4/28/2023 0 Comments Boson x reviewIn one way or another, Wright has interrogated the logic of this creolization for the last forty years. Linguistic retentions still demonstrate how the process managed not only to preserve features from its speakers’ prior lives but also to tailor new systems for thinking, saying, and being in the midst of harsh New World realities. Slavery and its aftermath proved a crucible for merging numerous distinct African languages with English. It is no great stretch to say that the African-American experience is always a creole experience certainly, the contemporary African-American cultural and linguistic universe inherits a genius for synthesis and syncresis. The cumulative effect is at once a bold opacity in the relationship between object and concept and also a surprising clarity in idiom. In his care, the sentence typically maintains its grammatical integrity despite eccentric syntax, diction, and rhythm. “What would you give,” he asks in Polynomials and Pollen, Although the settings of Wright’s poems float through a habitual blend of New Mexico, California, the American Northeast, South America, Europe, and Africa, grammar and prosody themselves serve as their own renewable frontier locales in his poems. Such places are always contingent because the language constituting them is always on the move. And like them, Wright subjects his readers to formal and conceptual contortionism in order to make a new place in language. Yeats, Robert Duncan, Michael Harper, Harryette Mullen, and Nathaniel Mackey, to name just a few. These thematic trends align Wright’s work with a tradition that includes, in no particular order, Kamau Brathwaite, W. From his first book, The Homecoming Singer (1971), to the visionary tours de force of The Double Invention of Komo (1980) and Dimensions of History (1984), Wright has forged intensely intellectual poetry from the search for habitation in a world that ultimately-as the poet continually rediscovers-complicates every homecoming. Wright’s personal peregrinations during the last several decades have tended to merge with broader themes of racial and/or existential displacement in his poetry. “uch,” Wright says of meditation (and implicitly of his writing), “is the inexact profession / of a pilgrim proceeding / toward the point of his own / erasure.” Like Thoreau’s anti-nomian saunterer (or “Holy-Lander”), Wright’s project blurs journey and destination in ways that confound conventional attitudes about successful identity formation and poetic means to that end. It would be a mistake, however, to characterize Wright as a poetic isolato instead, we might fruitfully imagine him moving through contested zones. At the same time, it takes little interest in big postmodern legacies. The writing is dense and project-oriented in a way that distinguishes it from the more accessible work of poets laureate. He is a challenging poet, and the challenge his work offers does not comfortably align with the dominant poetic trends on the present American scene. At seventy-four, Jay Wright has forged an important, if under-celebrated, career.
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