A Change of Maps
by Carolyne Wright
Lost Horse Press, 2006
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Carolyne Wright starts her new collection of (mostly) first-person, autobiographical poems
with a humdinger about studying with Elizabeth Bishop when the latter found herself forced to seek employment
teaching at the University of Washington, her prelude to a series of gradual declensions ending in her death
("the dropped telephone at Lewis Wharf"). Asthmatic, alcoholic ("she staggered past me, unseeing,
one April afternoon"), she appears in implicit contrast to the ghost of the equally alcoholic, huffing
Theodore Roethke, in the environment of whose "mythic maniacal/ dolor" she toils, "a scarf of
pure froth floating at the throat of her/ Bonwit Teller suit." Bishop's hallmark good sense is not to be
found here: "One Art" is still a ways in the future.
Wright, by composing a poem that draws attention to the indirect, often slippery nature of
literary pedagogy, unobtrusively assumes a place in the line of succession, after the demise of these great
talentsand great egos (something her work betrays little sign of). Not for Wright the Roethkean dolor or
Bishopian Weltanschang: "Still/ Zen's empty bowl runneth over. Awful? Yes! But cheerful!" Yet the
lack of ego's torque probably goes some distance in explaining the occasionally solicitous posture of these
poems, as they move through event and memory, balancing homage with gentle self-assertion. Don't get me wrong:
this poet has radar for the boundaries of immodesty and never strives (pace Bloom) agonistically. That wouldn't
do. When the poems get into the zoneand a great many dothey require no solicitude.
"Studies with Miss Bishop" provides a foundational shot, as it both applies Bishop's
lessons and brings up the subjects that will be Wright's own: the past, the present coordinates, how divergence
is the shape of time, and the importance of origins. It also brings into focus a still-rippling question: how
it is possible for an American poet, lodged between classical inclinations but reared on rock and roll, the Sixties,
and Bad Boys, to make a gradus ad parnassum so that doing so does not result in just another homemade
American destiny, privatized into anonymity. A standard reading suggests that the poet hunkers down for some
long winter, her work packed with irony's insulation from the very demotic energies that initially propelled it
and that constitute one of her topic areas. This would put her in a continuum where it is fair to say many poets
have submitted their life's works in the hopes that they will have flown under the radar while everything else
that used to be art falls under culture's commodifying, totalitarian blade. The question is whether the poet
participates in and attempts to modify (in her favor) the irony that taste and vision automatically meet in their
journey across the U. S. of A.
Bishop's ambition found its objective correlative in her master metaphorcartography, that
is, knowledge derived from coordinates. The cartographic imagination can also move readily to the moral, as well
as the aesthetic sphere. Here, one may note Stevens' ghostly demarcations and Keats' sensations beside Bishop's
gridlines, although Sevens' sensibility would find little difference between the aesthetic and the moral. By
contrast, Lowell devalued the poetry of fact in deference to that based on "imagination," and in doing
so was rephrasing a distinction made familiar by Keats, who wished, contra Lowell, for a life of "sensations
rather than thoughts" and why not? Such a life would never have the need to raise, as Wright has it,
"basilisk-lidded grey eyes to the dazed/ clutch of undergraduates clustered in the same Parrington Hall/
classroom where Roethke had blazed . . ." Wright sides with Keats over Lowell: life rather than (merely!)
something imagined. And yet her imagination, like Bishop's, redresses facts and their rebarbative edges,
shape-shifting through art's chastening formsand therefore providing a kind of compensation with the way
life evolves, while memory devolves into discontinuities of meaning. As for Bishop, defensiveness and denial
after the clink and heigh-ho of old money become another way of life, a come-down grudgingly accepted,
First of all, I don't like teaching, but the trust
fund ran outexhaustedso we'll make the best
go of it we can.
Just so, we might say. The book's title signals both adoption of purpose and a departure from
the teacher. This theme is again taken up in the title poem, one that references one of Bishop's key poems,
"The Map." "A Change of Maps" manages to exchange Bishop's Baedecker for Wright's own, the
learned from the invented:
Early fall looks both ways
into the yearhow we will outsmart
Outsmarting that distance is in effect to outsmart both our notions of fate and our reliance on
debased versions of ourselves.
Where now? We want to know of landscape
houses and poplars and children the maps
and master planners have no idea of.
Our arrival will coincide with the true
colors of our going.
Notwithstanding the fact that Wright is adept at ambiguity, clinging to it is not her style.
On the one hand, poets want, in some sense, for their inventions to escape classification, although the facts from
which they take their departure work to limit their free-play. On the otherbetterhand, they want the
recognition of having striven on the gridanother reason maps are useful.
Speaking of maps, any poet knows you can talk about time in terms of space, and you can talk
about space in terms of other space. But you can't talk easily about space in terms of time. Does this mean, one
wonders, that space is superior to time in terms of its usefulness to homo sapiens? If so, then the cultural
brain-pan of the Emersonian American is larger than that of the Old World aesthete. Poetry's win-win is that it
can talk the talk of both and has access to both in terms of technique. American poetic developments often come
about in terms of space (think of "field composition," Black Mountain aesthetics, the "deep
image," Whitman's tropes of space). Meter and rhyme are hooked forever to timeor should I say Time, but
issues with time are not over and done with just because they originated in the vieux monde. Wright is one
of those poets who wants to make sense of both, and yet at the same time this sense can't be made once for all. It
remains slippery, subject to our evolution as poets and readers to contingencies of many sorts.
Such contingencies are at the source of our vast interest in the never-repeatable private
sphere. "Love Affair in a Small Town" locates Wright in reflection upon a geographical place, bearing
the imprint of intimacy and time, and it always turns out that the latter is an ironizing agent for the former:
"That was the winter we clung to each other," when "[y]ou played songs from the days/ we believed
music had the answers." The wised-up disillusionment is sometimes too wised-upone might say lyrically
enhanced, but at the same time it's gentle, not destructive, not finally distancing.
Recollections of intimate life, for all their significance, can't take us to origins. Family,
on the other hand, does. In "Return to Seattle: Bastille Day," the poet begins by musing
How could I go back
to where I first took my age
between my hands like a lover's face
and said, "This far, no farther"?
But in the face of the changed daughter's encounter with her past life's sudden immediacy,
rhetoric gives way to biography's status quo:
My mother, 1945, stepping from
the Armistice Day prop plane
with her unchanged face,
light off the Cascade rain fronts
troubling her memory with its danger,
years before she could blame
herself for everything.
Ambivalence toward home is the right of all, and anxiety about origins can further mute the
neutral tones of place with the shade of self-awareness. The destinies of families certainly look fixed: the
mother's universal acceptance of blame takes place in a culture and time unlike that of the daughter. Her
sacrifice seems at once limited and overwhelming, not fittingexcept by forced thoughtthe time or the
imagination. But if family is destiny, then return is a trap. Everybody in the family is in the process of
manufacturing avoidance: father's sleepwalking, sister's vanishing, mother's vague-but-vast self-recriminations.
It is not the place to find restoration; neither is it a hell of dysfunction.
Likewise, in "A Reply to Storms in New Orleans," the poet remembers those evenings of
resounding climatic threats whose outcomes could go either way. The memory is brought back, mythically enlarged,
by that city's image of the seasonal deluge:
No nightly pyrotechnics,
no Voudoun-Thor hurling his thunderbolts
upside the sky, great swags of rain-laurel
slapping the jalousies. Never the dull
pressing-down of cloud cover, breezeways
in heat-stunned swelter, saltwater
glaze on the skin. Not the river
twelve feet above the city, the levee
that cradles the current in its arms
rolling slow as thunder. No monsoon's
straight-down drench, Creole sweetness
and crepuscule making an evening of afternoon.
Our vulnerability exists both as danger and opportunity, to say nothing of the sense of menace,
becoming hard to distinguish from victimization, indifference, or for that matter, baptism. Chalk the confusion up
to sub-tropic swelter, and you've understood how ambivalence imparts its regime on memory itself, whose own daughter
was the Muse. In the end, the poet remembers how her mother ("younger than she'd ever be again") once
soothed her brother over the Stürm und Drang of another kind of wild weatherthat of the Northwest,
precursors of wilder metaphysical storms surely to come.
In the echolalic "Unfinished Country," Wright imagines emotion as space,
"How high the moon?" we talked around ourselves
as air and ocean switched polarities
over the heart's unfinished country.
The image-complex includes not only geographic space, but outer space ("solar wind")
and moon. As if in response to her seemingly disingenuous question, the poet's Diogenes' quest for truth falters
under its own circularity:
Hands recall their bruising rhythms
that linger like multiple entendres
over the darkening bluffs.
And so, as is so often the move Wright executes, there is little reductive truth to take home,
but plenty of emotional experience left to make a claim:
we hesitated, lost ourselves in lamplight
while nighthawks circled, crying for direction.
The prospect of "the heart's unfinished country," neither to be easily discovered or
divulged, is a few pages later raised anew to form an answer in the form of a question: "the heart's/ subzero
weather?" ("Celebration for the Cold Snap"). Say what you will: a poet like this saves string and
is not without resources.
"Bildungsgedicht," as the full-mouthed title suggests, examines adolescent
temptations, here set in cheap cityscapes, almost as if it were a poet's duty to cruise to the beat of adolescent
rock, back in the day when low was low and high, invisible. Of course this is but another variant of the Bishopian
theme enunciated by Robinson Crusoe ("homemade, homemade' but aren't we all!"). The requisite boyfriend
who in his bathos is lame enough to say "ta" instead of goodbye, is also a full-blown male chauvinist ("your
mascara's smeared"). He pens a song for her ("Hey you're gonna dig this song"); he follows this not
long after with casual betrayal: "he brought blonde Suzie/ to the Food Court, I sobbed by the Orange Julius
machine." But what upsets her more than this boorish display is the failure of imagination:
His tenor was smokey and nasal
like Dylan in A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.
"Well?" he looked me up and down. "Symbolical,"
I breathed, not yet knowing the word cliché
or bright moments of love's throwaways.
But Shakespeare-the-Fixer puts all to rights when the poet turns to her part in a local
production of "The Tempest" ("'Clear, concise, poetic,' the reviewer wrote of my part"):
I went home and tore up Johnny's song, wrote one
and tore it up. If I couldn't be with him
I wouldn't be him. I opened the Cambridge edition
of Shakespeare, and told my mother the truth.
I'm starting a poem.
No less a diva than Akhmatova noted in what trashy neighborhoods our masterpieces have their
origins. One of the ironies that emerges from
A Change of Maps
is how the poet's natural nobility reflects not merely on the insufficient and self-involved, but on the class
pretensions that emanate from and limit such an iconic, sacrosanct figure as Bishop.
Similarly, in "Cult Hero" another poet figurethis one unnamedcontrasts
parodically with the poet as cultural custodian, his male grooviness combining the effortless cheese of the rock
wannabe with the winsomeness of the lover. As anonymous and yet ubiquitous as Pan, this person "vanishes"
and in a way that is his truthleaving us with our disillusionment. The poet suggests that our first mature
literary steps are situated upon just such disillusionment, and that fact is persuasive ("our best
rhetoric"). Is instruction, then, somehow modeled by a fickle lover's abandonment? Leaving us with
"nothing" (the culmination, you might suppose, of love's "nothings") may only lead to the
negative space of opportunity: it is purposeful enough? Does it leave a clear enough space? Still, like his
more famous poet/teacher, something of the lessons of poetry cash out the same wayin different denominations,
to be sure, but according to the same script (scrip?): faith, disillusion, departure, revision.
Knowing that no knowledge ever arrived without its emotional weather system, Wright gives us the
lover as deflated demon in "After All Is Said and Done": "I ride past your house, my body/ heavy
with total recall." Like a meteorologist (whose likeness to a cartographer would be noted here monitoring the
course of systems), Wright monitors the divergence that occurs between lovers, whose persons change readily into
We were too alone for the long haul,
we hadn't yet learned
doubt's forwarding addresses.
As Clare noted, those we love the best are stranger than any others; thus maturation, whether
for the emotional being or the artistic one, is often antithetical to one's motives in seeking love in the first
place. Look how far the once-beloved travels:
You've sat in the medicine circles
between shamans who carved
the spirit poles: ravens and seals
under the rain spell, cured
of the vision called forever.
I live with shopping malls.
Which is better? The question of the difference between high and low art is perennial, never
more so than for poets who passed from the 60s through the theory-correcting late 70s and 80s to the whatever 90s
and beyond, assimilating and synthesizing, cherry-picking inspirations from the downlow to the transcendently
highbrow. Shopping malls don't make the shamans look any better by contrast. In fact, as a comparable destiny,
the shopping mall makes the shaman look, well, diminished.
There are too many good poems here to discuss, but I will mention just a few for their
combination of formal felicities, savvy diction, and controlled voice. "Darwin's House at Downe (Closed
Fridays)" looks at the ever-changing nature of memorywith poems, like specimens, overseeing and managing
the freight of detail like the great naturalist's taxonomies. "Another Look at 'Albion on the Rock': Plate
38 of Blake's Milton," one of several sestinas (I haven't seen such a commitment to the form since Marilyn
Hacker's debut over three decades ago) considers the waves and emanations from Blake's great vision to the
contemporary poet's vision that "love is our wealth. It holds nothing in its hands." "As I Drive
over an Irrigation Ditch at the End of Summer, I Think of Small-Town American Preacher" is a dead-on parody
of James Wright's mid-America evocation of lonely Chinese questers updated to millennial evangelism in the context
of Y2K, OPEC and nuclear silos.
Carolyne Wright's journey through nearly four decades shows that the past is often a world that
resists disclosure, and yet the fact is less a fact about the past than a fact about our ability to find signposts
among contingent scenarios. Wright has this ability; which is less a concession to the spell of technique (which
she owns) than a kind of knowledge about poetry's secret sway and coterie wisdom and therefore of abiding interest
to poetry's serious readersbe they ever so fewwho know that the intramural is what we used to call the
universal, but know also that that is no come-down but a field promotion fitting for the lean hereafter.