Mary Szybist Remembers Her Former Teacher, Charles Wright

At Literary Hub, Mary Szybist contributes an article about Charles Wright, whose "seriousness which was always serious, no matter how funny—blew open my understanding of what could be perceived and what could be asked, and let me glimpse at how much was required. Was I willing to put on the hair shirt and go into the desert and sit still, and listen hard, and write it down, and tell no one?" More: 

Charles’s most important teaching didn’t come through explicit statement, but some of his statements (many from Halflife) have become so vital to me that I think of them habitually.

1. What you have to say, most likely, will not be news. How you say it just might be.

2. Unless you love the music of words you are merely a pamphleteer.

3. Art tends toward the certainty of making connections. The artist’s job is to keep them apart, thus giving it tension and keeping it alive, letting the synapse spark.

4. New structures, new dependencies.

5. Where else do we live but in our own constructions?

The first book by Charles I ever picked up was Zone Journals. I remember standing in Daedalus Bookshop in Charlottesville and looking at the Cy Twombly detail on its cover followed by undramatic poem titles like “Yard Journal,” “March Journal,” “Night Journal.” Its abstract cover said to me: art.  Its journal poems said to me: life. This idea is entirely obvious and not new even to me, but the experience of reading Zone Journals made the idea real to me: a living person had made something extraordinary out of life experience that did not seem by its facts particularly noteworthy. My experience of those poems was the experience of what I wanted life to feel like: a brilliance of heightened awareness in which time feels luxuriously ample. 

Read on at Literary Hub.