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Article Excerpt
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Charles Wright has had a career-long interest in the work of Italian modernist painter Giorgio Morandi. Morandi has influenced not only Wright's representational style and subject matter but also his approach to free verse lineation. For Wright, the kinetic energy between lines and white space maps out the metaphysical desire that words and images labour to describe.
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The relation between drawing and poetry begins before a single mark has been made. "I came to my senses with a pencil in my hand and a piece of paper in front of me," puns Charles Wright (b. 1935). He is quite aware that this statement could describe him as an artist rather than a writer (Negative 158). Putting down lines on flat white space, and thus giving it depth, becomes the artist's gesture of mediation between nothing and something, even before the line performs any encoded function. Furthermore, Wright's comment identifies the artist's vision with his compositional activity. Perception arises within the creative environment. "True description is enactment; [...] what is being described is part of the process" (Quarter 77, emph. Wright's). Wright's model of artistic agency has been the modern painter, who has led him not only to painterly images and metaphors but also to a conception of the poetic line as having spatial integrity. The line is not only the verbal register of stimuli or the encoding of v oice, but it is also a direct visual mark in a spatial pattern of such marks. Yet, for Wright, the line is ultimately metaphysical in its import. Like synaesthesia, the convergence of the arts (and the reciprocity between visual and phonological elements) points away from the senses. The artistic design and the description emerging from the writer's formal and imaginative "enactment" probe and project an ineffable, spectral, order.
Most comparisons between literature and the visual arts involve considerations of the organization and quality of the images, and Wright frequently draws analogies on these terms. Wright's descriptions, which employ a visual-art vocabulary of brush stroke, vanishing point, and frame, remind us of our role in producing what we see. While matters of imagery and representation bring poetry and painting together, discussions of prosody most often seek analogy with music. But in Wright's work the influence of the visual arts carries over from image to the line. Indeed, in Wright, the line emerges at an alignment of oral and visual impact, and the visual page becomes encoded with visionary themes.
The work of Giorgio Morandi has been central in Wright's development of this dynamic, in which the visual page shapes the sense of the line and becomes associated with the poem's abstract meaning. "Basic Dialogue" begins:
The transformation of objects in space, or objects in time,
To objects outside either, but tactile, still precise...
It's always the same problem-
Nothing's more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.
The job is to make it otherwise. (Negative 147)
Wright does not acknowledge the source of the middle lines, but he no doubt knows that he has here a citation from Morandi. Karen Wilkin quotes this remark of Morandi's in her study of the artist: "I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree" (qtd. in Wilkin 122). In his search for this elusive knowledge, the artist works to strip away rather than add on meanings. He has studied those shallow, biplanar spaces ("two-ply air" [Wright, World 199]) with their perpendicular shapes and profiles, where the functional life of objects has almost vanished into abstraction. The bottles may have contained something, but what they suggest in Morandi s the form of an absence, the hollowed-out quality of t he substantial world and its disembodied outline. Morandi's lines have inspired Wright not only in his treatment of the image but also in his handling of the visual age. The text, for Wright, creates a mental space that transforms objects in space and time to "objects outside either," but it also creates an optical space where lines carve into the white surface. In Wright, the "problem" of representation slips over into the "problem" of inscription. The mental images and the story of abstraction that they tell become directly related to the immediate optical configuration of the page and its "transformation" to a map of the invisible. Postmodern poetry often breaks the mimetic ties of word and image, but the space of artifice may be refigured in metaphysical terms.
As Renee Riese Hubert suggests in "The Postmodern Line and the Postmodern Page," many contemporary visual artists--Sol LeWitt, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, for instance--have minimized the distinction between graphic and verbal arts, creating a "dynamic performance of lines" (136) that evokes literary and visual values at once. It is for this reason, presumably, that Wright chose Twombly's deliberately untitled scribble drawing for the cover of his volume Zone Journals. He may indeed be "reading" Morandi's work in just this way: as inscription rather than pictorial representation. Conversely, writers have been fascinated by the sense that writing is a kind of drawing. Paul Valery's manuscripts, for instance, often cross the boundary between one graphic medium and the other as he leaps toward the revelation of thought in image (Bourjea 136). The concept of writing as drawing suggests a greater immediacy of the text's material production. Something of this idea is present in what Martine Reid, in her introduction to the special issue of Yale French Studies entitled Boundaries: Writing and Drawing, has called "textual genetics": "Textual genetics reasserts the value of the active, fluid process that is the textual production of the writer 'at work,' the evolution of the writing towards its final form" (4). This return to compositional origins, for Reid, breaks down the boundary between writing and drawing, the legible and the visible, and thus participates in the larger modern project of undoing "the old imperatives of differentiation" (5).
My emphasis on the visual text might seem to align Wright with the materialist aesthetic that Jerome McGann describes in Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. McGann observes a turn in modernism, initiated by the "Renaissance of Printing," away from a correspondence or mimetic theory of meaning (in which poetry participates in a system of symbolic exchange) toward a phenomenology of images arising in the encounter with the material text. "The work forces us to attend to its immediate and iconic condition, as if the words were images or objects in themselves, as if they were values in themselves (rather than vehicles for delivering some further value or meaning)" (75, emph. McGann's). Yet Wright does insist on something "beyond" the line and its "face value," even as he draws attention to the page. McGann would deconstruct this "beyond" as a subordination of the materiality of the text to an existing "patriarchal order of symbolic value" (75). For him, the materiality of the line ought to be obdurat e with respect to such values. But, for Wright, the artist's production is a sounding and a mapping of the infinite, or what Justus Lawler, in his Stevensian title, calls "celestial pantomime." In this sense, the most material element of the work, through formal patterning, can direct us to its most abstract meaning. Like Wallace Stevens, Wright defers questions of whether the invisible exists outside poetic enactment. Calvin Bedient is right to note that the poet is "defiantly un-Derrida'd" ("Slide-Wheeling" 47). Nor does he engage in any ideological scrutiny of his transcendental formalism. This question aside, my interest here is in analyzing the role of free verse in Wright's understanding of his own and Morandi's artistic ambition. Whether we accept Wright's...
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