Black Zodiac

"The first imitation that I wrote that felt in any way like a successful poem on its own was an imitation of Charles Wright. While Dunn had rightly tried to steer me away from too much intellectualisation in my writing, Wright is a poet who moves between a generally profoundly understated moment in his life (most often he’s just sitting in his yard watching birds or lightening bugs as twilight comes on) and metaphysical pondering. One gets a sense that the mundane and the overarching are always merged, approaching together on the wind. He gave me permission to quote from other texts directly the way an essay might. There is a difference between Wright’s appropriation of a text and Eliot’s. Wright generally gives you all the contextual information you need right there in the body of the poem. He isn’t interested in opacity at all. I didn’t know poems could do that! It was shocking to me. I love the wonderful texture that these other voices introduced into his poems, and I love the way Wright moves from the quotidian to the elevated, from the humidity of an August night to snippets from Roberto Calasso or Augustine or Wallace Stevens or one of the Chinese poets he loves so much. The domain of the poem is not bounded by the exterior landscape of the American South but the interior landscape. When you read Wright, you enter into a sensibility. This is how this mind experiences a typical evening. Always rooted in his Appalachian upbringing, it is not, to my mind, pompous or presumptuous, even when it suddenly speaks in Latin: it is, instead, the authentic voice of a soul that thinks and feels in conversation with other souls who have thought and felt. I also realised that Wright was orchestrating the stream of his thoughts through the use of line breaks and the dropped line. These were signals that allowed him to wander around the spaciousness of his own head without losing his reader."