and logic/reasoning (Quarter Notes,34).Theimage
is the figure upon which he structures and builds.
Many of Wright’s early poems read like the
tentative but determined exploration of mental and
emotional scars, like knowledge gained with one’s
fingertips. They display traces of what one might
learn from the scrutiny ofthe non-verbal life, traces
of how experience informs our emotional and cog-
nitive knowing. In ‘‘Dog Creek Mainline,’’ for
instance, a poem from the early seventies that
marks a new diction and tone for Wright as well
as the emergence of a more forceful syntax, we find
this metaphor: ‘‘[t]he heart is a hieroglyph’’ (Coun-
try Music, 37). What the heart ‘‘knows’’ (and from
experience has ‘‘inscribed’’ in the mind) can indeed
be read and declared, but not easily, its code as
hermetic as holy carving across a husk of grain. At
the level of emotional response, Wright suggests, is
scripted potential, or potential script, given indeed
in language, but at first a language other than the
mind’s, images of a landscape other than the
eye’s—and yet not entirely other. The poet’s
work then as Wright’s texts repeatedly make
explicit, is to ‘‘read’’ the hieroglyphs of human
feeling, to translate them into human discourse,
to transcribe them into textuality. The poem is an
attempt to render out of one code and into another
a complex, simultaneously social and private series
of scars, tattoos, traces. As James McCorkle would
have it, there are languages the world uses to write
(on) us, and then, subsequently, ‘‘writing is the
place of the transference of the world’s languages
into our discourse’’(110). This take-and-give is not
‘‘emotionally recollectedin tranquility,’’ exactly,
but emotion as tactile hieroglyph translated first
from sensibility into ‘‘sense’’ and then transcribed
into sound and image, into melody against rhythm,
into a fresh cognitive activity meant to generate, a
literacy of emotion and felt thought. As Wright
himself put it, speaking of‘‘DogCreekMainline,’’
such a poem is ‘‘about memory and how we change
memory, how memory changes and memory
becomes imagination. And imagination becomes
language’’ (Rubin and Heynen, 36; also qtd. in
Collins, 465). Memory, in the poet’s practice,
becomes image, which must then be lined out
through the poem, a known but perhaps densely
attenuated code, in language:‘‘Wecannot,’’writes
Steiner, ‘‘save metaphorically, ask in words of that
which may lie before words’’ (55).
Wright’s way of working out this translation
is in the tracing of such pre-verbal scars. What
they conjure in their immediate language is
another not-so-immediate one. ‘‘There are birds
that are parts of speech,’’ says the poet in ‘‘Har-
din County,’’ a poem on the death of his father
(Country Music, 77). A metaphor, yes, but not
merely that; as with much of Wright’s work,
apparent metaphor eventually unfolds itself to
reveal declarative statement. ‘‘Birds’’ is a part of
speech, clearly, for to speak or write birds is to
name them, to encode them, to situate them
syntactically and linguistically, to render them
verbal rather than physical. But it is also to
remove them from themselves as birds, to trans-
late them, through the peculiarly human tools
and practice of language, into a categorical artic-
ulation of perception and felt thought. More-
over, the statement suggests the inverse of what
has happened to Wright’s father, that now inef-
fable self transfigured into image, into ‘‘a grain
of salt in the salt snow.’’
A poem such as ‘‘Hardin County’’ is possible
in the same way that pain is possible: the practice
of language makes available the construction of
verbal meaning from instances (seamless and
otherwise) of feeling and knowing—hieroglyphs
of the heart. The poem is the attempt to render
those hieroglyphs into meaning.
In ‘‘Two Stories,’’ first collected inThe Other
Side of the River(1984), Wright makes a deliberate
and confident return to the past, to the presenta-
tion of two emblematic,hieroglyphic traces or
scars that help identify the self, that recognize the
self while it goes about constructing itself and/or
having itself constructed. The poem begins with
a Coleridgean, loco-meditative maneuver: the
speaker, alone, looks out upon an evening above
the Pacific. What he sees there, the pulsing of lights
along the shore, calls up traces of similar seeing
from his past; he is driven back into childhood,
back into the Appalachian Mountains, back into
memory by memory. ‘‘The past,’’ he writes, ‘‘with
its arduous edges and blind sides,’’ is marked by
identifiable traces of what we were and what we
are. Memory through the technique of image
encoded in language constructs the past; memory,
the poem teaches us, constructs memory.
One of the two stories, ‘‘a story I swear is
true,’’ presents Wright as an eleven-year old who
sleepwalks on a camping trip only to be awak-
ened at cliff’s edge by ‘‘the breathing side of a
bear.’’ Suddenly, ‘‘truly awake in the throbbing
world,’’ he turns away from the bear and the cliff
to return, without looking back, to his tent. TheWords Are the Diminution of All Things