“In a Word, a World”: C.D. Wright’s Apology

A Review of 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

At least among poets, universal love is a habit of mind on shaky footing in our age of irony. As a doctrine it may seem too compromised in its history; as a disposition it may seem too easy in theory, too hard in practice, or too withdrawn from callous discourses of public life. As Nathaniel Tarn wrote in The Beautiful Contradictions, “The problem is to love all without loss of edge.” When it comes to the art of loving all without loss of edge, few have sought to “enlarge the circle” with the same determination as C.D. Wright. Words root her impassioned abandon. “I love them all,” exhorts her latest book. This isn’t the first time Wright has insisted on her unqualified love of language. In Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005), she wrote, “I believe the word was made good from the start; it remains so to this second.” Only now, Wright gives her insistence full vent, attesting her love for every word of every language, sociolect, and idiolect, and for every “clutch” of words comprising every jargon, seduction, and revolt. Don’t suppose this is superficial verbal populism. Her belief has theological and philosophical underpinnings: “I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names.” And the edges of this belief sharpen into poetry with the grammar of a mathematical proof: “Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.” I should be writing in the past tense, since Wright died unexpectedly of thrombosis on January 12, 2016, at the age of 67, after a flight from Chile to Providence, Rhode Island, where she taught at Brown University for over thirty years. A week earlier, she published the book I quote above, giving it a demanding omnibus title fit for an eighteenth-century novel or a Fiona Apple record: 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 (henceforth The Poet). In the weeks after her death, moving obituaries and remembrances flowed in from her legion of friends, students, and admirers, and the impressive contours of her career came into view. Her youthful involvement with the poet Frank Stanford in Arkansas, where