On James Wright as Ecstatic Necromancer

FSG's Work in Progress, "a compendium of original works, exclusive excerpts, and interviews with authors from Farrar, Straus and Giroux," features an essay on the work of James Wright and the death of, well, poetry. Wright was, writes Lisa Wells, "in the main, a digger of sonorous graves." More from this piece:

Wright the ecstatic necromancer begins to pupate as early as The Green Wall (1957). In “On the Skeleton of a Hound,” a long-dead dog lies unburied but for the lovely creep of milkweed and dew. The poem begins in formal obedience but soon declivities darken, flies arrive, the music decomposes. As the poet Mark Doty had it, “his tongue won’t work the way it worked in the preceding lines.” This liminal grave is located adjacent to the eroding artifice of a crumbling wall, (the “sniveling iambic” soon to be abandoned). When the transcendent image arrives, it cleaves the poem in half; the dead hound, resurrected, bounds from an open meadow and lands on the moon, where singing girls dance around a fire. The moon invites a separation, and Wright, alone in the next stanza, goes to work disassembling the skeleton, disrupting its “perfect shape,” tossing the skull like a ball over the Maples (good arm, Jim!). If the hound is to live again, in other words, the poet must bust up its form, unlock it, dispense with the elevated aboutness and deliver the living image. (Not incidentally, Wright’s buddy Robert Bly likened image-based poems to animals with “considerable flowing rhythms.”)

Wright dug most of his graves in the vicinity of his hometown—Martins Ferry, Ohio—a place, if we are to believe the poems, populated by miners, dead sisters, rapists, and drowned children. His father worked at the glass factory, his mother in a laundry. Probably safe to assume his people didn’t employ such fancy talk as is found in much of The Green Wall (“with loads that build the slender bough / Till branches bear a tasteless fruit”) and the pull of those two languages split, and knit, and split again his tongue.

Read on at FSG Work in Progress. And find August Kleinzahler and Jonathan Blunk's writing about Wright here and here.