A Dying Poet’s Farewell to the World
Celan’s influence is tricky to absorb for any poet who did not suffer in a labor camp or witness his parents taken away to be murdered by the S.S. It is impossible to isolate Celan’s aesthetic innovations from his trauma and its historical meanings; Wright preëmpts that bind by presenting his own suffering as sort of lame and clumsy. It keeps him, in these last poems, from putting his finger on the tragedy scale: there are “so many things worse than death,” he writes, and killing, even killing a fly, is one of them. He quotes the haiku master Issa:
Wright’s body is dog shit, after all—don’t kill his companions! “More than ever I am haunted by the lives of the small, brief, powerless, filthy, and poor,” he writes. But “filthy” suggests something less than a Buddhist’s commitment to the flies’ well-being. In other poems, Wright has some fun at the expense of a cricket (“my friend describing you over the phone, chronicling your brief life and fairly gruesome end, both of us guiltily chuckling”) and a moth (“once it observes you have noticed it or given any indication its presence is a nuisance, you will very soon find yourself the perpetual loser in a chronic contest of wills”). We don’t read Wright for the purity of his moral life but for the erratic comedy of his good intentions yielding to blurted reversals and denunciations.
All the unresolved, zigzagging impulses give even Wright’s finished work here some of the raggedness of drafts. “Axe in Blossom” is in every sense an open book, practically an open studio. We see its striking title gestate through multiple phases—in a translation, an original poem, and a collage poem made from lines by Celan, Czesław Miłosz, and Rainer Brambach. There are “Three Homages,” two poems called “The Writing” (the second, marked “2,” is presented first), one poem called “The Lamp, 2” that insinuates an absent predecessor, two called “The Kiss,” and so on; the poems reshuffle the same vocabulary, the same images, the same settings and themes. The volume begins with more or less “complete” work, passes through some abandoned drafts, then trails off into an appendix, “Burial Herbs,” which works like a commonplace book of maxims, partial poems, and poems nominally complete but “unfinishable,” in the sense that certain poems, perhaps the most ambitious ones, only approximate their maker’s vision.
Among the “unfinishables” is a poem that I consider a masterpiece, probably one of Wright’s very best. Dedicated to the German poet Karl Krolow, “At His Desk in the Past” was “transcribed from self-recorded drafts on audio,” in 2012. It’s “raining in a dead language” out the window, as Wright measures the duration of his life against various phenomena—some brief, like an infant’s fever, some ancient, like the stars. The poem, written in linked prose blocks, is too long to quote in full, and is quite intricate. But one passage gives a sense of its eerie logic. Wright describes the words of his poem “still traveling toward the world although he is not there although he is not here or anywhere”:
