A working hypothesis tells a better story than the truth it purports to seek and for that reason seems suspect and is better left untold until it can be better put to use later not as a hypothesis but as an easily understood way of getting across a developed truth’s general idea.  Nevertheless, here’s my hypothesis.

My working hypothesis – my story – is that the Supreme Being gave poet Charles Wright grace to express the unknowable – to put something close to nothing in some of his poems’ white spaces – in his 1997 volume Black Zodiac, with the understanding that he would have to get along without that grace and trade on only his considerable poetic powers by 2006 at the latest when he published his poetry collection Scar Tissue.

It is a hypothesis.  I’ve read only those two volumes of Wright’s poetry.  I am willing to have it challenged.

But permit me to share some of the evidence that lead me to my hypothesis – one poem from each volume.  From Black Zodiac, the first part of “The Appalachian Book of the Dead”:

Sunday, September Sunday . . . Outdoors,
Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead,
Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface,
Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch,
A crow calls, deep in its own darkness,
Something like water ticks on
Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock . . .

Go in fear of abstractions . . .
                                                        Well, possibly.  Meanwhile,
They are the strata our bodies rise through, the sere veins
Our skins rub off on.
For instance, whatever enlightenment there might be
Housels compassion and affection, those two tributaries
That river above our lives,
Whose waters we sense the sense of
                                                                   late at night, and later still.

Uneasy, suburbanized,
I drift from the lawn chair to the back porch of the dwarf orchard
Testing the grass and border garden.
A stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise,
Bell jars the afternoon.
                                            Leaves, like ex votos, hang hard and shine
Under the endlessness of heaven.
Such skeletal altars, such vacant sanctuary.

How dark this bright Sunday!  Nothing is too brilliant or positive to escape Wright’s apophatic wonder, his “vacant sanctuary.”  No sound counteracts the suburban stillness, a stillness that starts as a notion of time or, better, of beyond time (“we sense the sense of / late at night, and later still.”) and four lines later morphs into (or builds on itself as) the absence of motion or of sound or both (“A stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise, / Bell jars the afternoon.”).

The loudest quiet and the most active motionlessness comes from “Bell jars.”  The startling imagery combined with the context of only its line suggests “Noun verb the afternoon”: a sudden bell shatters stillness, jars the afternoon.  But this loud, startling sound is also the absence of sound and agitation: in the stanza’s larger context, “Bell jars” is also the verb Wright creates out of the noun “bell jar.”  In this larger, less immediate sense, “stillness” is the noun and “bell jars” is the verb. To “bell jar” an afternoon, then, is to protect it from sound – and, indeed, from dust and time and perhaps thought or life itself – by smothering it.  Rarely are an ambiguity’s two senses so antithetical.  Perhaps “bell jars” is more agitating for being a self-smothering self-contradiction.

(Readers of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar get another layer of self-contradiction, recalling that autobiographical novel’s rollicking, life-affirming first half and its often silent, suicidal second half.)

There is something in many Black Zodiac poems that almost scares me, that makes me feel like, if I let these poems get too close, they will change me, cause me to see something not unpleasant but something I wasn’t capable of seeing before.

Nothing in Scar Tissue scares me, however.  The poems have few trap doors to the spirit, few aching white spaces sculpted by spare, black words.  But there is often the rich beauty of a poet in total command of imagery, sound, meaning, syntax, and the printed page.  Consider the first and last stanzas from “Images from the Kingdom of Things”:

Sunlight is blowing westward across the unshadowed meadow,
Night, in its shallow puddles,
                                                      still liquid and loose in the trees.
The world is a desolate garden,
No distillation of downed grasses,
                                         no stopping the clouds, coming at us one by one.

                                                      ________

The blanched bones of moonlight scatter across the meadow.
The song of the second creek, with its one note,
                                                                                        plays over and over.
How many word-warriors ever return
                                                                       from midnight’s waste and ruin?
Count out the bones, count out the grains in the yellow dust.

The first couplet is stunning both in its sound and imagery, and the poem never lets up thereafter.  I have read this poem out loud over and over to myself and to Bethany (the only member of my household besides me who enjoys reading out loud and having things read out loud to her).  I can’t get enough of it.

“Images from the Kingdom of Things” has none of the well-disconnected imagery and brutal absence I find in many Black Zodiac poems, though. “Images” is eyes and heart wide open; “Appalachian” is eyes blinked open only long enough to project negative images onto the back of the eyelids – “Nightdreams and daymares / pastures and woods that burn our eyes,” as another poem from Black Zodiac describes the unexpected colors of some modern landscape painting.

So I wonder, Mr. Wright, what pact did you negotiate among yourself, words, and silence?  Did it profit you to have gained the whole aesthetic world but to have lost access to the apophatic world of spirit?  Not that you sought the exchange, Faustus- or Balaam-like; perhaps the Black Zodiac chapter of your life opened and closed like a flower over the life of a healthy tree.  How did you cope with its loss?  Do you still miss it?

My hypothesis is based more on my own interests than on Mr. Wright’s poetry, I’m sure.  I’m fascinated by how writing inhibits and enables, distracts from and leads to, silence or, speaking more broadly, spirituality.

Hypotheses are carriers and proponents of incomplete truths, but an incomplete truth can sometimes at least front for a truth.  Let me know, Mr. Wright, how I’ve erred.

Posted April 7, 2010.