Jay Wright's Poetics: An Appreciation

Abstract

Since the mid-sixties Jay Wright has intensely pursued an absorbing study of West African cosmologies from which he has extrapolated metaphysically the intangible qualities that make an impact on the New World's multifarious cultures and also how we look upon them. In the interview editor Charles H. Rowell conducted with him for the special Jay Wright issue of Callaloo in 1983, we encounter the artistmaker, intellect and poetical theorist confident about the criteria of his discourse and the aims of his art. Whatever rationalizations one may advance to explain his relative obscurity as an American poet, his stature as a creative intellect deserves periodical appreciation to remind us of his work's magnitude. My intention in this essay is not to indulge in an exhaustive critical study of Wright's poems and their nuances-Vera Kutzinski's discussion of Soothsayers and Omens and Dimensions of History demonstrates an astute assessment of those works (Against the American Grain 45-130); and Gerald Barrax's essay about his early poems, published in the Callaloo special issue, is also well worth reading. I will, however, retrace this ground to offer another perspective on the historical and metaphysical codes that energize his poetry. If I appear to take his later collections, Elaine's Book (1986) and Boleros (1991), for granted, this is not intentional although it will prove obvious that Wright in these is moving around in Mexico and other places in the Americas with the sensibility he attained as the initiated in the remarkable book-length poem, The Double Invention of Komo (1980). Any attempt to discuss Jay Wright's poetics must sooner or later confront the matter of audience. As an American poet of color, selfreferrec as a black African-American (see Rowell), Wright endures being dismissed or challenged in ways all familiar at one time to Ralph Ellison and to Derek Walcott, when members of their communities of origin have variously accused them of being too intellectual if not socio-politically uncommitted. While Wright may have eluded some such public challenges, he could easily be describing himself in a 1987 essay where he mentions Robert Hayden, several of whose poems he finds to instruct, delight and lift us: