WRIGHT, Jay

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Nationality: American. Born: Albuquerque, New Mexico, 25 May 1935. Education: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; University of California, Berkeley, B.A.; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, M.A.; further study at Union Theological Seminary. Career: Poet-in-residence, Talladega University, Tougaloo University, Texas Southern University, and Dundee University, Scotland. Instructor, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1975–79. Awards: National Council on the Arts grant, 1967; Hodder fellow in playwriting, Princeton University; fellow in creative writing, Dundee University; Academy of American Poets fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement, 1996. Address: c/o Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540–5237, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Death As History. Millbrook, New York, Kriya Press, 1967.

The Homecoming Singer. New York, Corinth Books, 1971.

Soothsayers and Omens. New York, Seven Woods Press, 1976.

Dimensions of History. Santa Cruz, California, Kayak, 1976.

The Double Invention of Komo. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1980.

Elaine's Book. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1986.

Explications/Interpretations. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1984.

Selected Poems of Jay Wright. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1987.

Boleros. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Play

Balloons, A Comedy in One Act. Boston, Baker's Plays, 1968.

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Critical Studies: The Forerunners: Black Poets in America by Woodie King, Washington, D.C., Howard University Press, 1975; "The Early Poetry of Jay Wright" by Gerald Barrax, and "The Descent of Nommo: Literacy as Method in Jay Wright's 'Benjamin Banneker Helps to Build a City'" by Vera M. Kutzinski, both in Callaloo (Charlottesville, Virginia), 6(3), fall 1983; "The Clarity of Being Strange: Jay Wright's The Double Invention of Komo" by Michael Tomasek Manson, in Black Literature Forum, 24, fall 1990; "From a Goat Path in Africa: An Approach to the Poetry of Jay Wright" by Isidore Okpewho, in Callaloo (Charlottesville, Virginia), 14(3), summer 1991; "Jay Wright's Poetics: An Appreciation" by Ron Welburn, in Melus (Amherst, Massachusetts), 18, fall 1993.

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Ever since Ezra Pound undertook his descent into the troubadour mind in the early twentieth century, American writers have been making pilgrimages to obscure cultures to bring back lore and insight in an effort to expand the visionary powers of the mind. Charles Olson made a trek to the Yucatán Peninsula to study Mayan culture in 1950, and the beats scattered into Mexico, India, Japan, and North Africa in search of new ideas. Carlos Casteneda put his stamp on the 1960s with The Teachings of Don Juan, in which he became the willing initiate into the mysteries of a peyote cult among the Yaqui Indians of the southern Sonoran Desert. In Jay Wright's attempt to find a new source of religious ideas, he has plumbed the work of French anthropologists studying the Dogon and Bambara cultures of West Africa.

In The Double Invention of Komo Wright undertakes the task of imagining his own initiation into the rites of Komo as practiced by the Bambara, a people located on the upper Niger River and the subject of the book Les Fondements de la societé d'initiation du Komo, by the anthropologists Germaine Dieterlen and Yousouf Tata Cissé, on which Wright's poem is based. In an afterword to his poem Wright tells us that the initiate into the Komo religion attempts "to go 'beyond the pool,' to understand the universe within which the human spirit 'imbibes abstract things.'" Wright has done this to bring about the "necessary transformation of an enhanced world of intransigent act," to redeem us from our own errors and ignorance.

The claim Wright makes is familiar after a century of rebirths and conversions to other religions. This is one more piece in the jigsaw puzzle of twentieth-century art, in which Christianity's boundaries are scaled and other religions sympathetically explored. The goal is self-liberation, the transcendence of personal identity to gain the larger cosmos of nature and otherness. Here is some of the language of the poem's close:

I forget my name;
I forget my mother's and father's names.

I am about to be born.
I forget where I come from
and where I am going.
I cannot distinguish
right from left, front from rear.
Show me the way of my race
and of my fathers...
 
You take me to kneel, forehead to earth, before Komo.
You present me to sacred things.
I am reborn into a new life.
My eyes open to Komo.

The task is boldly undertaken, but there are structural and psychological problems posed here that the poem does not fully resolve. How is it that a poet of modern urban consciousness, with the whole range of English at his command, can hope to duplicate the modes of ritual descent as performed by rural Africans? The nature of ritual and of tribal cohesion depends upon body language, repeated gestures, grunts, and mantras, yet this poem weighs in with a large dictionary to accomplish the same ends. The mind is here, but the body's powers to read signs and make meanings from gestures and animal noises is minimized. What we have is a sort of orchestral transcription of the music from an African finger harp.

It simply does not work to bring such articulate skills to the person of a man who says that

All day, I stub in my father's fields
or whistle in the market over
my mother's pots, adept in the provisions
of belonging.
At night, I lodge
near the most familiar limbs.
On my bed,
I am fused to my brother's steel spine.
The wind's bugle covers my day's breath.

This language comes from a culture of self-consciousness. The diversity, density, and multiple layerings of the words used attest to the autonomy and hypertrophy of the self that has arisen out of centuries of social evolution in the West. How can this weight of alien psychology be crammed into the mouth of a tribal youth who has no bearings in such a world?

Unhappily, the poem never moves beyond the paradox of its strategy. It strains to possess the feeling of the rituals underhand, but Wright keeps his personal identity out of the poem. The fact that he is himself an African-American might have helped to convince us of some innate, a priori resonance between his and the Bambara imagination. Perhaps not. In the end the poem seems to prove the reverse of its intention—that one cannot easily leap from one's own culture to grasp the reality of another's. The poem is stuck in its own metaphysical and linguistic provinciality, with much intelligent laboring exerted for a noble but unreached goal:

Down below the love bed,
the knit bones of the dead
cock their conch ears
to another soul's implosion.
My monody impels you to the shore,
where I enroll among the thorns
clutched in the rocks.
I will, by my heart's hunker-down
harzard, examine your twilight eyes
and will.

Boleros is a more effective use of Wright's powers. In it he keeps himself apart from the mythological landscape of Mexico, which he traces to Indian roots and from there to Asian Indian and Catholic European ideas. This is Wright country; he was born in New Mexico and raised there and in California. He has a passion for how the ritual mind works, and the ecumenical bent of Wright's thinking is put to good use in threading together a world religious system from the faith of Mexico's southern indios. The plot of the book is a travel memoir of the poet and his wife moving from one world (Scotland, New England) to the other (Mexico), from Protestant rationality to the depths of the Mayan and Aztec worlds, with their layerings of Spanish Catholicism and other New World elements.

Wright is buoyant and clearheaded in Boleros, and he stays out of the psychological traps of his earlier book. He enjoys his role as an intelligent guide to both worlds:

Here,
as we stand in the Mayan evening,I know I should be able to say
something simple,
such as, it is the same moon,
that the triad—moon, earth,
and that star in Taurus—
sounds right again.
Where is my synodic certainty?
I know less than the ancients
who were accustomed to a late moon
	    and its difficult omens.

"I am learning," Wright says later in the same poem. Indeed, he is a tireless worker in the quest to bring passion and sensuality to American belief. The story of religion in the twentieth century may one day be its central motif. Wright's early years in New York were spent among some of the brightest talents of the postmodern religious renaissance, and it is no accident that he should emerge as another of its principal voices.

—Paul Christensen