C. D. Wright : from One Big Self

(pub. Copper Canyon)

Prepare to exit the forest of men and women

Louisiana bumper sticker: JESUS DON'T LEAVE EARTH WITHOUT US

It's a great day to die, a great day to leave the body, he told the press before his Easter execution

When I go, I want my lips Smyth-sewn, none of that perfect-bound crap it doesn't last

And burn me up I don't want any more real estate

No one promised you the light or the morrow

Mother Helen predicts you will be doing better moneywise between March and May

In your past life you had something to do with animals
She sees you in a hosptial with animals way back in the 1800s

After all, you are not Gramsci, she said

Qui facit per alium facit per se

Sounds dirty doesn't it

I wanted to offer you the bread of charity,

Mercy, etc.

When she said she would write the book
he said what direction

Take this down, then burn it

My faulty exchatology pardon my french

The lovebugs hitting the windshield like something electric

Jack and Jill the pastor at St. Gabriel calls them

Wonderful news Sissy had seven little catahoulas
Mr. Redwine in ecstasy

@

With lasting gratitude to Deborah Luster and to Jack Woody, and to the men and women of East Carroll Parish Prison Farm, Transylvania; Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, St. Gabriel; and Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola.

"In a capitalist country," as Frank O'Hara once remarked, "fun is everything. Fun is the only justification for the acquisitive impulse, if one is to be honest." -- Steven Evans, The Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprises

I've quoted these lines from Steve before, and I keep coming back to them because they hit at the heart of a lot of my own reading of contemporary poetry, done, mainly, in the spirit of "fun". Most poetry, read right, is indeed loads of "fun"; I think it's important to decide in those cases whether one is equivocating on the notion as it appears in O'Hara's quote. Even in a book like this connection of everyone with lungs, fun -- or "joy", or "pleasure" -- is lurking like a depth charge.

C.D.'s new book you might consider a corrective; a book about something so defiantly unpleasant -- prisoners doing hard time in Louisiana -- that the question of fun never arises. The pleasure -- and here's there's no question of accidentally conflating it with fun -- comes with an edge of deep discomfort.

aestheticisation looms when talking about a poem made from this "material", if only because of the hack writers who, lacking the ability to write something taken seriously, hide behind a weighty subject. It's difficult to excerpt C.D. because there is a narrative, a desire to tell stories ("I wanted the banter, the idiom, the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech" she writes in the introduction) that falls flat when an excerpt is read (as it always is) in the lyric mode.

Indeed, reading One Big Self I find myself reading twice: once for myself and once for an excerpt that will allow me to make the case for C.D.'s work in a few lines. These are difficult to find. Take this, from early on (the em dash C.D. has established as a way to attribute direct speech):

We're both here because of love. -- Zobonia of herself and her best friend

I am highly hypnotizable.

I would wash that man's feet and drink the water.

These lines, taken out of context, fall apart; hypnotizable in the text is arbitrary, a surprise, just as much as it is in excerpt, but is inflected as it cannot be out of context, a kind of lifting off. Here as a third of three lines, it just seems like a fragment we'd have no trouble calling pretentious if encountered in a single page poem. As for I would wash . . . -- well it's again the case that, excerpted, these lines seem staged, hard to account for as real whereas within a much larger stream they power along.

It's not to say that every line of C.D.'s 80-odd page poem is golden; there are lines here that do seem unworthy of their subjects, that seem too far removed, that take conceptual, intellectual angles it seems out of fear-to-touch. Then there are the successes; here are both on the same page:

The septuagenarian murderer knits nonstop

One way to wear out the clock

In Tickfaw miracles occur

This weekend: the thirteenth annual Cajun joke contest

They will/will not be sending the former governor to Big Gola

I pinch a cigarette and stare at Rachel's wrist scars

By their color they are recent

That the eye not be drawn in

I suggest all courage is artificial

Her sister did not fail

Noses amuse us and hers not less so

I think it's clear here where C.D. is drawing on a direct line to unimaginable experience, and where she is dropping the partition, shutting off this line, to speak in the voice of the seminar leader ("That the eye not be drawn in", for me, is this second mode, the elevation of the grammar clashing with any sense of the demotic so laboriously constructed; in later passages, shriven, a strangely unevocative piece of cant clashes similarly.)

I think this slightly longer excerpt gives a sense of the difficulty of the excerpter's task: "This weekend: the thirteenth annual Cajun joke contest" could be taken from any hack's catalogue poem. I'm talking a lot about hacks here, I think one important way to read C.D. is as a flirtation with hackery, with stream-of-consciousness journalism, with the idolization of random fact. C.D. is not constructing a solid archetecture out of what she has recorded, for sure, but neither is she simply generating another interminable list poem.

To return to "this weekend" -- I think what lifts this is the collision with the immediate tangibility of the pinched cigarette and Rachel's wrist. The joke contest is observed, but the cigarette, and the scars, are experienced, and it's that motion that gives these lines a life within the reader's mind. Another way to read C.D.: as someone who wants to write a poem about oscillating between these poles.

These oscillations can last longer than a line, and as a reader attuned to the compact lyric, these are the harder ones for me to read, the ones that require I suspend the critical resources of the Imagists we've all internalized. When C.D. spends, say, a long essentially prose paragraph recounting, in clipped, relentless and -- to my ear -- dulling syntax the decay of a neighborhood, I read resentfully.

It's a different pacing from the usual -- let's call it "fun" -- reversals and pullbacks of the contemporary Typo poem I myself have written, but that particular resistable paragraph rounds out in a clipped, gnomic but definitely unprosodic moment:

Ready or not. Ø exceptions.
Don't ask.

[The phrase returns in later passages as a leitmotif, addressed, not as above to the "affulent reader", but to the inmates: "In some prisons the last cigarette is no longer permitted / Ø exceptions Don't ask."]

It's not, in other words, that C.D. cannot because of the material write as a poet (a common, pointless gambit -- "this is beyond words" -- that's a main failing of Brian Turner's Iraq war Here, Bullet), nor, even, that C.D. does not want to write as a poet, but rather that she is going to pace out these moments, give them space to breathe among facts, to connect to facts, to root around in them.

The excerpt at the top of the page, coming just after "My Dear Affluent Reader" is I think a place for an affluent reader to begin when trying to get to grips. C.D.'s game is a tricky one, and she moves from high to low, from doctoral to inmate, rapdily. I've brought up an inexpert moment above, but the Latin and what comes after -- sounds dirty doesn't it -- to me is pitch perfect. It's not quite the sound of the pedagogue -- something stranger; not the self-conscious shrugging off of education, but almost as if the speaker discovers the uneducated voice within.

Fun, so is C.D. fun? The book is one of the most readable poem-projects I've encountered in a long while; the language is syntactically light, semantically loaded, in such a way that you are unbalanced forward by the facts:

Prison towns prison motels prison movies prison books prison dreams

Voices in the air conditioning

Convict hate convict sweat convict voices in the toilet tank

this cell your dwelling; this grave your garden

Mack trapped a spider

Kept in a pepper jar

He named her Iris

Caught roaches to feed her

He loved Iris

When Iris died

He wrote her a letter

There's a careening in C.D.'s lines, a sort of unconscious recklessness, a disregard for the subtle modulations of language, and I think this is how fun is approached and redirected. Fun poems today have a grammatical humor, a kind of twisting of language, that gives them their jauntyness; C.D.'s lines here simply refuse to resolve.

They sound, in other words, like a long lead-up; we read so quickly -- these eighty pages flew by in ninety spaced-out minutes -- because we are waiting for a wrap-up, for assurance that we are still within a normal poem. We're not, at least, we are in the hands of an expert poet with little left to "prove" -- there are few, if any, baroque, unnecessary moments -- and enough skill to renounce most of the "intelligent" devices of the 21st century avant garde.

It's C.D.'s genius here that she manages to write a poem with intelligence about deep, tragic folly, and in doing so neither separate herself from the material nor give the unpleasant sense of "going native." I think that the first great -- American -- poems we recover from the direct witnesses to the invasion and occupation of Iraq will have to learn some of the things C.D. has picked up in the hell's outposts of our own country.