first workshop: A memoir of James Wright, The

I sat at the seminar table directly opposite James Wright, feeling myself an outsider, although Wright had done nothing to encourage the feeling. I was not a student at SUNY Buffalo in the summer of 1974, and, in fact, have never been a formal creative writing student. I simply appeared, and he was most courteous, even courtly, in his welcome.

He asked each of us to read a poem of our own. When I looked up after reading the last line of my poem, I saw a face transformed. It was luminous. Wright had the ability to listen with the purest appreciation to each of us as we read. "Mank you for reading that beautiful poem," he said. From then on his voice seemed purple to me and velvety. Looking back, I may have been romanticizing a throatiness, the result of the heavy smoking that would eventually kill him. That summer his brown, very round, almost lashless eyes were barely able to contain some deep reservoir of feeling.

Wright brought to our attention a wonderful short essay by D. H. Lawrence, "Poetry of the Present," which served originally as an introduction to the 1918 American edition of New Poems. In it, Lawrence describes the quality of "sheer appreciation" before the world and its offerings. This kind of appreciation is possible only if one relinquishes the "sigh for what is not" and locates oneself fully in the present moment. James Wright received the offering of our poems, despite their unevenness and inadequacies, with "sheer appreciation." It was a great gift to an aspiring poet. Such appreciation has the power to elicit appreciation.

Wright spoke of "knowing poems by heart," by which he meant "having them in your heart." He deplored bald memorization. He enthralled us with his recitation of everything from Sappho to Catullus to Shakespeare to Lawrence to Rimbaud to W. C. Fields to Groucho Marx. In addition, he gave jaunty renditions of Medieval and Renaissance songs. I was particularly taken with his recitation of a little poem by Lawrence, "The White Horse":

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put

its halter on

and the horse looks at him in silence.

They are so silent, they are in another world.

His voice was resonant, deeply feelingful, and yet completely without affectation. Each word floated in its own sound for a moment, receiving exactly its due and no more than its due. In the fullness of Wright's voice, the poem continued in the silence. Along with horse and youth, we were in another world.

After classes Wright was whisked away. It was disappointing to those of us who craved more contact with him. At the same time, his routine disappearance created a mystique. As students, we were not privy to where he went or with whom. He made occasional oblique references to "not being well," though what he was suffering from was not clear. He talked about being "under doctor's orders" not to give any readings for a year. He seemed strangely dependent, as though he would not be able to navigate the world without a guide. He was brought to class and carried away, as I later learned, by his wife, Annie. During the hour and a half in between, he was in his element, an element more like sea than air-viscous, salty, sensuous.

He had recently returned from a stay as visiting poet at the University of Hawaii. He described his encounter with a moray eel. His round eyes were even rounder with delight, almost glee, while at the same time his bearded jaw jutted to the right and his mouth opened with a grimace of not exactly mock terror, when he told of entering the sea by night. He knew his power to raise his listener's gooseflesh, and he reveled in it. It was an act of solitude and stealth very like the theft of the "elfin pinnace" in Wordsworth's Prelude, and with a similar intense bodily and psychic awareness of a powerful, potentially overriding, presence. For Wright, unlike Wordsworth, the presence made itself known as light. He described the way the glow of the eel illuminated the underwater sea. The experience later found its way into a poem, "Entering the Kingdom of the Moray Eel," which was included in his last book, This Journey, published posthumously.

Through his encounters with the creatures of nature Wright was able to access a heightened awareness of the interconnectedness of things-- a restorative experience very like the Buddhist sense of oneness. In perhaps his best known poem, "A Blessing," he steps over a barbed wire fence to enter the world of two Indian ponies. The encounter between poet and ponies leads to a culminating image of transport:

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

Strangely enough, the stepping out of the body is at once a stepping into the body, expanded by the sense of interconnection. As Lawrence put it in "Poetry of the Present": "The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web; the waters are shaking the moon."

In contrast to his devotion to the poem of transport-and I imagine providing a psychic balance -Wright relished the poem as curse. By "curse" he meant "a real malediction," a "calling down of evil on someone." To his mind it was not only justified but also grand to lay a poetic curse upon someone or something. He thought of cursing as a way of exorcizing the evil that had been done or perhaps the evil spirit inhabiting the doer. The more exorbitant the curse, the better. Only a very grand curse could be a carrier of the poet's righteous indignation._