Volume 10 57
the second. The next line features a caesura after
its second word, “stop,” and the fifth word, “wind.”
All of these lines move toward an iambic meter, an
arrangement of the syllables into a pattern where
an unstressed syllable precedes a stressed one. Yet
the lines do not quite adhere to this pattern. For ex-
ample, in the following line I have italicized each
syllable that I read as stressed:
The flies comeback, and the heat—
Whatcan we sayto them?
Mixing the lines’ cadences and arrangements
of stessed and unstressed syllable, Wright produces
this distinctive rhythm.
“Black Zodiac” comes closest to articulating a
solution to the question, “What can we say to
them?” in its third section. “You’ve got to write it
down,” the poet tells himself three times:
Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and
automobile,
God’s sleep, you’ve still got to write it down,
Moon half-empty, night half-full,
Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and
prayer black,
Spider at work between the hedges,
Last bird call, toad in a damp place, tree frog in a
dry ...
This passage’s details remain mysterious; they
more evoke a state of mind than describe an expe-
rience. Memory takes a sorrowful form, a hand-
kerchief to wipe away tears. While the poet enters
death’s “dream,” God moves into a deeper distance.
God sleeps while death fills the poet’s conscious-
ness. A darkness surrounds him. In the poem’s
opening section, “the masters” humble the poet in
their presence. In this section, he achieves a state
of grace, entering the “starless and egoless” land-
scape. “The unexamined life’s no different from /
the examined life,” he declares. Humbled as in his
encounter with “the masters,” the poet realizes that,
though poetry brings no consolation, he must con-
tinue to pursue its examinations.
Source:David Caplan, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.
Dean Rader
Dean Rader has published widely in the field
of twentieth-century poetry. Here, he offers a com-
parative reading of Charles Wright’s “Black Zo-
diac” and Wallace Stevens’s poetry.
“Description is an element, like air or water”
writes Wallace Stevens in his “Adagia,” a collec-
tion of adages and aphorisms that appear in Opus
Posthumous(1957), a collection of ideas, poems
and plays published a few years after Stevens’
death. This passage also appears in the second-to-
the-last line in Charles Wright’s enigmatic poem
“Black Zodiac”: Description’s an element, like air
or water./ That’s the word.” And that’s the poem.
It ends right there. One wonders what, precisely,
Wright refers to with the word “it.” Possibly air,
possibly water, but most likely he is suggesting that
description is the word in question. In fact, the en-
tire poem is a description, not so much of the ex-
ternal landscape but of the landscape within. For
Wright, as for Stevens, there is a fuzzy (if even de-
tectable) border between the self and nature, or bet-
ter put between interior and exterior spaces. At
times, both spaces are imbued and altered by the
perspective of the poet. Thus, the poem “Black Zo-
diac” and the book of the same title see the poetic
process as descriptions of the ways in which the in-
dividual positions himself and his ideas against the
backdrop of this utterly complex and inhibiting
world.
Wright’s final line, “That’s the word,” recalls
the first line of the Gospel of John, “In the begin-
ning was the word, and the word was God.” How-
ever, in Wright’s universe, the word is not God but
description. Such a configuration means a decid-
edly different role for the poet. It’s not so much
God that speaks the world into being or even de-
fines the world but the individual capable of de-
scription. That leaves the poet in a pretty good
place. Indeed, in Stevens’ wonderful poem “De-
scription without Place,” he begins section four
with an aphorism worthy of Wright, one that brings
home the idea that description carries an element
of apotheosis: “Description is revelation.” Like
most of Stevens’ assertions, this one proffers mul-
tiple meanings. On one hand, Stevens suggests that
description is not a fixed endeavor, that it reveals
itself over time. On the other hand, Stevens endowsBlack ZodiacYou’ve got to write
it all down. Landscape or
waterscape, light—length
on evergreen, dark sidebar
Of evening, you’ve got to
write it down.”