C. D. Wright Poetry.
C. D. Wright is one of my favorite poets, and through 2013-15 I have been re-reading Just Whistle: A Valentine, Deepstep Come Shining, One Big Self, and other poetry selections in her collection Steal Away.  Somehow I began reading what I would call Wright’s “Neo-Romantic Sublime Gothic” poetry in the context of David Shields’ Reality Hunger. Wright is especially adept at exposing the  indeterminacies of contemporary life through figures of the Sublime and Gothic, such as “July by lotuslight,” and “ghost hair nestled in streamers” (Deepstep). Shields in Reality Hunger reminds us that we’re still thrilled by that which is culturally familiar, when it is made to slip jarringly toward the new, beyond clichéd image/idea/language (82 #240). As I read Wright’s poetry aloud, I am thrilled by the disruption of the heightened diction of Gothic otherworldliness and by the rebuff to Sublime “intimations of immortality” through her raw diction, like “cane slashing through the grass” and the image of lightning striking a lake, causing a swan to explode as her “five cygnets sizzled on the surface” (Deepstep). Thus, raw lines of poetry are interlaced with Sublime Gothic language. Might we be thrilled by the mixing of the Gothic and the raw, by language that is made to fail in its approach to the Sublime?