A Poet's Poet

    The Super Bowl is over and my Chefs (that's not a typo) are victorious. Wait...what? YOUR Chefs? Boss, I know it's your hometown, but you couldn't find Kansas City on a map! You probably don't even remember that Kansas City is divided by the Missouri River, making half the city in the great state of Kansas, home to Dorothy...from Kansas! Please, just get to the sad part. I can't take it anymore. Sure thing, Sancho. Unfortunately, no one now gives a damn (and rightly so) that the Chefs won the Super Bowl because the subsequent parade the other day was destroyed by the uncivilized who shot up the place, causing people to run for cover, and parents to fall on top of their children in the hopes of protecting them from harm. Don't get me wrong, I could write forever on this; ranting and raving about the disintegrating social cohesion in our society today, or the ever increasing idea that life is cheap, or what's worse, that some people actually find some kind of perverse meaning in doing something like this. That's the scariest thought of all. But I'm sure this topic, or something much like it, will be returned to in this space. Because it's never-ending. But not today.

    So, at least for a few moments I hope you will join me as I stand athwart chaos and evil, and yell, "STOP!" And because I am a human being with a free, conscious mind, I embrace Monsieur Rene Descartes when he emphatically states, "Cogito, Ergo, Sum," "I think, therefore, I am." And in doing so, I choose to channel, humbly so, our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, and embrace "the better angels of our nature." 

    Now and then, when I get into full geek mode, (like I'm doing right now), and start talking with friends, and even strangers, about literature and poetry and the like, I sometimes find myself being accused of that most pernicious of evils...racism. C'mon, really? Me? Can you believe this crap? WTF? Anyway, this accusation usually comes from people who don't know me...but every once in a while comes from a friend or former colleague, in a mildly sarcastic way, who feels that I am not sympathetic enough to the idea that literary or poetic genius is equally distributed among the races or genders. It usually starts with someone asking me the following question which goes something like this, "Peter, who are the great novelists in America?" And I reply, "Well, if I can divide it up into time-frames, the four greatest novelists of the late 20th century, into the early 21st century, are Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy." You know what's coming next, don't you? "C'mon, Peter! They're all old white guys! No women or blacks." And because I'm a juvenile delinquent, I usually then add, "Yes, you're absolutely correct. And to make it even worse, two of them are currently dead! Get it? Dead white males!" Trust me, sometimes the humor is lost on these people.

    Anyway, I then get lectured about someone like Toni Morrison, because these people always bring up Toni Morrison and start in on me about her novel Beloved. Stop with Beloved. Please? Just because Oprah says it's great, doesn't make it so. I mean, Oprah thinks Harry Potter is great. So she has zero credibility! Unfortunately, these really intelligent people never seem to have heard of Morrison's best novel, Song of Solomon. That's a real novel. A really, really good novel. Unfortunately, it doesn't put her up into the Mount Rushmore of the aforementioned novelists above. But that's okay. Not everyone can make it onto Mount Rushmore, kids! And look, I get that a lot of this is opinion-based and frighteningly SUBjective. But, and there's always a 'But'...these things can be OBjectivized by literary people, and people that are deep readers with no agenda. My point is, the four authors I've chosen were not chosen by me because they're old, white, and possibly dead. They've been chosen because their work stands the test of time; it stands multiple readings...and their work is simply undeniably great to anyone who enjoys deep reading. And intelligent people can go back and forth on these writers and others and have wonderful debates. For me that's the fun of it all.

    But let's get to the matter at hand. One night not long ago, over dinner, a friend of mine started in on me (again), about my choice of great American poets. Now, the following shouldn't matter in the first decades of the 21st century in America, but, unfortunately, it does...and I'll say it. This particular, very dear friend of mine, is black. Trust me. Black. He didn't just wake up one morning and say, "Hmmm...I think I wanna be black, so I'll go argue with Hall about Black literature and pretend that he's oppressing my people even though I'm really white!" Nope, he's black. Oh, AND, he's brilliant. I hate that! Frighteningly smarter than your humble correspondent! So there we are, having dinner and he started in on me. I couldn't even finish my main course! I said, "Really? This can't wait until dessert?" Ah, we kid because we love! Anyway, he says to me, "Peter, why don't you write about or embrace any black poets, or novelists for that matter?" Huh? Really? "Fred," I replied (not his real name), "do you know who the greatest living American poet is, as we speak, in my humble opinion?" He stared at me nervously, chewing politely on his mouthful of shrimp scampi. "Whumph?" he responded. I assumed that meant "Who?" "Jay Wright!" I replied. "Jay Wright! No way! He's a dopey ex-basketball player, like you!" See what I put up with, people? I then laid down the ace up my sleeve. "And you know what else he is, Fred? He's black!" That shut him up...

    I then proceeded to explain to my dear friend that Jay Wright, the POET, is a treasure that every American should read. He is 89-years-old, with degrees from Berkley and Rutgers (Fred's alma mater, by the way), whose work attempts to recover an African-American idea and history that he feels is close to being lost. I then chastised Fred for not being more aware of Mr. Wright, a fellow Scarlet Knight...if at all. I had him now! Wright has won numerous awards for his poetry as well as the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Fellowship. His work is compared favorably to T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman. That's not bad company, seeing that those six people may be the six greatest poets this nation has ever produced.  

    But here's the thing; Wright's poetry is as difficult as it gets. I mean, you've got people who do this kind of thing for a living...write and critique poetry...and even they don't get a lot of it! So you can imagine how stupid I feel when I'm reading his work. It's not like I'm showing up for a debate with Trump and Biden. That's easy. I win just by walking on stage! Put a couple of nouns, verbs, and adjectives together and Trump is toast. C'mon, you MAGA people, you know damn well Trump can't even spell 'adjective'! As far as Biden is concerned, I'm tired of being nice just because he's old and senile and he reminds me of Henry Fonda at the end of On Golden Pond...all I have to do is know the difference between Egypt and Brazil, and remember that the aforementioned Fonda is actually DEAD...and I drop the mic right in front of Uncle Joe and strut off-stage, like Travolta strutting down the street with a paint can in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever! Pretty good, huh? But back to Mr. Wright.

    So, why this soliloquy about a poet that many people don't know, and will probably never read, despite my protestations of his greatness? That's my question, Boss! Well, I'll tell you why, Sancho. It's because I admire greatness. Wright's recent work includes the book-length poems The Presentable Art of Reading Absence (2008), Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms, and Praise for Lois (2008) and the collection Disorientations: Groundings (2013). Looking at the first two books in the context of a career, Aaron McCollough in the prestigious Boston Review wrote that “again and again” Wright has striven to find balance between the romance of origin and the exigencies (yeah, I know...I had to look up that word, too) of life ultimately disconnected from such romance. With questions of personal and cultural authenticity, Wright has always found interesting ways to mix skepticism with approval.” McCollough described The Presentable Art as “a long dispatch from a Western mind attempting (and often struggling) to practice transcendental meditation” and Polynomials and Pollen as a sequence of verbal oddities (the parables, proverbs and paradigms of the title) “engaged with the pleasures and travails of married life.” While both books can be read and enjoyed on their own, McCollough described them as part of Wright’s larger poetic project, “as modes of reckoning the self of the early work, founded in play against the textures of social life, with increasing cognizance of life’s mortal constraints.”    

    I know all this sounds way out there, and up to a point, it is. But it also shows us that Wright, like the other poets I've mentioned above, is a man to be read and taken seriously, if we want to dig deep and find our true selves. Because isn't that why we read? That's the "Poetic Project." How do we better know ourselves? What is the best way to expand our minds? How do we deal with death? It's deep reading, my friends. And I don't mean the type of reading that we all do; run-of-the-mill romances, serial sci-fi novels, or, the heavens forfend, Harry Potter! I mean deep reading by serious novelists and poets (if that's your thing) like Wright, or Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Hart Crane. These writers and poets ask those questions about who we are and how we come face-to-face with ourselves and others. And yes, with death.

    Let's be honest...I also wanted to show Fred that deep reading, whether it's prose writing or poetry is not limited to white people. I know many black people who question that. And that saddens me. I've written before about the idea among young black kids that it's uncool to "act white." And I know a lot of black people who think there's nothing more "white" than poetry, or great prose writing. That's a lie. Deep poetry and deep prose is for all of us. And Mr. Wright is one of many tour guides to something greater.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com