56 Poetry for Students
characteristic skepticism. His widely noticed poem,
“The New Poem,” categorically rebuts these hopes:
It will not attend our sorrow.
It will not console our children.
It will not be able to help us.
As this stanza suggests, “The New Poem” pre-
sents a series of negative propositions, an austerity
that extends to its nearly monotonous cadences.
Though extremely bracing, such poetry does not re-
main “new” for very long.
Wright published Black Zodiacin 1997, a time
when Americans enjoyed peace, not endured a di-
visive war. Black Zodiacexpresses a less severe
pessimism. The difference can be heard in the
poem’s lush rhythms. While “The New Poem” pre-
sents a dirge-like monody, “Black Zodiac” avails
itself of a much wider variety of cadences. The
writer of “The New Poem” is a young man, laying
down prohibitions. In “Black Zodiac,” Wright asks
a series of questions directed toward himself and
his art. The questions include:
What can we say to either of them?
How can they be so dark and so clear at the same
time?
.........................
The flies come back, and the heat—what can we
say to them?
.........................
Why do the great stories always exist in the past?
Appropriately for such a self-questioning
poem, “Black Zodiac” opens with a tone of hu-
mility. Meditating upon the poet’s relationship to
his precursors, the great poets who preceded him,
the speaker pays homage to “the masters,” a term
suggestive of a great humbleness, an almost reli-
gious deference to these artists’ authority. Like a
supplicant, the speaker stands at the level of “the
pale hems” of their gowns. Yet these “masters” also
form the poet’s inspiration and his audience. The
poem starts:Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories,
mix
And mismatch, And settle about our lawn furniture,
like air
Without a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness.
In the terms of contemporary literary criticism,
this passage considers the nature of poetic influ-
ence: that is, the nature of a poet’s relation with
earlier writers. Some scholars characterize this re-
lationship as essentially competitive, as poets fight
each other for a chance at poetic immortality.
Wright, though, describes a different dynamic. The
“masters” gather as the poet writes. The act of cre-
ation summons them because poet starts to “mix /
And mismatch” his great influences as he writes.
In other words, a writer claims originality not by
composing a wholly unprecedented poem but by
bringing together a unique combination of influ-
ences.
Wright’s notes for this poem confirm this strat-
egy of eclectic influence. The mere presence of
these notes in the back of Black Zodiacsuggests a
certain meticulousness; Wright does not try to hide
the fact that previous works inspired his poem. In-
stead, his notes acknowledge that his poem bor-
rows phrases and ideas from sources as diverse as
the posthumously published work of the twentieth-
century American poet Wallace Stevens, a transla-
tion of the German poet Paul Celan, and the jour-
nals of St. Augustine, a leading figure in early
Christianity.
Mixing and re-mixing these god-like influ-
ences, the poet faces the challenge of drawing sus-
tenance from “the masters” without being mastered
by them. He twice distills this problem to its crux,
asking, “What can we say to them?” In the pres-
ence of these “masters,” the poet experiences a
tongue-tied sense of awe. They reduce him to act-
ing like a child, letting them tussle his hair.
Of course the poet is not actually tongue-tied;
he remains articulate about his inability to craft a
response worthy of the visiting spirits:
They ruffle our hair, they ruffle the leaves of the
August tree.
They stop, abruptly as wind.
The flies come back, and the heat—what can we
say to them?
Several characteristics mark these lines as
Wright’s. As in much of his work, this passage uses
a split line as a means to control the tempo and ca-
dence. For example, the first line features a caesura,
a comma that forces the reader to pause, after the
word, “hair.” Wright then splits the line, leaving it
unbalanced, as the first part remains shorter thanBlack Zodiac... a writer claims
originality not by
composing a wholly
unprecedented poem but by
bringing together a unique
combination of influences.”