Poetry for Students Vol. 10

Volume 10 59

Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever changing, living in change.
This idea of change haunts Wright as well.
Elsewhere in “Black Zodiac,” he writes, “Mine is
a brief voice, a still, brief voice / Unsubject to
change or the will to change.” According to James
Longenbach, one of the best readers of twentieth-
century American poetry, Wright’s poetic style, his
means of expression, put him in touch with both
tangible and intangible experiences: “The possibil-
ity of change depends on what Wright calls ‘ce-
lestial similes’ or ‘the slow dream of metaphor’:
Wright’s style is the arc of his own salvation.” Lon-
genbach adroitly notes that Wright creates his mode
of salvation through the poetic process; he under-
stands that Wright changes the landscape from one
of emptiness to one of possibility. To combat the
“giant of nothingness,” as Stevens would say, one
must construct somethingness; one must call at-
tention to the somethingness that is there as op-
posed to the nothingness that is not there. In sec-
tion five of “Black Zodiac,” Wright invokes
Stevens’ famous poem “The Snow Man” to un-
derscore his system of belief-description: “Callig-
raphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards, /
What letters will we illuminate? / Above us the at-
mosphere, / The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on,
and waits for our beck and call.” For Stevens and
Wright, there is little evidence that God resides in
the atmosphere above us. For the modern and post-
modern writer, God is an absence, but language,
words, poems are a presence. They sustain us.
Wright’s question is a provocative one. In a world
in which there are no monks creating illuminated
manuscripts of sacred texts, we must make our own
sacred text out of the world around us, the world
mediated through language.

That we make not only the sacredness of the
world but the world itself is the ultimate theme of
both “Black Zodiac” and “Description without
Place.” How do we make these things? Out of
words:

It is the theory of the word for those

For whom the word is the making of the world,

The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

It is a world of words to the end of it
In which nothing solid is its solid self
As, men make themselves their speech: the hard
hidalgo
Lives in the mountains character of his speech;
According to Stevens, the word is the only
solid thing in the world. What’s more, the world

issues forth from the word. We are nothing more

than our speech. What we say of the world is part

of what the world becomes. For Wright, the words

desire us as much as we desire the words: “The let-

ters undarken and come forth, / Your X and my X.

/ The letters undarken and come forth.” The reve-

lation that Stevens speaks of translates into letters

for Wright. Instead of God revealing himself in a

burning bush or in a flame in a cave, the divine

comes to us in symbols, in letters, that we trans-

late, through our own language, into the world

itself.

Stevens and Wright are both difficult poets.

There is no easy interpretation for “Black Zodiac,”

or, for that matter, for “Description without Place.”

In his poem, Stevens, more overtly than Wright, ar-

gues that the poet has the ability to do anything

through description; he can even bring about “the

invention of a nation in a phrase.” To speak is to

reveal. It is to utter the holy. For Wright, to speak

is to make sense of the world. Without language,

the world, our heads, the past, the future are a

junkpile of words, a dark map with no markings.

So connected to the external world is the poetic

process, that both Wright and Stevens accord it el-

emental status: “Description is an element, like air

or water.” For the reader, the philosopher, the poet,

the lover, and the believer, words are part and par-

cel of our world. They connect us not only with

each other but with the divine and the idea of the

divine. In fact, without them, the divine would not

be the divine, merely the “nothing that’s nowhere,”

waiting “for our beck and call” to reveal the divine

and our world to each other.

Source:Dean Rader, in an essay for Poetry for Students,

Gale, 2001.

Sources

Amazon,www.amazon.com (March 28, 2000).

CNN News,www.cnn.com (March 28, 2000).

The History Channel,www.historychannel.com (March 28,

2000).

Hosmer, Robert Ellis, Jr., Review of Black Zodiac,in Amer-

ica,Vol. 177, No. 20, December 20-27, 1997, p. 24.

Longenbach, James, “Between Soil and Stars,” in Nation,

April 14, 1997, pp. 27-30.

———, Review of Black Zodiac,in The Nation,April 14,

1997, pp. 27-31.

Stevens, Wallace, Opus Posthumous,Alfred A. Knopf,

1957.

Black Zodiac