c.d. wright's "rising, falling, hovering"

Ron Silliman suggested a few blogs ago that we gather round C.D. Wright’s poem, "Rising, Falling, Hovering" to see what it was about and to sing its praises. It took me a week or so to get a copy of Chicago Review (Autumn 2005) where it appears, but, having read it three times, I think it an interesting experiment, at least, to try to see a brand new poem as one fully in the cultural bloodstream. Given the usual practice, this is highly–what?–tendentious, but fun. And, as Ron indicates, it might just be deserved.

So, briefly, I see the poem, first, as an anti-war poem, specifically anti-the current Gulf War. It is a feature of the culture that we live in that this anti-war poem is not coming from a soldier, but the mother of a son who, in the worst of all possible worlds, might find himself one day in a uniform shooting and being shot at. More than anti-war, this poem, for me, folds those sentiments into a more generalized, and anguished (the tone is tight and subdued, almost mournful), assessment of "what’s happened to America," much of which has to do with our ingrained racism and imperialism. The title, I feel, is meant to echo The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Lines that stand out in this regard include:

What’s going to become of us Is the beauty used up then

The momentum of lives shifts into the absence of thought
The first task is to recover the true words for being

In the event of our death You will have to roll your own poetry

I am willing to take "the beauty" as a term for what our culture promised and, as she sees it, promises. I put it that way, since having asked if the beauty is used up, she answers her own question by assigning us our "first task." Which is to "recover the true words for being," a fascinating term for a project of many years, if not decades, and of many minds, not just poets.

One of the most killing moments comes with her use of Akhmatova’s famous line, put to her by an old woman outside the huge prison in Leningrad: "Can you describe this?" This move throws that image and state of being, from Stalinist Russia, back at us, as people who are possibly (probably) under a kind of siege like that endured in the Soviet Union. Terrible thoughts to have, but in the current circumstances, certainly warranted.

I would like to mention, in the shadow of this, a review I just read in North Dakota Quarterly (Summer 2005, which just came out) of an anthology of war poems, Old Glory: American War Poems From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terrorism, ed. Robert Hedin. The review is written by James Scully and is one of those writings that I think all of us should read. Scully has much to criticize about the anthology, but he is just as vocal on the state of our poetry and behind it, of course, the state of our national mind. Here’s a fair sample:

"Despite declared political values, most American poets have trained themselves as poets not to see, never mind deal with, the historical, social, and political realities that inform and condition everyone’s existence including their own. The immaturity induced by compartmentalization, the constriction of vision and context, disables the poetry. Having put on blinders, yet faced now with significant social, moral, and spiritual crises, that poetry can only twist its head every which way, trying desperately and too late to make out what is happening all around it. "

Praising Baraka’s "Somebody Blew Up America," which is not included in the anthology, Scully reminds us that Baraka was talking, not about two buildings being blown up, but "civil rights, human rights, constitutional rights in general, habeas corpus, separation of military from police, insulation of criminal law system from that of military law, Geneva Convention, Nuremburg precedent, legal constraints on torture, etc." Parts of the "beauty" that we hope will always belong to America. Ways toward, perhaps, the "true words for being."