At evening we wait for the rain to fall
and the sky to clear.
Our words are words for the clay,
uttered in undertones,
Our gestures salve for the wind.
We sit out on the earth and stretch our
limbs,
Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow
laid up in our hearts.
The code in question is a code we know, and
come to read, by heart.
It is helpful to remember, as Keats knew and
as Bond reminds us, ‘‘sensation serves as a con-
dition of consciousness’’ (265). Wright’s poetry,
Bond observes, in a statement that might be
applied to any strong lyric poet, is ‘‘an effort to
enlarge our range of feeling, to contain and be
vitalized by contradiction’’ (269). When image is
pressed or compressed into metaphor it is of
course a form of contradiction, words and their
subsequent images juxtaposed to generate a fresh,
intuitive, and intellectual understanding. But the
job for the poet is to get from sensation to words,
from feeling to form. ‘‘All poems,’’ says Wright,
‘‘are translations’’ (Halflife, 33), and especially so,
he would add, since the liberation, hastened by
modernism, of the word from the world. The work
of the poet is to pit technique against that which
resistssaying.ForWright,theanswerliesin
image, manipulated through syntax. His images,
like Morandi’s windows, attempt to shine a light
into the darkness, to compose a code by which to
read the hieroglyphs of the heart.
Source:David Garrison, ‘‘From Feeling to Form: Image
as Translation in the Poetry of Charles Wright,’’ inMid-
west Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, Autumn 1999, pp. 33–47.
SOURCESArnold, Tim, ‘‘‘U.Va. Profiles’: Charles Wright’s Interior
Landscape,’’ inUVAToday, February 4, 2008, http://
http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday (accessed October 31, 2009).
Costello, Bonnie, ‘‘Charles Wright’s Via Negativa: Lan-
guage, Landscape, and the Idea of God,’’ inContempo-
rary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer 2001, p. 329.
Garrison, David, ‘‘From Feeling to Form: Image as
Translation in the Poetry of Charles Wright,’’ inMidwest
Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, Fall 1999, pp. 33, 45, 46.
Hammer, Langdon, ‘‘The Latches of Paradise: Charles
Wright,’’ inAmerican Scholar, Vol. 74, No. 4, Fall 2005,
p. 74.
Henry, Brian, ‘‘New Scaffolding for New Arrangements:
Charles Wright’s Low Riders,’’ inVirginia Quarterly
Review, Vol. 80, No. 2, Spring 2004, p. 105.
Rand, Richard, Review ofBuffalo Yoga,inHarvard
Review, No. 27, 2004, pp. 203–204, 205.
Seaman, Donna, Review ofBuffalo Yoga,inBooklist,
Vol. 100, No. 14, March 15, 2004, p. 1259.
Spiegelman, Willard, ‘‘Charles Wright and ‘The Meta-
physics of the Quotidian,’’’ inHow Poets See the World:
The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry, Oxford
University Press, 2005, p. 84.
———, ‘‘Landscape and Identity: Charles Wright’s
Backyard Metaphysics,’’ inSouthern Review, Vol. 40,
No. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 180, 187, 188.
T’u Lung, Epigraph, in Charles Wright,China Trace,
Wesleyan University Press, 1977.
Wright, Charles,Quarter Notes, University of Michigan
Press, 1996, p. 123.
———, ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’ in
Buffalo Yoga, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, p. 45.FURTHER READINGDenham, Robert D.,Charles Wright: A Companion to the
Late Poetry, 1988–2007, McFarland, 2007.
This work is a reader’s guide to seven volumes
of Wright’s poetry, includingBuffalo Yoga.
The book provides commentary and back-
ground information on each of 230 poems.
Denham, Robert D.,Charles Wright in Conversation:
Interviews, 1979–2006, McFarland, 2008.
In this collection of interviews, accompanied
by an extensive bibliography, Wright discusses
a broad spectrum of subjects, including his
career, techniques, and style.
Giannelli, Adam, High Lonesome: On the Poetry of
Charles Wright, Oberlin College Press, 2006.
This collection of fifteen essays pays particular
attention to the trilogy of trilogies, including
reviews of individual books.
MacGowan, Christopher,Twentieth-Century American
Poetry, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
Designed for students, this guide covers histor-
ical and social contexts, provides a biograph-
ical dictionary of major writers, and discusses
themes, movements, and the situation of the
arts during the twentieth century.
Moffett, Joe,Understanding Charles Wright, University
of South Carolina Press, 2008.
This study discusses Wright’s books and
themes, especially the trilogies, and his spiritual
engagement with the landscape.Words Are the Diminution of All Things