Above all, he was reading
Pound’s “Pisan Cantos,” written while
the poet was imprisoned, near Pisa, at
the end of the Second World War. With
Pound as his Baedeker, Wright experi-
enced the landscape through one man’s
idiosyncratic emphasis. Wright adds to
the sedimentary layers of description al-
ready settling on old places, rather than
breaking fresh imaginative ground. A
couple of years later, back in Italy, Wright
encountered Pound himself, in Venice,
staring at a church: Wright approached
him, stood silently by his side, then
skulked away. He didn’t want an auto-
graph or a blessing; he wanted to share
his idol’s point of view.
It was during this period that “I came
to my senses,” he writes, “with a pencil
in my hand/ And a piece of paper in
front of me.” In “A Journal of Southern
Rivers,” from 1990, he describes this birth:
What hast thou, O my soul, with Paradise, for
instance,
Is where I began, in March 1959—
my question has never changed,
