The most obvious and salient fact about the natural separation of poetry from criticism is that in the greatest ages of poetry there has been little or no criticism. Criticism comes, if at all, after the art.

—Karl Shapiro

Things have changed since Karl Shapiro's time—and this is Karl Shapiro's time. But during his long career of writing both poetry and criticism, the gap between the two has simultaneously widened and narrowed. Theorists have discovered what writers always knew (“The meaning of poetry, as far as language is concerned, is the meaning of hey-nonny-nonny. To the poet, hey-nonny-nonny means what the other words in the poem failed to say.”—Karl Shapiro, In Defense of Ignorance, 1960), but they've added a complex new vocabulary to the old insights. In fact, sometimes the “old” vocabulary isn't what it seemed. A previously unpublished essay by Randall Jarrell (which appeared in the Winter 1996 issue of The Georgia Review) reveals that prominent “modernist” critic to have had quite a few insights we have always termed “postmodernist.” The point is that critical ideas, including a poet's ideas about his own work, evolve across time with overlapping strands rather than clear or sudden breaks.

We think of theory as not being the same as criticism. But for the poet, especially today, theory, criticism, and practice are often one. Poets who last have inevitably evolved not only their own aesthetic principles, but an ongoing critique of these principles. In effect, their work is a kind of “practical theory” (in place of I. A. Richards' “practical criticism”). Some poets elaborate on their conceptual underpinnings within their poems; some have a kind of invisible structure that governs their choices. In either case, the reader is often made conscious of the process of writing as much as of the subject matter. Together, these add up to what we might, for want of a better term, call content.

I am convinced one of the things that makes a poet have “sticking power” is the sense the reader has that the poet knows what he or she is about. The poems themselves may be full of questions, but the poet is sure of what to ask. (This is different from the “sticking power” of an individual poem, which may or may not be written by a poet who persists.)

And how do we assess persistence in an age when publishing houses are “downsizing” their poetry lists in favor of blockbuster political or TV personalities and the latest legal wrangle? Excellent poets often have a hard time finding a publisher for second, third, even fourth books. Others have found a publisher with loyalty but often also with an insistence that they produce more to keep them in the spotlight. And meanwhile, it takes a spot on NPR or an invitation by Bill Moyers to pull a book of poetry out of the ho-hum category of negligible sales.

The bottom line is a bitter lesson. The place of poetry in our society has been debated for decades with no apparent answers and no lessening of the urgency of the question. But it's useful to remind ourselves that that question remains urgent to all too few of us. And what about the Internet, with its allure? Will young readers want—and need—the physical presence of the poem on the page? Will they see enough by any one writer to understand the poetry as well as the poem? Or will all our thoughts be scattershot, forays into the unknown?

A writer's poetry is always more than the sum of his or her poems. One can talk about this only when there is a large enough body of work to reveal an ongoing aesthetic. In a poet who persists, a critical overview simultaneously arises from the poems and governs their inceptions. It links those that will be written to those that have been, however different these may sometimes appear. In this essay, I will look at six poets whose work has persisted over time [Charles Wright, Robert Haas, Maxine Kumin, Paul Zimmer, Lisel Mueller, and Leslie Norris]. A key part of their persistence has been their work's ability to judge and, if necessary, correct itself. In other words, this is writing that teaches us how it is to be read.

Three years ago, in the afternoons,
                                        I used to sit back here and try
To answer the simple arithmetic of my life,
But never could figure it—
This object and that object
Never contained the landscape
                                        nor all of its implications,
This tree and that shrub
Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient
I took from or carried to,
                                        nor do they do so now,
Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate
Look to see what adds up.

I'm instantly in the presence of, inside the voice of, Charles Wright. How do I know this? Even without the black-and-white cover of Chickamauga, even without the potent associations of the title, I know this is a “Southern” voice, a voice that will take the time it needs to think the things it wants to think. Speculative, contemplative, the poems of Charles Wright move across the page with the unhurried pace of a porch swing.

Wright is a poet for whom subject matter is subsumed by process. He can, it appears, begin anywhere, with anything, and a poem will emerge if he gives himself enough time and space to ponder the imponderables and to follow his own train of thought through its curious patterns, trusting it to find its way. At the same time, the poems probe and posit and penetrate even as they seem willing to follow a course of natural logic. (I can't help but think of “Snow,” one of my early favorites, which begins with the structure of logic—“If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises”—and moves through the “then” clause with a sweep of religious and scientific history to end, six lines later, on a surprising note: “white ants, white ants, and the little ribs.”) Logic, in a poem, is not always synonymous with “rational.” Wright takes us on associative journeys which open the rational world to new and different interpretations.

Chickamauga was awarded the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, only the latest of Wright's many recognitions. Divided into six unequal sections, each of which embodies the fluidity of time, the book is a kind of stock-taking, a middle-aged reflection. The first section, “Aftermath,” is a series of responses to the ideas of other writers—T. S. Eliot, Lao Tzu, Celan, Li Po (and even Yeats, if a poem called “Easter 1989” could be said to be referential). Yet each response is filtered through the here and now of landscape, a view through orchard to the Blue Ridge mountains beyond, which colors the response by narrowing it to the specifics of season and circumstance. The second section is a deliberate foray into the “known land” of memory, the exactitude of 1959 and then 1963 in Italy, and the inexactitude of a number of fleeting memories finding a place together in my favorite of the poems, “Sprung Narratives.” Memory—including the impossibility of “fixing” memory, of finding its proper place in the order of things—becomes a motif. But it is the concept that engages the mind, not the event. And memory is not the moment held, but a movement of its own:

This text is a shadow text.
Under its images, under its darkened prerogatives,
Lie the lines of youth,
                                        golden, and lipped in a white light.
They sleep as their shadows move
As though in a dream,
                                        disconnected, unwished-upon.
And slightly distorted. And slightly out of control.

The other four sections twist these strands to form a thread comprised of memory, response, careful observation, and surprising images—until, in a religious sense, it connects “everything with everything else” and, in a more literary vein, “constructs us and deconstructs us.”

“An Ordinary Afternoon in Charlottesville” is exemplary. The somewhat generic title, paying homage to Wallace Stevens, could serve for many of the poems in the book. The ordinary, the title implies, is sufficient; everything is important. The scene is a close-up of an orchard, with birds “combustible / In the thin leaves incendiary—,” and the tone is meditative, a bit melancholy:

Or so they say. We like to think so
Ourselves, feeling the cold
                                        glacier into the blood stream
A bit more each year,
Tasting the iron disk on our tongues,
Watching the birds oblivious,
                              hearing their wise chant, hold still, hold still …

The poet mediates between the “now and not-now” of the earlier poems; the afternoon is tinged with the familiarity of Dante's Purgatorio and the premonition of a final holding still. Meanwhile, the afternoon “fidgets about its business” as the sunlit feathers of the birds flare in the branches, everything a part of everything else, reminiscent of the Eastern poets Wright has been reading throughout the book.

If Wright's concerns are religious and philosophical—and they are—they are also painterly. He suggests that his poems, like Elizabeth Bishop's are “descriptive.” Light is doubly important, serving as insight, intelligence, intuition, and also as illumination. In “Still Life with Stick and Word,” the poet examines a broken stick along with whatever word is the word of the moment:

Inside now. The word is white.
It covers my tongue like paint—
                                        I say it and light forms,
Bottles arise, emptiness opens its corridors
Into the entrances and endless things that form bears.
White, great eviscerator.

These lines are characteristic. The reader is invited to participate, to say the word and to watch the thought unfold. To see what form can, and will, bear.

In Wright's case, form allows a freedom of thought. His distinctive lines help him to move from the particular to the abstract—and back again. Even as they break, they continue. Sometimes thoughts falter, then resume; more often they veer away from themselves, catching up the lint of other thoughts, moving outward in associative circles until they embrace idea. Wright's abstraction is built on so many specificities that the reader settles comfortably into its center. But Wright is never satisfied: by noting the repetition of the seasons from the fixed centers of his successive backyards, he can take his own measure from a number of perspectives. (Titles like “Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night” and “Looking Across Laguna Canyon at Dusk, West-by-Northwest” show his obsession with getting it right, even in memory.) His answers are answers only for the temporal duration of the poem. What pertains today may not pertain tomorrow. What Wright sees on a winter afternoon may be contradicted in a summer morning's song. “Structures are wrong,” he declares emphatically on page 6; relenting, he admits on page 63, “Everything flows toward structure, / last ache in the ache for God.” The poems may say one thing at any given time, but the poetry is all about not-knowing, about impermanence and flux.

This brings us to “theory” as Wright practices it. His method becomes his message. He does not show us how to (if we were to do it, it would not be like this) but that it can be done. Wright's images, like Sylvia Plath's, are arresting in their uncanny accuracy; the reader discovers a way of experiencing the world that, even in its strangeness, seems incongruously right. Afterwards, we see things differently. While Plath's images are intense, even desperate, each linked to an emotion, Wright's are intent on an internal perception and restrained passion: “The sea with its one eye stared.”

Since Wright's poems are about movement, they let the reader in on the movement even as they self-consciously annotate their own progress, even subvert it to see if the opposite will reveal yet another possibility. Wright's images occupy a juncture; they are the vehicle, moving thought from concrete to abstract and back again. Accompanied by patterns of sound, these images feel as fluid as music, as in “Cicada”:

Noon in the early September rain.
A cicada whines,
                              his voice
Starting to drown through the rainy world,
No ripple of wind,
                              no sound but his song of black wings,
No song but the song of his black wings.
Such emptiness at the heart,
                                        such emptiness at the heart of being,
Fills us in ways we can't lay claim to,
Ways immense and without names,
                                                  husk burning like amber
On tree bark, cicada wind-bodied,
Leaves beginning to rustle now
                                        in the dark tree of the self.

The whole point of all this thinking seems to be to “answer to / my life.” Not to answer, or find an answer for, but to speak to its conditions, both physical and spiritual. The poems approach the age-old question of the nature of the universe and the place of the individual life within it, each time opening wide vistas, and often coming back to the inevitable: “There's only this single body, this tiny garment / Gathering the past against itself, / making it otherwise” and, in another poem, “One life is all we're entitled to, but it's enough,” and in yet another, “When we die, we die. The wind blows away our footprints.”

Like Wright's ten other books of poetry, Chickamauga is not so much a collection of discrete poems as a long meditation. And Charles Wright's body of work really could more accurately be termed a body of thought. From poem to poem, book to book, his work has taken on the thickness of thought. That is, the poems accrete; they weave in and out of one another. Wright effaces himself before the immensity of his questions, his mind asserting its presence through the clarity of his images. The result is not a “shape,” nor is it formless—it's an approximation of human consciousness. Wright teaches us how to listen to him: attentively, with an inward ear and eye. I cherish this work as a whole more than for its specific poems. I count on its being there.