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What follows is the annotation I wrote on C.D. Wright’s
One Big Self as part of my master’s work at Fairleigh Dickinson. It is not really meant as a standalone essay and was incorporated into a much longer theoretical thesis on the use of outside sources and reporting in poetry.
The book,
One Big Self, impressed me so, that I have gone back and read much of Wright’s work since and, as I wrote on Facebook and Twitter, Wright has become a touchstone poet for me, meaning that her work stands as an example or a beacon for me as I attempt to craft my own poems and send them out into the world. In fact, my book
As an Alien in a Land of Promise, which should be out this spring from Piscataway House Press, uses similar techniques to those found in Wright’s work (and the work of other touchstones for me — Charles Reznikoff, Robert Hayden, Martha Collins, Muriel Rukeyser and, of course, William Carlos Williams). Wright didn’t teach me the techniques — I’d been using them most of my writing life as a way to integrate the two sides of my writer’s mind — but reading her work helped me refine my approach to them and for that I am deeply indebted.
I post this today as a way of honoring Wright,
who died on Tuesday. Her singular voice will be missed.
Annotation of C.D. Wright, One Big Self
C.D. Wright could not have found a better name for her book-length poem about Louisiana prison life than One Big Self. The poem is a collage of multiple voices crafted from Wright’s visits to several Louisiana prisons and her readings of numerous texts on prison life. The title, therefore, is a literal description of what is to follow and integral to understanding how the poem works – a description of a process in which the many voices become one.
The poem, part of a collaborative documentary project with photographer Deborah Luster, uses child-like lists about adult topics, seemingly random observations that echo later in the poem, and sections that an intrusive narrator who interrupts the narrative with direct address.
There are quotations from outside texts, snippets of interviews, dictionary definitions, texts from signs, all of which add up to far more than the poem’s individual parts. She melds these disparate pieces and voices — the prisoner and the textbook, the warden and the newspaper — to create a larger, single American voice. The
poet Martin Earl, writing on The Poetry Foundations’Harriet the Blog, says Wright’s poem is “an
embodimentof prison life,” an effort to use her poetic voice to broadcast the voices of the prisoners and prison workers of the south.
In One Big Self, Wright is interested in definitions – in this case, defining “the spirit” of our age. Quoting Eric Schlosser in the prose introduction — “The spirit of every age … is manifest in its public works” (Wright, p. ix) — Wright makes the claim that it is the prisons that define us: “So this is who we are, the jailers, the jailed. This is the spirit of our age (Wright, p. ix).”
I wanted the banter, the idiom, the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech to cut through the mass-media myopia. I wanted the heat, the humidity, the fecundity of Louisiana to travel right up the body. What I wanted was to convey the sense of normalcy for which humans strive under conditions that are anything but what we in the free world call normal, no matter what we may have done for which we were never charged. (Wright, p. xiv)
The poem itself opens with a list that sounds as if written for a child (Wright, p. 3), a style that repeats throughout the book:
Count your fingers
Count your toes
Count your nose holes
Count your blessings
Count your stars (lucky or not)
Before moving into more adult matter:
Count your loose change
Count the cars at the crossing
Count the miles to the state line
Count the ticks you pulled off the dog
Count your calluses
Count your shells
Count the points on the antlers
Count the newjacks’s keys
Count your cards, cut them again.
The tone then shifts immediately, to something more official – the voice of the warden, perhaps — though some of the language echoes the opening list (“Count heads. Count the men’s. Count the women’s.”), creating a seamless movement from section to section. At the same time, the poem shifts back and forth – even within sections – between prose and verse:
There are five main counts in the cell or work area. 4:45 first morning count. Inmate must stand for the count. The count takes as long as it takes. Control Center knows how many should be in what area. No one moves from area A to area B without Control knowing. If i/m is stuck out for the count i/m receives a write-up. Three writes-ups, and i/m goes to lockdown. Once
in lockdown, you will relinquish your things:
plastic soapdish, jar of vaseline, comb or hairpick, paperback
Upon return to your unit the inventory officer
will return your things:
soapdish, Vaseline, comb, hairpick, paperback
Upon release you may have your possessions:
soapdish, Vaseline, comb, pick, booth
Whereupon your True Happiness can begin (Wright, p. 4)
The meat of the poem, however, is the accretion of voices, a slow-building.
The section, “On the Lessening of Free-World Ties,” opens with description, a hybrid of prose and verse, justified to the left margin. It sets the scene and readies the reader for the stray, poeticized comments of inmates:
The caller can see the phone
ringing in its cradle; see the light pour to the tiled floor, the magazines
heaped by the door, the old zinnias in a pepper jar, the leftovers, the
dog’s bowl, the unread letters; can almost make out the handwriting
almost certain it is her own (Wright, p. 22)
What follows are snippets of interviews and explanation, in the voices of the inmates and the poem’s speaker, voices that build and melt together.
The men like The Young and the Restless.
Some of us be rootin’ for the bad guys; some of us be rootin’ for the good.
— George
And some of us just be rootin’ . – from the turnrow
The women like Guiding Light
The women like Nora Roberts and John le Carre
The men like Danielle Steel and Lous L’Amour
Ever’body likes Jackie Collins
The men’s units are named for animals and trees
They keep the young ones in Eagle
Until they get a face on them
The women’s units are named for signs of the zodiac. Capricorn is
lockdown
That’s my sign
She misses her clematis he misses his dogs
What they hold in common, their poverty (Wright, p. 22-23)
Common is the key word and describes the impact of the quick cuts from voice to voice – the creation of a common voice and sensibility that elevates the tales and opinions of the inmates, people society views as trash but who Wright avoids categorizing.
It is important to note, of course, that Wright is orchestrating the entire collage, even as she “maintain(s) something of the journalistic distance of class reportage. (Earl, Web)
– and frequently signals as such to the reader through the use of an intrusive narrator. Throughout, there are sections headed “My Dear Conflicted Reader” (Wright, p. 14), “My Dear Affluent Reader” (p. 24), “Dear Dying Town” (p. 27), “Dear Unbidden, Unbred” (p. 38), “Dear Prisoner” (p. 42), “Dear Child of God” (p. 61), “Dear Errant Kid” (p. 76), and “Dear Virtual Lifer” (p. 77). The sections that follow the heading, sometimes verse, sometimes prose, sometimes both, stay in the epistolary voice, an addressee implied. Writing to the “Child of God,” the speaker –the poet, perhaps? – as what we assume is a prisoner a favor:
If you will allow me time. To make a dove. I will spend it
Well. A half success is more than can be hoped for. And
Turning on the hope machine is dangerous to contemplate. First
I have to find a solid bottom. Where the scum gets hard and
The scutwork starts. One requires ideal tools: a huge suitcase
Of love a set of de-iced wings the ghost of a flea.
Music intermittent of ongoing. Here. One exits the forest
Of men and women. Here. One re-dreams the big blown dream
Of socialism. Deep in the suckhole. Where Lou Vindie kept
Her hammer. Under her pillow. Like a wedge of wedding cake.
Working from my best memory. Of a bird I first saw nesting.
In the razor wire. (Wright, p. 61)
Wright also turns to inserted texts or to facsimiles of outside text to expand the palette of voices to which she can turn. Two sections on consecutive pages use the technique, injecting an official tone into the poem and a commentary on what has been called the prison-industrial complex. “Dialing Dungeons for Dollars,” which is subtitled “Prison Realty”, describes the Corrections Corporation America in the voice of the newspaper business pages:
publicly traded
on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PZN
The good news is:
Corrections Corporation of America increased its inmate mandays by 12% From 15.1 million in 1998 to 16.9 million in 1999 A manday is one inmate held for one day for which the company bills government a per diem The increase in mandays in 1999 led to a 19% increase in CCA’s revenues for the year to $787 million.
Then there is Wackenhut Wackenhut Wackenhut
underwritten by Prudential Securities (Wright, p. 28)
The next section, “Modern Times,” offers more authoritative text – this time seemingly from a history or criminal justice text book. “Modern Times,” she writes,
have seen a new spirit come over the peace agencies engaged in the war on crime. This spirit rose with the entrance of Finger Print Science into the battle. (Wright, p. 29)
This leads to a consideration of forensic science in a colloquial, spoken tone, interspersed with descriptions of crimes.
You’ve got your plain loops, plain arches, tented arches, twin loops,
lateral pocket loops, central pocket loops, whorls, and your
accidentals
Found: his nineteen-year-old testicles
in a bag in the river
How can that be shriven
Found: fourth body of a woman
in a barrel
The man in the middle is Jesus
Bullets from a sawed-off gun fan out faster
170 tablets of Ectasy
What if it’s the drugs, stupid
Stippling is mostly confined to a 2- to 3-foot distance (Wright, p. 29)
There is a danger that the disparate sources could create a scattered, incoherent whole. But the use of repetition and echoes – of specific tactics (lists of things to count repeat throughout, the intrusive narrator) and specific language (“the women like/the men like” motif) – create a structural framework within which the disjointed narrative can be tied together even as it reaches into the far corners of the subject matter. Earl calls them “familiar islands of language for the reader,” which “allows for accretion within the collage, which gradually increases tension and works to create a sense of movement, the feeling that there is a kind of progress or inevitability.” (Earl, Web)
“It gets old / The way we do things,” the speaker says as the poem comes to a close. The speaker is “all stirred up” and takes out the tintypes – the raw photos taken by Wright’s collaborator – “And drew the prisoners around me.” (Wright, p. 80) It is a final gesture that underscores the collage work – like a quilt — that drives this poem forward and collapses multiple voices into a single song.
Sources:
Wright, C.D. One Big Self. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2007.
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Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
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Hank Kalet 