Love Without Optimism: C.D. Wright and the Tradition of American Sentimentality

"[Poetry] is the one scene where I advance determined, if not precisely ready, to do battle with what an overly cited Jungian described as the anesthetized heart, the heart that does not react."1

Perhaps it has been difficult to place C.D. Wright in context of her contemporaries because she participates in what Lauren Berlant calls "the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture" which stretches from the nineteenth century to the present moment. According to Berlant, authors in the sentimental tradition follow the model set down by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin — a novel whose abolitionist politics rested on the transformative power of love — as they "[act] as a critical chorus that sees the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement enough."2 Wright's thoughts on the role of poetry's sentimental affordances, as expressed the epigraph above, suggests that poetry has a role in awakening sensitivity and creating socially-oriented emotions, such as compassion and sympathy, that counter the "anesthetized heart." For Wright, this motive for writing poetry facilitates explorations of political issues such as mass incarceration, desegregation, and global war in her late book-length volumes such as One Big Self (2007), Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008), and One with Others (2010), all of which continue the literary activism of writers in the sentimental tradition. Yet, Wright does so without optimism in the political efficacy of her work. Notice how, in the epigraph, Wright expresses skepticism in the possibilities of the sentimental by sardonically referring to popular psychology and by doubting her fitness for the scale of the task. Nonetheless, she still claims emotional expression and engagement as key elements of her ambivalent mode of political engagement, which sees the "expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration" as necessary yet insufficient.

Wright's place in the tradition of American sentimentality is apparent across her works that address political topics. Writing about mass incarceration in One Big Self, Wright states that she "wanted [. . .] to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time" with the hope of providing a vicarious experience that will shape a reader's awareness of the lives of prisoners: "If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least with our minds, we are more likely to register the implications."3 By focusing on the emotional experience ("the real feel"), Wright expresses the hope to have a transformative effect on her reader's understanding. This is precisely the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration that Berlant associates with the sentimental. Similarly, Wright's elegy for Civil Rights activist Margaret Vittitow in One with Others is punctuated by urgings to embrace a solidarity based on shared feeling: "What we really want from our time on this planet, is that which is not this, we want the ethical this; we want to feel and transmit. // It is known that when a blackbird calls in the marsh all sound back and if one note is missing all take notice. This is the solidarity we are born to."4

In contrasting these two moments of relative optimism, Wright wrestles with the political efficacy of the sentimental tropes of her poetry in Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008) as she entwines a narrative of family discord with news of the nascent Iraq War, alongside other ravages of neoliberalism (notably climate change and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border). This topical pairing of the familial and the political is a central trope of sentimental literature. But where many earlier sentimentalists — particularly sentimental novelists such as Stowe, or, with greater ambivalence, Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Olive Higgins Prouty — express that belief that love in the private realm serves as a stand-in for change in the public world, Wright's poetic expression of sentimentality appears critical of that political solution. The two narratives coexist and intersect, but the private realm offers no solution to the issues of the nation.

This is, in part, because Wright presents a different form of love than we see in sentimental writers such as Stowe. Berlant observes that sentimental literature is characterized by an optimistic faith that the achievement of love in the private realm serves as a model for solving political problems as authors "[seek] to harness the power of emotion to change what is structural in the world."5 Yet, this logic rests on a fantasy of love which imagines it as a static state rather than a relationship that must constantly attune itself to the changing terms of the present. For Berlant, sentimentalists idealize love as an experience in which "people can rely on re-experiencing their intimates' fundamental sympathy with the project of repetition and recognition, no small feat since the terms of that sympathy are constantly shifting internally as they are renegotiated in the world. This explains the fetishistic optimism of romantic love about 'tomorrow.'"6 Exhibiting an understanding of love more closely aligned with Berlant's critical view than the optimism of sentimentalists, for Wright in Rising, Falling, Hovering,the experience of love emerges as a mode of discordant and effortful perseverance with others, rather than as a source of easy hope. What optimism Wright finds in poetry rests not in the guarantee of a better tomorrow, but as a tool for apprehending the present tense more fully.

A long poem published in two installments and then later collected into a book with shorter poems on either side, "Rising, Falling, Hovering" opens with a scene of tension between a man and a woman:

                                                                                                      Yesterday
                        nothing was unusual      a rainy March morning
                        there were scores of starlings on the ground
                        she had been thinking about what he said
                                                                       What has been said is said often7

As if to emphasize the generic quality of this storyline, Wright leaves the two unnamed and refers to them simply as "he" and "she" throughout. The two have difficulty communicating, and that failed communication renders the scene a visual rather than an oral, argued one: the most vivid image occurs in the scene's margins as Wright momentarily turns her focus from the man and woman to further describe, "on the pallid grass / the birds    accumulated chromatic density," a figure that provides a momentary respite from the personal, poetic, and political dread that otherwise mark the sequence.8 Wright's use of technical language here seems like a strategy for disavowing the beauty of the birds, as if they are not worthy of being mentioned in a poem dedicated to the topics of imperial warfare, mortality, and the challenges of human relationships. Or perhaps the diction registers how the force of these topics prevents her from attending to any beauty in the birds. She gives weight to the negative affects of the couple rather than the beauty hinted at in the scene.

Although a somewhat hermetic way to begin a war poem, the couple's domestic world does not exist independently from their historical reality. As the first installment progresses, they embark on a flight, still silent with anger, where the woman glances at the news of the U.S. attack on Baghdad: "One glimpse of the paper was too much / the number of their dead to remain unknown."9 Thus, their romantic difficulties happen only in the larger context of military conflict. Marital strife and global war appear simultaneously:

As a piece of sentimental literature, Rising, Falling, Hovering is distinct in that it does not center exclusively problem of love and the difficulty of tolerating someone's otherness: the central couple are preoccupied with how to respond to disaster on a global scale and, in particular, how to preserve aesthetic experience ("the color of the world") at a moment when it is threatened. Wright depicts how the contemporary world challenges the couple by leaving them unsure how to react to changes in history or how to recalibrate their actions both as a couple and as individuals. Although their apologies sound generic — with both sides recognizing their faults and understanding what personal characteristics helped to create the tension — the end of the stanza reveals that global politics rests at the heart of their argument. Developing the trope of colors (the "chromatic density" of the birds) that first appeared in the opening scene of the sequence, the poet takes the side of the "color of the world" and appears to find some purpose in defending it. Yet, Wright undercuts the closure of this conclusion, as she gestures toward Adorno's famous dictum about the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz in the following stanza: "What is said has been said before       This is no time for poetry."11 Wright appears skeptical about the role of poetry in times of political crisis: she is unwilling to idealize its powers, but she is also unwilling to let go of it.

Wright published a second installment of "Rising, Falling, Hovering" in Chicago Review two years after the first. While the second installment still focuses on the interpenetration of the domestic and the political, the Wright's attention to the familial relationships recedes: the female figure's relationship with the nation and the world become more significant sources of emotional tension. So responsive to the external world, Wright's female figure might seem like the antithesis of the "anesthetized heart" Wright claims to battle in her poetry. But this figure's reactive heart does not create a more peaceful world; instead, such a disposition ushers in a host of difficult emotional experiences such as rage, dread, and self-hatred.

Initially, her life might seem fully disconnected from the reality of war and climate change that opens the poem: "and now it's Monday again // I have been to Pilates       I found my old coat / I took my will to the notary      I found my good glasses."12 She writes such daily actions — a to-do list devoted to the care of the individual body, a gesture of basic responsibility for what happens to property after death — in a vaguely parodic tone. As the female figure continues to recount her day, the connections between the larger world become more pronounced: "I have filled my tank       I am going to the market."13 References to oil and consumerism alongside climate change and the Iraq War throughout Rising, Falling, Hovering prepare a reader to interpret this line to connect the speaker to the larger world depicted in the poem. Despite opposing the war, she nonetheless is linked to the war effort through the daily complicities of an uninterrupted life. This feeling of impotence, in turn, affects the speaker emotionally as she jarringly asserts, "then I think I'll cut my hair off with a broken bottle."14 The War on Terror invades the domestic sphere in the form of interpersonal anger. Whereas nineteenth century sentimentalists may have imagined sympathy as political agency, here Wright shows how pairing sympathy and perceived political impotence creates negative feelings — the broken bottle shearing her hair — that exceed the traditional sentimental range of affects.

While the ending of Rising, Falling, Hovering provides an adequate conclusion to the opening marital argument, it seems wholly inadequate to address other problems that emerge as the couple travel back and forth from Mexico during the early years of the Iraq War. These are depicted as reported conversation while driving back from the airport:

While the male figure concludes on a note of love of his past and love of his family, this apparent resolution is undercut by the hand on the wheel: the man is situated in a context where he might be relaxing but he is adding to the use of petroleum. His pose in this scene recalls the female figure filling her gas tank at the beginning of the sequence, yet her rage has given way to his serenity. The adequate conclusion to the marital narrative coexists with a continuation of the demand for oil and the destruction of the environment.16 The family's love, if it remains within the private realm, cannot serve as a model for political critique. By living out the limits of this love, Wright evacuates this key trope of sentimental literature of its imagined political potential. She does not hold onto any fantasy that emotional resolutions have structural effects.

Although Wright may decouple love from optimism, that does not mean that she forgoes optimism altogether: the female figure at the center of the poem finds some limited optimism in willful performances of happiness in the present, and the poet's drive to appreciate aesthetic beauty. Her optimism cannot transfer to a political vision; instead, it emerges as a necessary consolation for living in bleak times, the intersecting narratives of imperial war, climate change, and xenophobia. It gives a momentary and needed respite from the negative affects that otherwise dominate the poem. The final short poem in the volume reprises the opening of "Rising, Falling, Hovering," returning to where it all started: as with the poem's opening sequence, it is set in the family's backyard. Even though it is now fall instead of spring, Wright finally discovers optimism in this vision:

The private backyard emerges as a shared space linked to neighbors and the larger seasonal changes. And passive acceptance ("if it rained, it rained") leads to an overwhelming sensory experience of being "inebriated" by the rain. Wright manages this excess by shifting the aesthetic register from passivity to optimistic observation. As a symbol of death and fall, the yellow leaf may initially appear as a pessimistic symbol.18 Yet the vibrancy of the color allows it to emerge as "a spot of optimism" that participates in "a slow intensification of color" in a single, contained space time: "the lower corner of the morning." Of course, that this optimism emerges in just a "spot" emphasizes its limitations. Imagining that the morning has a "lower corner" like a painting or photograph, Wright implies that this optimism can only be perceived by willfully looking at the world through an appreciative, aesthetic lens and disregarding the system connections she dedicates earlier portions of the poem to depicting. That is, rather than the technical language of finality in "accumulated chromatic density," we see the process of "a slow intensification of color" as a richly aestheticized description.

Refusing to derive this final image of optimism from an imagination of the future, Wright discovers it in an apprehension of the present and the use of language to shift readers' focus in order to perceive both the totality of a destructive geopolitical system and the beauty of one dead leaf. While the rapprochement between the husband and wife did not adequately address any of the structural issues depicted in the poem, it does allow for one change in the arc of the book as the beauty of the image is no longer disavowed but celebrated, albeit in a limited way.

Throughout Rising, Falling, Hovering, images of vivid color repeatedly appear as demonstrations of how everyday citizens find themselves utterly incapable of realizing their desire to counter neoliberalism's devastations. Why then does Wright conclude her poetic sequence with this very image? I would suggest that it reflects her fraught and ambivalent engagement with sentimentality: while Wright does not profess any belief that poetry can awaken feelings of sympathy and take a direct role in solving political problems, she still doesn't see that as a reason to give up on poetry or shift poetry away from examining affective experiences. Instead, she strives to articulate the experience of intersecting personal and political observations while also representing what limited work poetry itself can do in that world. Because Wright does not idealize the power of love or poetry, she honors what each does in the world without expecting them to solve problems beyond their scope.

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Annie Bolotin holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. Her writing has appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Jacket2, and Boston Review.

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