The Essential C.D. Wright, edited by Forrest Gander and Michael Wiegers

 

 

 

          Whether you’ve followed the work of C.D. Wright for years or are encountering it for the first time, this condensation of decades is rich, like that 94% dark chocolate you allow yourself only on special occasions. The Essential C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), selected and edited by her partner, Forrest Gander, and editor, Michael Wiegers, provides the breadth of a single poet’s career all under one cover, leaving it up to the reader when to take breaks to breathe. Savoring is necessary.

          Wright (1949-2016) explored a forest of forms and themes in her work, notably the catalog poem, or list poem. The name is unflattering, because what this type of poem does is build through “a welter of associations” (“One with Others”), not tabulate random items. Wright has worked and reworked variations of the list poem to the point that only an attentive reader will notice the technique at all. She writes poems that look like a list, but are not, as well as poems that do not look like a list but are. For example, “Remarks on Color” is composed of 40 numbered lines. A superficial examination would reveal items listed: “13. Gourds strung between poles.” But the poem weaves together fragments that defy individuality and develop meaning only in aggregate, elements of a single thought:

          33. check this:

          34. at the time of his death Presley’s was the second most reproduced image in the world

          35. the first was Mickey Mouse

          36. Lansky Brothers – down on Beale – outfitted the johns of Memphis

          37. and Elvis

Though numbered as if individual items, the words fit together as a single complex thought, wherein the numbers are the paper wrapper, if not irrelevant.

          Contrast this with a poem like “This Couple.” The poem begins with a meditative quality: “Now is when we love to sit before mirrors,” but that claim is followed by two other predicates that grammatically follow the verb phrase “love to”: “hand out leaflets” or “come together” to talk. Three options, listed, in what began as a meditation on reflection and memory. A similar structure occurs beginning in line 11, where the words “we think of” set off a list of twenty items that complete the poem. The items though are not numbered. They are enjambed and serialized:

          Things we sent away for. Long drives. The rain. Cafes

          where we ate late and once only. Eyes of an animal

          in the headlamps. The guestbooks that verify

          our whereabouts. Your apple core in the ashtray.

Wright observes “the unconnected life / is not worth living,” in “And It Came to Pass.” That is the principle of organization pinning together a poem like “This Couple.” The connections of the listed noun phrases are implicit, where, paradoxically, the gaps become the glue.

          Another important element of Wright’s work is her contemplation on the nature of being a poet. “Our Dust” begins “I am your ancestor,” but focuses through the main body of the poem on ways “I was the poet”: 

          The one with the trowel in her handbag.

          I dug up protected and private things.

          That sort, I was.

The “protected and private things” include some confessional moments. In preparation for her exploration of poetic facets, the poet has already backhandedly invited the reader into the privacy of her life, explaining, “There is no need for you to imagine / [. . .] Forrest and I coupling on the landing.”  The poem goes on to catalog details of an (extra-)ordinary day in nature and in town. The poet sees everything throughout the day with an eye to connection, even when the connection is never stated.

          In addition to being a poet, Wright explores in depth what a poem is. In “My American Scrawl,” the second prose poem of that title in the collection, Wright reveals a striking image regarding the shaping of a poem: “Order is there to be macheted from the tangles of words.” Ironically or purposefully, the prose poem in which this statement is made resists such pruning and shaping, relying on the force of idea more than the shape of the argument. “Can you put words to an inchoate desire,” asks Wright, in “Questionnaire in January,” though her question is rhetorical, complete with period rather than question mark. The obvious answer is no, but that does not stop the poet from trying. In a series of poems, each entitled “In a Word, a World,” Wright looks at the language of everyday life with the same wonder that William Wordsworth fixed on the daffodil. 

          Wright relates that her own process in writing poetry has shifted over time from “the medium’s essence” to “its mutability”; this is a result of her exploration and intention in poetry to “make meaningful contact with a consciousness other than [her] own” while keeping the potential for “obvious common ground” in play (“Poems are my building projects”). For her, poetry’s role as communication far exceeds its role as self-expression. Yet, both are abundantly evident in this collection.

          Wright’s accolades range from a well-established professorship at Brown University to being named a MacArthur Fellow, but her real worth is in the poetic legacy she lays open for today’s readers, and The Essential C.D. Wright is an excellent starting place.