58 Poetry for Students

the act of description with a palpable holiness by

linking it with God himself—a revealed deity.

Thus, for both Stevens and Wright, the poetic act

is a sacred act, one that turns the mundane into the

divine.

For Wright and Stevens, the divine may not

exist in heaven but on earth, which is to say that

some may seek the divine not for purposes of praise

but simply to engage it. It would seem, then, that

for both poets, the first step toward this engage-

ment is to desire it. Wright begins section two of

“Black Zodiac” with a passage from St. Augustine:

Those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise

of him.

Perhaps. And perhaps not—dust and ashes though

we are,

Some will go wordlessly ...

Wright suggests that we each look for divine

out of different motivations. For him, looking does

not equal praise. But, that’s not a problem, for both

Stevens and Wright, finding is not as important as

looking. Indeed, both poets locate the divine in the

act of desire itself. In “Description without Place,”

Stevens claims that description “is an expectation,

a desire” and in “Primitive Like an Orb,” he says

that “The Lover, the believer and the poet. / Their

words are chosen out of their desire.” In the final

moment, we may never actually find God, we may

never experience the grand revelation. Thus, when

we cannot count on the celestial, we can count on

the terrestrial. We can count on language. Lan-

guage, the ability to articulate, the description of

the processes of life remains our most reliable av-

enue toward making sense of a senseless world. As

Wright writes in “Black Zodiac.”

The unexamined life’s no different from the

examined life—

Unanswerable questions, small talk,

Unprovable theorems, long abandoned arguments—

You’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.

Simply thinking about the world is not enough.

Our memories, our moments of insight and under-

standing, slip away from us like minutes and hours,

like sunlight. Writing down the world, describing

the internal landscape fixes your perception of the

world in a medium we all share—language. Stevens

would agree. It’s all about articulation:

That’s it. The lover writes, the believer hears,

The poet mumbles and the painter sees ...

As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,

Of the skeleton of the ether, the total

Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods

Black Zodiac

What

Do I Read

Next?

• Editors Robert Bain and Joseph M. Flora ex-
  plore both the changing and the traditional val-
  ues of the American South inContemporary Po-
  ets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the
  South(1994). The book includes critical com-
  ments and personal glimpses of 50 southern
  writers and provides an excellent overview of
  the nuances of “southern” writing.


• Diane Jarvenpa’s 1996 publication entitled Di-
  vining the Landscape: Poemsis a splendid col-
  lection of poems reflecting this Finnish-Ameri-
  can’s love for the Minnesota landscape. She
  brings a remarkable sensibility to everyday sub-
  jects and also deals heavily with mother-daugh-
  ter ties.


• Australian theologian Peter Jensen provides a
  unique Christian perspective in understanding
  man’s place and purpose in the universe in At
  the Heart of the Universe: The Eternal Plan of
  God(1997). The book is written in an easy-to-
  understand literary style without a great deal of
  heavy-handed theological doctrine.


• Under the fun and provocative title On Kissing,
  Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Es-
  says on the Unexamined Life (1993) author
  Adam Phillips presents a collection of essays fo-
  cusing on issues rearely discussed in the field of
  psychoanalysis: kissing, worrying, risk, etc. He
  debunks the Socratic notion that the unexamined
  life is not worth living, asserting that good men-
  tal health depends on maintaining aspects of life
  that resist interpretation.


• Christianity in Appalachia: Profiles in Regional
  Pluralism(edited by Bill Leonard, 1999) brings
  together articles on the many religions repre-
  sented by the “hill-folk” of the Appalachians.
  While many publications portray people from
  this region as simple and unsophisticated, this
  collection presents them as genuine, sincere be-
  lievers in God who do not always fit the mold
  that the rest of society has created for them.