[In the following essay, Davis argues that Wright transcends the geographical places he writes about in his poetry by transforming them into metaphorical images.]

In her essay, “Places in Fiction,” Eudora Welty says that “[p]lace is one of the lesser angels that watch over the … hand” of all writing and that “as soon as we step down from the general view to the close and particular, as writers must and readers may,” to try to determine “what good writing may be, place can be seen … to have a great deal to do with that goodness, if not to be responsible for it” (116). Welty is careful to distinguish between a “sense of place” in writing and “regional” writing. She calls the term “regional” a “careless term, as well as a condescending one” since it fails to “differentiate between the localized raw material of life and its outcome as art” (132).

In terms of poetry specifically, Welty says that “[m]an is articulate and intelligible only when he begins to communicate inside the strict terms of poetry”; that “place induces poetry” and “can focus the gigantic, voracious eye of genius and bring its gaze to point” (123); that place “never really stops informing us, for it is forever astir, alive, changing, reflecting, like the mind of man itself” (128). Finally, Welty says, “It seems plain that the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood” (132).

James Wright, obsessed more than most poets with a sense of place, was born in 1927 in Martins Ferry, Ohio, a small industrial/mining town on the Ohio River not far from Wheeling, West Virginia—then and now one of the poorest areas of the United States. Wright grew up during the Great Depression. His father, a die-setter at one of the local factories, was often out of work, and the family constantly struggled to survive, moving frequently from place to place within the small town of Martins Ferry, the place which would become Wright's microcosm in literature, as it was in life.

Martins Ferry, Ohio, inseparably connected with the river, whose banks it literally hangs from, was the place where Wright was from and which he never really left—although he literally left it early on and never really returned. It was home for him in the way that writers have to have a home, beyond geography, and even though he called it “That black ditch / Of river” in his poem “The Life,” he also called it in the same poem “my only country” (Above the River: The Complete Poems, 163). That it certainly was.

Asked in an interview about Martins Ferry and his sense of place, Wright responded by describing Ohio as a kind of microcosm of the whole country. He said that “Ohio is eastern and western while it is also northern and southern” (Smith, 7); and he went on to say that he had a “peculiar kind of devotion to Martins Ferry. … It is my place, after all” (5). And then he talked about the “poetry of place,” as a poetry of presence, and, finally, he expanded his thinking about this specific, particular place where he was born to a place literally as large as the nation and, indeed, of the imagination itself. In short, for Wright, this “only country” of Ohio, which so many of his most representative poems explore, is both a specific, particular place and his universal region of imaginative mind.

Wright's “Ohio” poems include, then, the poems which make literal, specific, detailed references to the people and places of Ohio—most often to Martins Ferry. In these poems Wright attempts to define Ohio in terms of his own literal, physical, presence there or in terms of his memories. These “Ohio” poems include Wright's poems of praise for Ohio and its people (and include as well the negative poems of “dead Ohio”) both of which are scattered throughout Wright's canon although they come to climax at almost the exact center of his canon and career, in Two Citizens, Wright's most ambivalent book, the book, as he called it, “of my patriotism, my love and discovery of my native place” (dust jacket comment).

Then, secondly, there are those poems (again scattered about throughout the canon) in which Wright successfully effects a physical transformation of place in such a way that the specific and particular becomes almost universal and in which place blurs into metaphor and theme goes beyond any literal Ohio to become an almost mystical, largely metaphysical, place—an “Ohio of the mind.” In these poems, as Bonnie Costello remarks, “place sifts through his imagination like dusk” (232) as Wright's “inner voice and vision go out to meet the landscape, and the landscape moves in to shape the private world” (226). This movement back and forth “between psychic and natural landscapes” allows Wright to “render the subjective experience of place in a primary way” (230). In short, in these poems Wright works to effect a spiritual transformation of place. Between the poles of these two “Ohios” then, James Wright staked out his claim to place. It was something he was clearly conscious of; as he said in an interview the year before he died, his “sense of vista” had to do with the “deep world in the Ohio Valley … and the huge world of time and space beyond the place” (Saunders, 6).

And so Wright's work is unique. Unlike other poets of place (many of them among his early models—poets like Virgil, Wordsworth, Hardy, Lawrence, Frost and Robinson), Wright uses place not to define itself, finally, not to delimit any particular place, thematically or structurally, within the bounds of mechanical meter and memorable meaning, but ultimately to go beyond particular place by so grounding himself in it that he can go through it, out the other side as it were, and into his own “Ohio of the mind.” It is this that makes Wright's poems not merely “regional,” but universal.

In this sense, then, Wright's most memorable poems are attempts, simultaneously, to explore the limitations of the specific and the local as well as the full reach of the imagination, as the inner and out worlds of the works meet and merge into a single entity—even though (and almost inevitably) they are frequently “weighted” toward one side or the other of the dichotomy. This desire for synthesis in part accounts for Wright's frequently vivid, often startling “deep image” lines: butterflies “searching for diamonds / In coal seams” (“Two Hangovers,” Above the River, 132), or alighting “on the branch / Of your green voice”; “Small antelopes” that “Fall asleep in the ashes / Of the moon” (“Spring Images,” Above the River, 137); a “grandmother's face” which “is a small maple leaf / Pressed in a secret box”; locusts “climbing down into the dark green crevices / Of my childhood” (“Twilights,” Above the River, 131); as well as the wonderment of “How many scrawny children / Lie dead and half-hidden among frozen ruts / In my body, along my dark roads” (“The Frontier,” Above the River, 161); and the possibility (or the inevitability) that “When I stand upright in the wind, / My bones turn to dark emeralds” (“The Jewel,” Above the River, 122). Such moments come to climax in what is probably Wright's best-known poem, “A Blessing,” which ends:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

(Above the River, 143)

Wright's sense of place then involves his attempt to escape from a particular, specific place and to a place of almost spaceless space and timeless time. And yet, ironically enough, Wright found himself, again and again, brought back, as literal, literary, and mental exile, to his particular personal past and to his personal particular place of Ohio. Indeed, this sense of deracination, of exile, of longing, and of inevitable return became his constant theme—and his constant threat. As Wright himself said in an interview (Smith, 6):

My feeling about the Ohio Valley is … complicated. I sometimes feel a certain nostalgia about the place. At the same time I realize that … our problem when we were boys in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in the industrial area enclosed by the foothills of the Appalachians on both sides, near that big river, was to get out.

The two senses of place in the work of James Wright, then, although they can be somewhat arbitrarily separated out in the poems, must finally be put back together—as they always are in Wright's most memorable poems. This sense of a sense of place, beyond time and place, fully personal and private, specific and specifically limited, but simultaneously unlimited and universal, is the sense of place Wright sought for in his finest poems, and which, in them, he finally found.

By looking briefly at representative poems, we can, finally, put James Wright in his place (as it were) in terms of contemporary American poetry.

In the first poem of Two Citizens Wright says, “I want to gather you back to my Ohio” (Above the River, 223). Later in the same book Wright, as he often does in the early work, speaks of Ohio, that “brutal and savage place” “in the middle of America” which “I still love” (Above the River, 238), as a grave. Still, acknowledging that “The one tongue I can write in / Is my Ohioan” (Above the River, 261), and knowing that he must excavate his past in order to extricate and expiate himself from it, Wright tells one of his many stories of a “grave in blossom” (Above the River, 163).

In “The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio” (Above the River, 236-37) Wright describes how his father and the other “fierce husbands” of Martins Ferry built a swimming pool for the city when they realized that the “river / That is supposed to be some holiness” had started to die. This “hole in the ground, / No grave for once,” became for Wright a place both of baptism and mystical experience. He describes how, when he “rose from that water,” a “little girl” appeared as if from nowhere and “whispered” over his shoulder, “Take care now, / Be patient, and live.”

The little girl who appears here is, clearly, the same anonymous little girl who appeared at the end of The Green Wall, Wright's first book, and spoke through the voices of birds, saying: “Be Careful of holes,” “Cling to the edge, cling to the edge” (Above the River, 45). At the end of “The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio” Wright acknowledges this little girl's continued presence in his past and the guidance she has given him: “I have loved you all this time.”

With Wright thus clinging to the edge, the first group of poems, the poems of specific, placed reference, comes to a powerful climax with “At the Executed Murderer's Grave,” the penultimate poem in Saint Judas, his second book.

“At the Executed Murderer's Grave” (Above the River, 82-84) is an important transitional poem, the single poem that both brings to climax Wright's early obsession with the formal work in his first two books and with Ohio as a literal progenitive place, at the same time that it prepares for the “deep image” poems that are soon to come.

“At the Executed Murderer's Grave” begins:

My name is James A. Wright, and I was born
Twenty-five miles from this infected grave,
In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave
To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.

Then, immediately, Wright mixes George Doty the murderer, Ohio, and himself together:

                                                                                                    I return
Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried,
To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,
Had I not run away before my time.
Ohio caught George Doty …

Wright notes, “I walked here once. I made my loud display.” Now “sick of lies,” and turning “to face the past,” he finds that just as Doty has been executed for crimes committed in Ohio, so he also “burns” in memory as his “nights electrocute my fugitive, / My mind” with memories of his life in Ohio which, in one sense, he knows he has escaped from, but, in another sense, knows he never can. As Wright says in the middle of the poem,

I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying.
I pity myself, because a man is dead.
If Belmont County killed him, what of me?

Then, by the end of the poem (the metaphor changed from a hole to a door), he writes:

Earth is a door I cannot even face.
Order be damned, I do not want to die,
Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe. …
(Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!)
I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass,
Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness.
Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face
Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief:
Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.

Here, in these final lines of this poem, George Doty, Ohio, and “James A. Wright” are inseparably linked, united, and “buried” together. What is this meant to mean? Apparently two things simultaneously. First, beyond the literal place-oriented associations with Ohio, Wright is talking about his poetic self. This becomes explicitly clear in the line, “I croon my tears at fifty cents per line.” There is an elaborate history, both personal and poetic, to Wright's interest in George Doty. In The Green Wall he included “A Poem about George Doty in the Death House” (Above the River, 25-26) and, even there, early on, Wright implies an earlier interest in this “man I have wondered of.” Then, in the late 1950s Wright published two early versions of “At the Executed Murderer's Grave,” both quite different from the one in Saint Judas. This poem, then, perhaps more than any other, illustrates Wright's empathetic response to the “outcasts” of the world. As Robert Hass has remarked, “What has always been a remarkable, almost singular, fact about [Wright's] poetry is the way in which the suffering of other people, particularly the lost and the derelict, is actually a part of his own emotional life. It is what he writes from, not what he writes about” (31-32).

The “James A. Wright” who has written these early formal poems is dead; the James Wright of the new “Ohio” is about to be born. In short, Wright, having made peace with Doty, and having buried him in Ohio, has also “buried” his own literal Ohioan past, and replaced it with the “Ohio of the mind” that is to come.

This turn in Wright's theme and in his poetic design results in the powerful books of his middle and late career—The Branch Will Not Break, Shall We Gather at the River, To a Blossoming Pear Tree, and the posthumous This Journey—books in which place blurs into metaphor and theme goes beyond the literal Ohio to become a mystical metaphysical place in the imagination, an “Ohio of the mind.”

These later poems, however, are as important to the working out of Wright's “Ohio” theme as the earlier explicit ones set in Ohio were—even though they are not specifically set in Ohio—and, indeed, often, seem to insist on a kind of studied avoidance of anything “Ohioan,” even of anything at all particular to any specific place. In these poems, then, Wright moves out into that “huge world of time and space” beyond Ohio, and enters the arena of his finest and most representative work.

This is the world of Wright's “deep image” poems. These poems are poems of a place beyond self that can only be reached by a kind of death of self—by one “skillful with suicide” (“A Christmas Greeting,” Above the River, 147), who “Stumbles upon the … locks of a grave, whispering / Oh let me in” (“Miners,” Above the River, 126). Clearly, this is a place, like the “cave / In the air behind my body / That nobody is going to touch,” that Wright speaks of in “The Jewel” (Above the River, 122).

In a poem positioned in the center of Wright's central book, and, appropriately enough, entitled “Beginning” (Above the River, 135), he documents the movement of the moment of transition from the one world to the other in terms of a series of synesthetic surreal-like images:

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

“Beginning” begins in an interior “place” and thus is literally placeless. This immediately sets it off from Wright's earlier “exterior” poems of place and suggests that he has made his move from the literal to the metaphysical in this new “beginning.” An important clue to this transition in Wright's work is the connotative changes attributed to the words “dark” and “darkness” here and in his later poems. Whereas in the poems of Wright's literal Ohio the conventional associations of light and dark are much more conspicuously at work, in the “deep image” poems of these “Ohio of the mind” poems the traditional associations are reversed and “dark” becomes positive, good, something to be sought for, something to “lean toward” for the sake of making a new beginning. As Breslin has said, this kind of “deep image” poetry is “hermetic, in that it asks, not merely occasionally but continually, that we attribute an inherent significance to a recurring symbolic vocabulary,” and that learning to read such poetry “is largely a matter of initiation into the vocabulary.” Therefore, in Wright and the other “deep image” poets (Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, and W. S. Merwin, for instance) “there is a reversal of the traditional moral symbolism of light and darkness” whereby “darkness” comes to be seen as “a sign of wise humility, of turning inward from the illusion of a corrupt culture toward the mysteries of being” (120, 162).

In an essay published at about this same time that he himself was making this major turn in his own work Wright discussed how a poet engages in a search in an attempt to discover “how to be true to his own self.” In “The Quest for the Child Within” Wright said:

The journey itself is a dark one. … But there really seems to be a true path back to the lost paradise, back home to the true child in one's self, back to the source of healing strength—back to the Kingdom of God which, we have been told, is within us. If there really is a true path homeward, then it appears that certain heroic men found it dark, sometimes yawning with dreadful pits of fire, sometimes winding and contorted apparitions of our own vanity. … [These “heroic men”] see the world. … And they discover themselves and what they contain. … [T]hey are alive at last.

(65-66)

Therefore, as early as Shall We Gather at the River, Wright had begun his final turn toward his true imaginative home, his “Ohio of the mind.” In a poem called “Listening to the Mourners” (Above the River, 161), “speaking with the voice / Of a scarecrow that stands up / And suddenly turns into a bird,” he describes rising from the field of his “native land,” which is here called “This place of skull.” Such a metaphysical golgotha can only be arrived at by thought. More than an exterior physical place, it is an interior mental one; a place of imagination, an “Ohio of the mind.” In “Willy Lyons” (Above the River, 166-67) Wright contrasts this “other world” of imaginative mind with his literal uncle, “a craftsman of hammers and wood,” who is now “dead in Ohio.” And even though his mother cries because “she is angry,” she knows that death “is nothing to mourn for” because “It is the other world” (166), a world, as Breslin (175) says, that is “secretly abiding within or behind” the literal world called “Ohio.”

Finally, if not fully writing under the death threat of the cancer that killed him, Wright's career came to completion with the book, published posthumously, but, appropriately enough, entitled This Journey—the book of Wright's literal life and of his poetic career. In This Journey he remembers both life and career and, now, knowing he is at the end of them, he imaginatively re-journeys the journey he has made as man and poet.

Acknowledging that he is literally “a long way from home” in “The Sumac in Ohio” (Above the River, 324-25), Wright remembers his early life in Martins Ferry all over again. “A Flower Passage” (Above the River, 354-55), Wright's elegy for Joe Shank, the diver who retrieved the bodies of the drowned from the Ohio river when Wright was a boy, celebrates this “Shepherd of the dead,” now himself dead, but dreamed back to life by the “mourning” Wright, “not home in my place” but far away, gathering mental “flowers” from both present and past and passing them back and forth through each other in his mind.

But the fullest final assessment of Wright's journey in This Journey is the poem “The Journey” (Above the River, 337-38), the title poem in the middle of the book. “The Journey” is set in Tuscany, that part of Italy that Wright had so much come to love, his home away from home, as it were. Here, with everything “graying gold / With dust,” Wright leans “down to rinse the dust from my face.” And, there, in this arid place almost removed from time and space, he finds a dusty spiderweb, a kind of microcosmic world all its own, and he finds a spider, symbol of self, stepping into this “center of air … While ruins crumbled on every side of her.” And he sees that she is “Free of the dust, as though a moment before / She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.”

This vision of spider and spider web is of something special, something almost sacred, and in trying to define what it means for his life, man and poet, Wright comes as close as he ever came to defining the separate sides of his dichotomous quest toward his final “place”—both in his own life and in contemporary literature.

Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling. The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don't worry.

Here at the end of life and career James Wright has managed to bring together “the heart of the light” of his life and work and to define the “secret” of “this journey” as he steps “lightly, lightly / All the way through [his] ruins”—beyond the dead in Ohio, “who surely / Will bury their own, don't worry”—and, “free of the dust,” off into “the journey” of the placeless place of poetry.

Bibliography

Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Costello, Bonnie. “James Wright: Returning to the Heartland.” Dave Smith, ed. The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982, 221-33.

Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. New York: The Ecco Press, 1984.

Saunders, William S. James Wright: An Introduction. Columbus: The State Library of Ohio, 1979.

Smith, Dave. “James Wright: The Pure Clear Word, an Interview.” Dave Smith, ed. The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982, 3-42.

Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction.” The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Vintage, 1979, 116-33.

Wright, James. Above the River: The Complete Poems. New York: The Noonday Press, 1992.

———. Dust jacket comment to Two Citizens. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

———. “Something to Be Said for the Light: A Conversation with William Heyen and Jerome Mazzaro.” Anne Wright, ed. Collected Prose: James Wright. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983, 151-71.

———. “The Quest for the Child Within.” Frank Graziano and Peter Stitt, eds. James Wright: A Profile. Durango, Colorado: Logbridge-Rhodes, 1988, 57-69.