Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Helen Vendler (essay date 1988)

Helen Vendler (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: “Charles Wright,” in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 388-97.

[In the following essay, Vendler examines Wright's meditative approach to history, time, art, and the physical world in Zone Journals.]

Lashed to the syllable and noun,
                                                            the strict Armageddon of the verb,
I lolled for 17 years
Above this bay with its antimacassars of foam
On the rocks, the white, triangular tears
                    sailboats poke through the sea's spun sheet,
Houses like wads of paper dropped in the moss-clumps
of the trees,
Fog in its dress whites at ease along the horizon,
Trying to get the description right....

[The entire page is 3155 words long]

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