The Commonplace Book:

a review of C. D. Wright’s Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon Press, 2005.

The commonplace book, or locus communis, has emerged in publication throughout history; an example recalled to mind would be, coincidentally, Charles Wright’s Halflife. A collection of anecdotes, personal insights, quotes (anything short and to the point, typically), commonplace books have been evaluated centuries after their composition in order to obtain an interior understanding of the writer, the collector. Due to the supposed “completeness” of the work when viewed as a whole, it mirrors the construction of a book of poetry, which is usually made up of individual poems.

In C. D. Wright’s case, Cooling Time assembles multiple lines of original thought, anecdote, poetry, and story in an attempt to construct a personal, contemporary ars poetica. Memoir, essay, biography, and, of course, poetry, Cooling Time is an ars poetica with a necessity of cross-genre pollination forcefully proclaiming itself to be “an American Poetry Vigil.”

In an attempt to make the ars poetica accessible to its readers (be they the general public or the academic), Ms. Wright relies on an intimate style that contains the quietness (but assuredness) and trust of the 1^st person in her prose with the sensuality of her “voice,” as is exhibited in her poetry. Ms. Wright really does a good job of keeping her language, and consequently her prose/poetry collected here, alive, accommodating, and contemporary. As she writes in an entry on landscape, elegy:

What landscape is: not a closed space not in fact capable of closure. With each survey the corner shifts. Distance is the goal; groping, the means. (39)

And, continuing:

What elegy is, not loss but opposition.

By any means necessary being the only directive I can adhere to with any consistency. Some hillbilly crank or sex pistol must have already said as much. (Ibid.)

The dramatic balance between a formal diction and the informal terms “hillbilly crank” and “sex pistol” is easily recognizable as Ms. Wright’s language. Rather than suspend the reader in the formality of poetic language (supposed formality, that is), an immediacy that emerges in her juxtapositions of thought and diction. Add to it the modern sense of fragmentation and syntactical manipulation, and she does in prose what she does so well in poetry.

Innumerable lines in this collection are quotable and, if focus be found, memorable. But, in assuming the characteristics of a commonplace book, the division between coherence and singularness (singularness of anecdote/phrase) affirms dominance and purpose. When reading such a work, one must keep something of a commonplace-book attitude in order to follow the aphorisms that so solidly make up the book. Thus, reading this collection would necessitate the reader keep a collection of her/his own in order to gain a full grasp of the individuality of certain lines. But, in the lines of poetry and in the italicized lines of thought, one can find the true voice of Ms. Wright; and there is no reason to quote physically for oneself, rather a reason to return faithfully and continually to rediscover and remember the main thrust. If a reader unaware of Ms. Wright’s proclivity for the abstract as well as the concrete approached this book, the reader’s impulse would be to follow the lines word-for-word, to remember line after line. Someone aware of Ms. Wright’s poetry would definitely not falter from the heaviness of many of these lines, and would hear an unmistakable voice, overall, in thought-compelling thought:

Another strategy is to create new structures that further the art (for its own sake). Create a language that the unborn might be unashamed to speak. (62)

Sensuality, intimacy, the personal…the characteristics of Ms. Wright’s opus—it all adds up to an invitation to her program: the long-wrought focus on the body becomes a focus on the interior. Many times throughout the collection, other poets that have passed through her life are mentioned, either for a memorable quote or the remembrance of an occasion in her life. In a sense, one could look at this as a type of conversation between Ms. Wright (or her text) and those whom she mentions. At one point in my reading I came across a section that, for me, is impossible not to identify with Forrest Gander, especially because it is so similar to the first lines of his collection Torn Awake. As Mr. Gander writes in “The Hugeness of That Which Is Missing,”

Call the direction the eye is looking

the line of sight. There

where it grazes the surface

of the visibly surging

without reference to a field of human presence,

don’t look away. (3)

And as Ms. Wright has in “Cooling Time,”

The eye of the line (the line of the eye): every eye sees otherwise. The shape of the object is the result—what impinges upon the sighted field; what penetrates the sight itself. (44)

What is the goal of comparing these two excerpts, these two thoughts? To show that she believes in the conversation amongst writers, amongst her and their words, and her and their thoughts: the type of conversation that supports and helps bind this book together. It seems her belief that the exchange happening between the poet and others relies on the auditory, whereas within the poet the reliance is on the visual; thus, the unique dependence on the eye. One of her final thoughts is just this idea:

The ears believe other people, goes the proverb; the eyes believe themselves. (103)

Cooling Time is a collection of thoughts, aphorisms, anecdotes, biography, memoir, poetry, etc. etc. that should be read just as that: a collection. What is “continuity,” what does it matter, when one is confronted with a commonplace book of such originality and vigor as this one? We can find continuity in the book’s originality and vigor. Read it for an established poet’s unique vision of poetry, of the experience of art, of the world. There are, ultimately, answers for anyone in this book.

— Richard Scheiwe

Other works appearing in this essay:

Torn Awake, by Forrest Gander. Published by New Directions, 2001.

Halflife , by Charles Wright. Published by University of Michigan Press, 1989.