[In the following excerpt, Bedient discusses Wright's explorations of language and existential silence, or nothingness, in Chickamauga and previous works.]

Our print-besmeared and bomb-shrill century has made silence more acute than ever before. It has made of silence a crisis. At the century's end, two American poets, Carolyn Forché and Charles Wright, stand out for their preoccupation with it, a preoccupation so profound that their poetry, like T. S. Eliot's, approximates prayer.

There is between these two poets an almost clean division of labor. If by the end of the century silence has become polarized beyond any extremes known before, Forché's The Angel of History is the great work on the silence at the pole of the appalled and the disappeared, and Charles Wright's many books a great body of work on the silence that rebukes language, hence repudiates subjectivity and history as well—the silence of the Thus, the absolute, the Beyond. The silent World of God. …

… Charles Wright's work shares with Forché's, and in every fiber, an acid stain of apology, an I-dissolving, balked love and dismay. But Wright's poetry lines up not with Forché's refusal to abandon what has been abandoned by everything, but with T. S. Eliot's filterings of the absolute. His imagination keeps being pulled up to the vertical, whereas hers continues along a historical and horizontal axis.

In fact, Wright's disenchantment with history is even more total, more sincere, than Eliot's. Where Eliot saw people walking around in a Void, a void lined with history as if with newspapers pasted on windows in a spiritual black out, Wright simply leaves out history altogether, and along with it humanity as a cruel and suffering body. It is the singular Other of metaphysics that obsesses him, that and the “the” of a singular, unrepeatable life, the “the” as it evaporates into memory, which, in turn, evaporates and evaporates. But, as he himself acknowledges, and as his critics are required to reiterate, material light, as distinct from the heart of light, keeps intruding on these obsessions—material light and material things. Wright is one of the supreme poets of the physical world. And even if, as he says in “Night Journal,” he writes down the physical world in order to forget it, in “Words like thousands of pieces of shot film / exposed to the sun,” the world is nonetheless unforgettably caught, in multiple splendor, in his pages. Wright is a back yard mystic who alternately wants to become transparent to nature and to God. That is his imagination's cross.

In his stunning book of 1977, China Trace, the poet says, “I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear / Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.” And in the same book: “Nothingness, tilt your cup. / I am the wafer just placed on your tongue, / The transubstantiation of bone and regret / To air and a photograph.” Bone and regret: his startling summation of physical life. Wright places his disenchantment like a wafer on Nothing's ethereal tongue. But a wafer of sound cannot melt on the tongue of silence. Wright is the poet of an always-suspended salvation. He's stuck on the tongue of his own medium of suffering and grace, so much so that he images even an absolving Nothingness as a tongue. Impossible, this device called speech! Always the way and in the way.

Again, Wright is distracted from the purity of Nothingness by the little somethings he's almost ashamed to love. Nature is corrupt with self-enamored change and “that's why we love it,” the poet says in his latest book, Chickamauga, “That's why we take it, unwinnowed, / Willingly into our hearts.” On the other hand, who wants to be appended by Time like a suit coat, as he puts it, “left out overnight / On a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket”? Wright keeps trying to graft Zen wisdom onto the quaking aspen of his sensibility. “Live in the world unattached to the dust of the world,” he tells himself. But the tree flashes a leaf and he sins again. Wright did not invent the impalement he illustrates, left hand nailed to a blade of grass, right hand to a difficulty imagined emptiness. But perhaps no other poet so possesses and is possessed by the dilemma.

It has kept him more or less in one position through many volumes, at the point of crossing and of failing to cross. Because of it, he cannot exploit drama's drive and resolution, or narrative's bridge-curved and then's. In their place, however, he has invented a unique poetic structure, one that strings affectionate regrets and regretful affections together as in a rosary of alternating doubts and affirmations. As Edward Hirsch has said, Wright “has created a poetics of luminous moments, what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time,’ Joyce ‘epiphanies.’ Such moments loosen bonds of continuity and consequence.” The characteristic gesture of his structures is to point now to an inch of this and now to an inch of that. Here a floral-knot, there a cloud-knot. The dominant rhetorical figure is two, as in “on this hand” and “on the other hand,” or two as in the doubling of verbs, verb nick and verb shimmer, a doubling that pushes against the suspicion that all verbs have been stung with a paralyzing venom.

Wright's dilemma is divided between two possibilities of language: first, that the purity or nothingness of silence is inside words like a rower in a boat and second, conversely, that silence is outside words like the sea surrounding a boat, and let us imagine that the boat is burning. “We who would see beyond seeing,” Wright says in Chickamauga, “see only language, that burning field.” What if we “are our final vocabulary, and how we use it” Wright asks. What if language irremediably marks our limits. The thought is almost enough to make the poet “go down / On all fours,” in his words, “and mewl like the animals and make it mean what it means.” In the poem “Absence Inside an Absence,” Wright again comes into alignment with the young Hegel, saying,

And if we cry out,
                              if once we utter our natural sounds,
Even the angels will hide their heads
Under their blue wings,
                                        it's also said.

Here, Wright appears all but distraught from the knowledge that we are, in a Heideggerian phrase, in the place of language without a voice—the voice of Being. If he is so bold as to entertain the fiction of “our natural sounds”—and he's given to outbursts of both positive and negative fictions, fictions carrying the violence of pain—it is because of and despite his all too familiar knowledge of the utter unlikelihood of this naturalness. Language is inherently universal, abstract. By contrast, “the bush in the flame,” Wright says in “Absence Inside an Absence,” “is the bush in the flame.”

Wright, I think, would no more settle for the immediacy of the animal voice than would Eliot. In the poem “Silent Journal,” published in 1990, he put his faith where his medium is, imaging Reality itself as “the word.” Inaudible consonants and vowels, he says, fall down “In splendor around us,” the “back yard like a book of snow / That holds nothing and that nothing holds / Immaculate text / not too prescient not too true.” God, here, is a poet, nature his book. “The artificer is not his work, but is his art,” Wright notes in “December Journal.” Unlike ours, God's language is the thusness of itself. It contains no referential negativity. Prescience and truth, which rely on a referential function, have no part in it. There are moments when “the visible,” as the poet says in “December Journal,” leads him into “The hymn in the hymnal.” How? His answer: “By being exactly what it is, / It is that other, inviolate self we yearn for.” It is comparable to “the word inside the word.”

At such moments of perception, the eye is the tongue's instructor. But aren't words more lasting than sights are? Shouldn't we seek the transcendence of the literal word inside the word, avoiding love “for things that must fall away”? And so Wright slogs on through words, simultaneously despairing of them and believing in them.

Wright is erratic, then, in his conceptualization of the relation of words to the purity of our Nothing. Continually and anxiously erratic. Language is now an incalculable sum, now only so many coins in the right hand pocket of a jacket left out in the dark and the cold. It is now “fricatives and labials … falling like sequins inside the shadows,” and now no more than “Flash and a half-glint as the headlights pass.” Round and round Wright goes, as he meditates on language, often despairing of words in words too beautiful to strike out.

What would paradise be? “Everyone's name in chalk letters once and for all,” he answers in his splendid book The Southern Cross. What is the relation of the dead to language? “They stand close to the meanings and take them in,” he says. On the other hand, in the same poem, “Homage to Paul Cézanne,” he asks rhetorically, “what do the dead care for the fringe of words, / Safe in their suits of milk?” The dead return to speechless infancy. Milky infancy, Agamben says in his book Infancy and History, is anterior to the consciousness that can never grasp itself as an entirety but, possessing language as it does, foolishly thinks that it has the means to try. Consciousness is, in Agamben's words, a “calvary”; infancy is Eden.

Wright's endless and repetitive vacillations are a symptom of the split in his heart, that torn valentine leaning on this side toward the 10,000 things of the world and on the other toward the inviolate self. If this poet were a better Buddhist, he would stop the tongue-thief, the eye-thief, all the thieves, but he would also stop being a poet of nature and, with the best will in the world, he cannot altogether distinguish nature from God, especially, of course, nature in its most apparently inviolate guises and moments, its evening lessons of graceful fading and anonymity. But it's not in entire conviction that he permits the world to make free with his senses and affections; is he perhaps being trifled with? In his “Lines After Rereading T. S. Eliot,” he speaks of pain as “what calls us, / A life between the rocks, / the desert's sweet syllable. / We cannot forgive ourselves.” “Whatever happened,” he asks in the same poem, “to the dark sublime … / Cross-gap between flesh and abstraction.” The answer is that it was taken up by Charles Wright, but with a significant difference—namely that Wright finds sweetness in both the humped ocean's and the level desert's sweet syllable. He's more nearly forgiving of the flesh than Eliot was, for all his severity toward its “bone and regret.”

In the poetry of both Charles Wright and Carolyn Forché, words tell more than they can be told; much as they may want to, they do not attain to the status of prayer beads. The structures they make and find themselves in refuse to subdue them to structure itself, to structure, in Wright's perhaps too eager words, as “an element of belief” and “syntax / And grammar” as “a catechist.” The work of both poets reflects our century's overexposure to systems—reflects it by keeping a charred distance from all regimentation. In the poetry of both, even if Wright approaches language with a virtuosic determination to make it his own, the word, the line, and small series of lines are closer to a trembling nakedness, a defenselessness, than is apparent in other poetry in English. The work of both might seem to echo what Wright quotes the Buddhists as saying: “Open your mouth, you are lost. … Close your mouth, you are lost.” This is not at all a consoling thing to say, but poetry has never contracted to be consoling. And let us not underestimate the knowledge of life and language and the honesty and courage required to say it.