The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

by C.D. Wright

A companion to her astonishing collection of prose Cooling Time, C.D. Wright argues for poetry as a way of being and seeing, and calls it "the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine." Wright's passion for the genre is pure inspiration, and in her hands the answer to the question of poetry is poetry.

From "In a Word":

I love the nouns of a time in a place, where a sack once was a poke and native skag was junk glass not junk and junk was just junk not smack and smack entailed eating with your mouth open, and an Egyptian one-eye was an egg, sunny side up, and a nation sack was a flannel amulet, worn only by women, to be touched only by women, especially around Memphis. Red sacks for love and green for money…

C.D. Wright's most recent volume, One With Others, was a National Book Award finalist. Among her many honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Criticism, Writing

150 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2015

About the author

C. D. Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She earned a BA in French from Memphis State College (now the University of Memphis) in 1971 and briefly attended law school before leaving to pursue an MFA from the University of Arkansas, which she received in 1976. Her poetry thesis was titled Alla Breve Loving.

In 1977 the publishing company founded by Frank Stanford, Lost Roads Publishers, published Wright's first collection, Room Rented by A Single Woman. After Stanford died in 1978, Wright took over Lost Roads, continuing the mission of publishing new poets and starting the practice of publishing translations. In 1979, she moved to San Francisco, where she met poet Forrest Gander. Wright and Gander married in 1983 and had a son, Brecht, and co-edited Lost Roads until 2005.

In 1981, Wright lived in Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico and completed her third book of poems, Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues. In 1983 she moved to Providence, Rhode Island to teach writing at Brown University as the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English. In 2013,

C.D. Wright died on January 12, 2016 at the age of 67 in Barrington, Rhode Island.

Reviews

[Leigh Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Swan song from a singular swan.

C.D. Wright's death came as a surprise to a lot of people, but I'm guessing she saw it coming. I say this because she poured all of life and death into this final collection. Basically, it's her "Blackstar." Among other things, it's a meditation on the art and craft of poetry, a celebration of poets whose work she loved, a memoir of what it was like to write several of her best-known pieces, and an argument for the continued worth and relevance of poetry in our big-box world.

Wright's poetry is very much rooted in the world. Words are never just floofy things you toss around for effect. They are always grounded in something. They have shape, weight, heft. They make different sounds when you bang them together. She bangs damn well, and at the same time can explain the art of the bang without drifting off into academic platitudes or other literary navel-gazing. It's a book-length attempt to capture the hardworking joy of wrestling the world into shape via the word; it's also a story of belonging to a poetic lineage, and celebrating that. Poets from all over the world have informed Wright's process, and she speaks of them with love and reverence.

Oh yes. She had to have known she was not long for this world as she shaped this manuscript. It's a last love letter to the worlds that would go on without her: the physical world and the world of poetry that illuminates it. I've never been quite so sorry that I'll never meet someone. Not that our paths would have crossed anyway, but still. There's nobody quite like Wright. If you already know her, then you know. But if you don't, you will. A keeper, recommended for readers who want only the best poetry in their permanent collections, as well as anyone who loves words and what they're capable of.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because I love Brenda Hillman and a friend told me CD Wright had some poems/essays in here about her. I've read some of Wright's poetry before, including her famous Deepstep Come Shining. She was a deep and complicated thinker and tinkerer with words, as this collection makes clear. Her empathetic voice carries this book, which is poetry about the writing of poetry. Poets often write about poetry, but in veiled ways. I appreciate that CD Wright does not veil her way into this, she just goes right at it, unapologetically. We are treated to her unique way of seeing things, her personal quirks and affectations with language are the joy and charm of these pieces, where she openly gushes about Robert Creeley, Jean Valentine, WC Williams, Brenda Hillman, Arthur Sze, and others. To me, poetry should be personal, should be slightly illogical, and so theories about poetry, about the writing of poetry and its place in this world, should also be personal and quirky and without a clear logic, only the human element of it should show through. We should write less manifestos and more odes. Wright believes in poetry, in the power of poetry to effect change, and her faith in poetry is probably what keeps this collection going. It's what makes it interesting to read. I am also a poet, but my faith keeps wavering and faltering. I doubt that it makes a difference. I think that if I write a poem, only other poets will read it. My negativity automatically imagines a circle of poets convincing each other of some obscure point, whereas the wider world is unaffected. Wright was not plagued by these doubts, and I wish she could teach me her ways. Her faith is a self fulfilling prophecy. Because she's not riddled by these thoughts, her poetry is able to soar without that kind of self consciousness, without that apologetic air which always rides the tail of every word I write. I did not plan this review out, I just wrote it kind of as it came word for word, so sorry if this was a total mess of a ramble. (there I am apologizing again)

[Fireflydances · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much of this book is in the form of prose poetry; it reminds me very much of Claudia Rankine's Citizen though it is more tightly interwoven, i.e., certain specific "topics" are returned to throughout: Spring & All, In a Word, a World, etc., etc. Poets Robert Creeley, Williams, Jean Valentine, Brenda Hillman, Jane Miller, George Oppen, John Taggart recur in quotation and ruminations. I should call this "a poet's book."

It does bring together three of my most recent reads, The Brothers, about US foreign policy, Men Explain Things to Me, in which violence and suppression play a serious role in Ms. Solnit's life, and Vargas Llosa's journalistic rant on the decay of "culture."

A central theme in this book is the value/function of poetry, especially in the face of the bestiality inflicted on the Middle East by the Bush Administration, but it keeps returning, beautifully, to the poets and poetry itself and what it means/is to C.D. Wright herself. And it is her life, focusing her vision, allowing her room for speech--I almost wrote "a room for speech," thinking of Virginia Woolf's sometimes cramped world and her argument for women writers (perhaps prompted by Ms. Solnit's testimony to Woolf's presence in and influence on her writing and those of so many others.

What Sartre called being engage applies both to Wright's work and the examples she draws on:

"Empire, destruction, imagination and wilderness: Brenda Hillman's 'Hydrology of California' doesn't attempt to reconcile one event or thing with another because she aims to take in the wild scramble for life on planet Earth even if she has to open a fire hydrant onto our duct-taped-gaping eyes and toothpick-propped-wide mouths while she empties her recitation of waterways and their fate. The abecedary backs up the poem, but remain incidental. Suppose there is a point from which you cannot be held back. Therein lies your unimproved poem of perfection; 'no one knows how this sentence will end in a dream with a lyric sky'" (p 89).

Or this epigraph:

"THE POEM

A poetry of the meaning of words
And a bond with the universe

I think there is no light in the world
but the world

And I think there is light

Oppen" (p 108)

It's not really fair to focus on the work of other writers when "reviewing" the book of another, but this work has autobiographical elements--is one poet's poetical autobiography--and so these and other words as well as her experiences make her who she is. One element of that is her collaboration with the photographer Deborah Luster in One Big Self Prisoners of Louisiana (2003) recollected in "Stripe for Stripe (pp 9-16) and elsewhere in the volume and the manner in which it reflects her inclusiveness and compassion.

That inclusiveness leads to this observation: were one to read this book, noting the names of writers and the titles of books and poems (some graciously gathered before the "author's note" [p 133]), that reader would have a pretty fine curriculum out of which to emerge intensely thoughtfully.

I should add that I know C.D. Wright and have often enriched my own library and reading by noting the books she uses in her Creative Arts courses. These facts have nothing to do with my comments above. This book offers more than I can express, for which I am grateful.

[Sigrun Hodne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of fragments.

But also a book on writing & reading, a book on how reading informs writing, and on the relationship between writers & artists – across time & culture.

In The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures … Wright is giving word to many of her friends and mentors; here is William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Jean Valentine. Here is the painter Agnes Martin and the sculptor Anne Truitt, a short snatch from Beckett, some words by Woolf, and many, many more.

Right at the end of the The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures … there is a text called “Questionnaire in January”,I have posted som snippets on my blog:

https://omstreifer.wordpress.com/

[Maya Tsingos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wright’s poems/essayettes (cf. “The old business about form & content”) about poetics are some of the most beautiful I’ve read. Add to that her knowledge of history and craft… This whole collection is just luminous. It demands re-reading. And I will gladly comply.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incandescent. It offers light. Need to reread often

[Claudio Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

C.D. Wright’s The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (which from now one, will be referred to as The Poet) is a beautiful and insightful, if at times rambling and esoteric, Ars Poetica. Often using the works of other poets as her jumping off point, C.D. Wright takes the reader through her own mind and process as a poet in an attempt to define what poetry is, often by pointing out just how indefinable poetry can be. In her own words, a poem “is a poem if I say it is” (37).

The book is almost entirely prose poetry, a form that is notoriously tricky to pull off, but has wonderful effects when done well. In many ways, Wright’s book delineates what separates not only poetry from other forms of literature but also what separates prose poetry from other prose such as fiction. In poetry, “the goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess” (7). Indeed, The Poet can often feel like a fluid, rambling mess, but it’s also an experience that you never want to stop.

C.D Wright is situated comfortably in the world of contemporary American poetry, and explores what is it is to a poet today. In doing so, she brings us into her own writing process, a process that is portrayed as both an exploration, a creation, and a demolition.

Poems are my building projects. I inhabit them for the time it takes to have every corner lit, and then I clear out, taking what I need to start over.” (17)

Though it is easy to be frustrated by a book that seems to provide only questions and half-answers, Wright makes it clear that this too, is by design. To her, “poetry does not presume to know, but is angling to get a glimpse of what is gradually coming into view.” (32). Hate it or love it, this is what Wright gives us: a glimpse, a shift in the right direction, towards the truth of what poetry is and should be.

[Jonathan Tennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable book of poetry - the first I have read by Wright.

"Poetry, I have tardily determined, not only seeks silence, it aspires to silence. I mean not that it aims for perfection but for an opening, an unofficial opening, a zone wherein the language affords unexpected associations and alternative outcomes." - p. 90

Faves included:
- In a Word, a World (p. 3)
- A Plague of Poets (p.6)
- Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the World's Biggest Retailer (p.31)
- The not knowing whether what you've set down is any good (p. 47)
- Nuptials & Violence (p. 73)
- Hold Still, Lion (p. 79)

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a latecomer to Wright's poetry (she died in 2016), but I am glad I came. The audacity behind these poems invigorates me. She repeats titles frequently; this makes reading a different poem with the same title like turning a multi-faceted gem over in my fingers and noting all the different ways it catches and throws light. William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Jean Valentine, Amina Massey, and more appear in her Hall of Heroes.

Most of the poems in the book have a prose format and this too promotes a vigorous re-working of the definition of poetry. This is the book to go to for this.

I also appreciate how connected she was to poets and their work. I get the sense that she must have been a marvelous dinner guest and conversationalist.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The language of poetry specializes in doubt. Without the doubters, everyone is cut off at the first question. Poetry does not presume to know, but is angling to get a glimpse of what is gradually coming into view; it aims to rightly identify what is looming; it intends to interrogate whatever is already in place. Poetry, whose definition remains evasive by necessity, advocates the lost road; and beyond speech — waiting, listening, and silence.” — “Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the World’s Biggest Retailer”

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of "defense of poesy"s greatest branches. i was really blown away by the marking of poetry's tendency towards silence not just as its continuous failure (not new) but as its ethical imperative: poetry, now, must fall short of its purported openness. it will, therefore, always bear a relation to a gentler version of itself, first as refusal & then as haunting abandonment. close to its end but not quite there yet (and that will be, in perpetuity, not quite)

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a wonderful amalgamation, a bit of literary theory and history, mixed with the poet's larger experiences, written and steeped in the language of poetry. She analyzes some of her personal favorite poets (Creeley, Williams, et al.) and include a powerful essay about her experience visiting Louisiana prisons and confronting the humanity there. Highly recommended.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd never read any of Wright's poetry so I looked some up online after reading this. I like her prose poems better than her poetry. The form just seems more natural to her. I can't say I always understood it, but I always feel that way with modern and contemporary poetry.

[Zac Sigler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has led me to want to read more poetry, and to write poetry.

A word, a world, indeed.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a lot of Wright but not enough to feel at one with this book. Lots of great fragments and many references to other poets and poems I now want to read.

[Clayton Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

RIP Carolyn

[Cail Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful meal. What a stunner of a book.

[Tamara · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible. now i need to read some of her actual poetry.

["Greg Adkins" · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the costliest books I've purchased. For every one poet Wright mentions whose work I'm already familiar with, there are two more names she drops I've never heard of and whose books sound desperately interesting. Total purchases after finishing The Poet, The Lion (etc.): 9. Save yourself!

[Jeanne Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a book for everyone, but writers in particular will enjoy these snippets and reflections on writing the grimmest aspects of our culture (prisons, and "Does Walmart win?"), and interesting authors. It's described on the back of the book as "prosimetrical [a word not recognized by spell-check] essays." I folded down pages and marked passages to ponder in months to come: "Poetry moves by indirection and in so doing avoids the crowd," "The language of poetry specializes in doubt." I am not as familiar with the work of the respected C.D. Wright as some readers. I was sorry that the reading world lost her, but glad to receive this legacy of hers from a friend. A good book to keep on the shelf and dip in to when you need inspiration, or reassurance that you're not the only one who thinks thinking about thought and words is worthwhile.

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book slipped into my life at just the right time. A strange, new American idiom, indeed. Reading it was like engaging in a four or five-part conversation with one of our finest poets, a woman with roots, a searing intelligence, a far-reaching sense of social justice, and the ear of a brilliant musician. I say this about every C.D. Wright book I read: It ain't like anything else on your shelf. And thank goodness for it.

[Patti K · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 2015 volume of prose poetry by C.D. Wright is very powerful and
provocative. It is divided into many sections that repeat, such as,
The World In a Word, Spring & All, Jean Valentine. She examines
varying aspects of other poets' works as well as offering ideas on
the importance of poetry and its connections to the world of
communication. Very enjoyable and witty and smart.

[Tom Hrycyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

8.2/10
On the surface level, C.D. Wright’s poetry collection is a poet writing about poetry. But she does so much more with the subject than others in her line of work, seems so much more well-read. She’s given the reader a mousehole in which to view the infinite span of creativity and somehow makes it work.

[Jared Levine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not a good introduction into C.D. Wright's work. I know she's great. I do, but I couldn't get into this book. I feel like I could have if I read one of her earlier works first

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read, author finished book-- just before she died
unexpectedly in her sleep...

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of prose poems is very interesting and worthwhile reading and about the right length even if the title is a little long.

[Louise Aronson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not easy and yet a total pleasure. I found it best to dip in, consider, and return a while later. She circles among various poets, her own life, and poetry itself. Brilliant.

[Brendan]

Rating: 3 1/2

Poems about poets, poetry, language, etc. She repeats her titles often; references William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, and Jean Valentine enough to be noted. A bit of leftist politics.
My favorite piece is the version of "In a Word, a World" on page 20.

Writing is choosing.
- "In a Word, a World" (44)

I met a French poet who lives on the edge of a silent land.
- "Nuptials & Violence"