Charles Wright, a UD fave (see her analysis of Black Zodiac here), is the new US poet laureate.

If you read through some of the poems on this page, you’ll see one strongly recurrent theme, and one strongly characteristic technique. Like Don DeLillo – he’s about DeLillo’s age, looks quite a lot like him, and presents to the world a very similar laconic diffident serious and almost shy demeanor – Wright is a lapsed but still gasping (grasping?) metaphysician. Both were raised Christian; both have long since ceased to believe. But both retain, in a visionary way, “the glowing shards of things which have continued to dazzle at me,” as Wright puts it. DeLillo notes the retention within his atheist self of eschatological seriousness:

[One of my characters] needs to know that people out there believe in all the old verities, the old gods. These things keep the planet warm. But she herself is not a believer. I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood. For a Catholic, nothing is too important to discuss or think about, because he’s raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and that if he doesn’t live his life in a certain way this death is simply an introduction to an eternity of pain. This removes a hesitation that a writer might otherwise feel when he’s approaching important subjects, eternal subjects. I think for a Catholic these things are part of ordinary life.

Both writers see a planet warmed by a glow from somewhere, warmed by a transmission from a force that feels like an ultimacy. They’re always sticking their speakers or characters in metaphysically charged settings – the desert in novels like The Names and Point Omega (the latter novel features a main character who “sit[s] and reflect[s] on grand subjects such as time, extinction and the attainment of what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point: a zen-like state of relinquished consciousness.”), and, in Wright, the foothills of the Appalachians at dusk, with the natural world pouring down its dazzle and the poet conscious of the pathetic nothingness, in this rich and self-sufficient context, of the human. Here’s a short, echt-Wright poem, Vesper Journal. Note the teasingly prayerful title, plus the contrast between non-human living things, which lyrically accept the “tiny,” “half-grain” nature of the earth, and restless miserable metaphysically-grasping humans who can only, poem after poem after poem, lament that “language, always, is just language.”

Wright’s technique, a long free-verse line that weaves about from slangy prosaic chat to intensely Romantic nature description to baldly metaphysical reflection, captures modern consciousness as it registers both its capacity to feel awe and its inability to make awe meaningful. Wright is unlike the steadily Episcopalian Richard Wilbur, who tells an interviewer

I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that is my attitude. My feeling is that when you discover order and goodness in the world, it is not something you are imposing — it is something that is likely really to be there, whatever crumminess and evil and disorder there may also be. I don’t take disorder or meaninglessness to be the basic character of things. I don’t know where I get my information, but that is how I feel.

For Wright, we can’t even impose it anymore; we can only mull over earlier poetic (and theological) efforts to impose it. All of Black Zodiac (note the title – the blacked-out heavens) is a backward glance at the poet’s precursor cosmologists – Dante, Milton – and an insistence that these “masters” leave the poet alone in his “dwarf orchard” to work out his shrunken relationship to the cosmos. Language isn’t a medium anymore, a way through to hidden cosmic truths; it’s “an element, like air or water.” (Wright takes this last phrase from Wallace Stevens.) The human voice, our words, our poetry – these aren’t vehicles toward something metaphysical. They are simply the material, life-sustaining environment in which we move every moment of our lives. We are condemned to live out our lives trying to get the better of words (that latter phrase is from T.S. Eliot’s East Coker), knowing that we never will, but knowing also that they are all we have.