The Dialogue of the Eye: Wright, Truitt, and Martin

Not to know but to go on.
Anything is a mirror.
There are two endless directions. In and out.1
— Agnes Martin

In The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (2016), C.D. Wright writes that poetry is "not a particularly collaborative art — an acceptable occupation for the eye, to have a dialogue with its own mind."2 In a covert pun, Wright aligns visuality (the eye) with the lyric voice (the "I"). But even if Wright claims that a poem's visual form is "not particularly collaborative," I venture that through her use of the space of the page Wright's poetry is in active dialogue, not just with the poet or reader's self, but with the works of specific visual artists. In her writing on poetics, Wright references the works of painter Agnes Martin and painter-sculptor Anne Truitt, two artists associated with the Minimalist school. While Wright has published books with her collaborator and friend, photographer Deborah Luster, and this relationship has served as the occasion for many discussions on the relationship between word and image in her poetics, the relationship I aim to excavate here is one born not out of a personal friendship, but forged from an process of activated ekphrasis — that is, not simply a literary description of a piece of visual art, but an interactive intermedial dialogue.

When I write poems, the "reader" I hold in my mind is most often another poem. Poems read poems without reproducing them. Can poems read paintings? Perhaps what I am venturing here is that the ideal reader (expansively conceived) of certain C.D. Wright poems might be an Agnes Martin painting, or an Anne Truitt column. Or, inversely, Wright fashions poems that are themselves abstracted viewers of Martin's grids and Truitt's columns, poems that enact formal resonance with these visual works without aspiring to any representation or illustration of these works' admittedly elusive "content." Martin's paintings offer a quiet, orderly expansiveness, images that reward close attention to subtle variation. Truitt's columns of color bring together formal discipline and emotional vibrancy. In a seminar at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2016, poet Jane Mead suggested a connection between Martin's grid paintings and Wright's navigation of the space of the page. This essay develops this idea further, doing the awkward work of constellating a trio of creators — C.D. Wright, Agnes Martin, and Anne Truitt — in search of an opening, however tentative, toward a better understanding their use of form and its relation to their creative processes.

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How does poetry's visual form (how it looks) interact with its production (how it was made) and its process of signification (how and what it comes to mean)? Or, put another way, what does the shape of a poet's work reveal about her poetics? Wright's oeuvre is ripe for exploring this question for two reasons. First, Wright, more than many, writes about poetry in her poetry, many of her books serving as ars poeticas in fits and starts. Thus, we have the benefit of observing her use of form even as she comments, sometimes explicitly, upon it. Second, Wright often employs multiple configurations of text within the same poem or poetic series. Unable to make a general statement about the "meaning" of such configurations, I am convinced that Wright conceives of the page visually; her manipulation of the page constitutes a carefully modulated formal exercise. It is tempting to place Wright in league with a slew of poets that resist the tyranny of the left margin (Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker), but I argue that Wright, to a greater extent than most, is working the page for visual, rather than primarily sonic, effect. By varying the spacing between lines and phrases, as in the titular poem of Rising, Falling, Hovering (2009), Wright experiments with density and saturation. Her placement of text forms a visual composition — at times orderly, at times chaotic. Taking on visual weight, her stanzas must contend with and balance against one another. In The Poet, she writes of this process of experimenting with visual form as one that works against a unitary lyric "I"; that is, it is an exercise in negation:

Admitting she uses the tab key — "hit tab" — in her process of composition, Wright reveals she is responding to an underlying structure of the page, a grid that directs more organic movement into half-inch intervals. These visual maneuvers, even if they are not "radical," provide openings — silences, but also thresholds, pathways, opportunities for turning toward and away — which Wright takes not as the opposite of poetic work but its constitutive negative element.

***

Writing in the 1970s about the art world's recent fascination with the grid, Rosalind Krauss declares: "the grid announces among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse." It has "wall[ed] the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defend[ed] them against the intrusion of speech."4

Agnes Martin wrote that her paintings appeared first in their perfect form in her mind; she sought (and failed) to recreate that perfection on her canvases: "One must see the Ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory of perfection."5

These statements — equating the grid with a static, ideal form to be protected from the "intrusion" of language and the movements language demands — sit in tension with Wright's poetry, her love of process and being in process, her disambiguation between imagination and perfection. Perhaps it is Krauss's proposed equivalence between literature and narrative that is her mistake. Perhaps it is her dismissal of silence as something "hostil[e] to literature."

As if explicitly correcting Martin and Krauss, Wright declares: "Poetry, I have tardily determined, not only seeks silence, it aspires to silence. I mean not that it aims for perfection but for an opening, an unofficial opening, a zone wherein the language affords unexpected associations and alternative outcomes."6

In a pattern familiar to Wright's reader, she restates herself, never satisfied with the singular articulation, the single way of seeing. She corrects further, more incisively: "The call of the writer is the same as the call of the reader. Take me to other planes of myself. Agnes Martin said her paintings were for people to look at before daily care strikes. Suppose reading and writing do their best work after daily care has struck (and struck hard)."7 If we imagine Martin's journey to "planes of myself" as those that transcend lived reality and sociality (before daily care), Wright remains convinced that writing's transport to other planes is not an escape from the imbrication of the world and its relations, but a mode of exploring those forces of daily care with greater depth and duration.

***

When Wright addresses Truitt and Martin in The Poet, she groups them with Jean Valentine, whom Wright also considers a kind of minimalist, a quiet poet who "organiz[es] her emotions," who "is not interested in working it through by means of her story. In words, narrative is ultimately inescapable, but scattered elements of it will get the job done." Wright: "These three are artists who have spent their longish lives finding their proportions, setting their corners, mapping, if you will, the clear lines of an imagination."8

Sometimes we are quickest to notice in the poetry of others a gesture consonant with our own work; we've all been guilty of it, responding to the facet of ourselves we see in others, or writing toward the thing we wish we could achieve. Perhaps I am doing it now, as my own poems seem pleased with their own ritual silences, employing caesuras to create floating islands of text on the page's visual plane. When I write about Wright writing about Valentine, she and I inevitably write about ourselves, but I hope not only that. After all, Wright is someone who recognizes herself as one with others, and someone "interested in exploring the possible ways by which you can make meaningful contact with a consciousness other than your own without surrendering the possibilities to an obvious common ground."9 Such a poetics moves in suspicion of any self-projection that threatens meaningful relation.

In a grid, each of a square's sides sounds at the same volume. Martin's grids may have come to her as squares; but when they entered the world they lost that perfection, itself a kind of oppression: "My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn't set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power."10 Perhaps this another way of saying that "Anything can be a mirror" but nothing is a perfect one. Repetition, even in image, imperfect — lines not replicating but multiplying. Martin, again:

***

A pirated scan of a German edition that collects Martin's writings, SCHRIFTEN. The original book must have had glossy photo inclusions — color reproductions of her paintings scattered throughout, a yellowing frontispiece: a photograph of her, young, unsmiling, hair pulled away from her face, sitting in front of one of her painted grids. The photocopier's ribboning light has distorted the finish of the photograph: moiré lines spread across Martin's face, contouring the canvas behind her. She is gridded again in this reproduction, the light's movement captured as it captures her. The volume's editor Dieter Schwarz comments on Martin's resistance to submitting writing for the collection: "She is skeptical about the manuscript that has become conclusive by being reproduced."12 Here, however, the reproduction has marked itself as an iteration, making the image both more fluid and less transparent. Less conclusive, more true. Fixity, ironically, is something Martin feared in language, and not in the image. Language, the medium that unfolds in time, dynamic in and of itself, for her still threatened enclosure in a way her paintings did not.

***

Anne Truitt connected her sculptures to memory, to a model of experience that builds on silences, gaps. From her June 15, 1974 entry in Daybook: "such play with scale . . . has drawn my attention to the intervals between events, to what is happening when 'nothing' is happening. The meaning of two hands clapped is fixed in the soundless interval between the claps. Just so, the meaning of our experience is held in the infinitely short intervals between our sensory perceptions."13 If her artist notebooks tracked the passage of time in its moment, her sculptures were meant to transport the beholder between moments, a present sensory impression opening into memory. This traffic between sense and memory recalls time's behavior in Wright's essays, something to be dipped in and out of, reflected on before giving rise to new clarity. Unlike Wright, Truitt's writing carries dates (the calendar is its own grid) but both women disrespect the regimentation of the calendar's forward march.

I read about Truitt's love of wooden sculpture's vulnerability to moisture's rot and time's erosion ("Wood is haunting me"), in an ebook on a laptop screen, divorced from paper's wood pulp, page breaks lost and variable, her words unchanged from August 19, 1974.14 "Read," in the previous sentence, I write in both the past and present tense.

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Truitt and Martin have both been associated with Minimalism, but their relationship with the movement is contested, not least because of their gender. Truitt's expressive use of color, deemed "feminine" in contrast to the more "aggressive" and "far-out" work of her male contemporaries by critic Clement Greenberg (and he was her advocate!), distanced Truitt from "orthodox Minimalist art."15 Minimalist icon, Donald Judd, espoused a brand of literalism — art that emphasized the materiality of the object at hand — that clashed with what Miguel de Baca calls Truitt's transportive "memory work," that is, her gravitation toward "the Proustian idea that an object in one's focus could unleash a powerful return to the past through memory, which in turn brings a fresh, even critical, attention to present experience."16 Truitt's reputation as a life writer, gained through the publication of her artist journals Daybook, Turn, and Prospect, also put her at odds with Minimalism's rejection of artist biography: "Minimalism . . . equated its own intellectual seriousness with an abstention from biographical information on the premise that knowing a given artist's expressive intent negates the character of what was advertised as essentially expressionless art."17

Agnes Martin was certainly a more central figure to Minimalist painting, claimed by others as a progenitor of the movement, but a "reluctant" one according to her biographer Nancy Princenthal.18 Indeed, in interviews Martin seemed to soften the Idealism that dominates her writings, a softening which she contended distinguished her from other Minimalist artists:

Both women inhabited the art world's geographical periphery, living and working far from New York City (a commonality with Wright who had deep ties to rural Arkansas). Martin, originally from Saskatchewan, spent most of her time at her home and studio in New Mexico; Truitt spent years in Japan and then lived and worked in the Washington, DC area. Living there, Greenberg deemed her "hardly any closer to . . . New York City than she was in Tokyo."20

***

Grids invite doubling. Artists use them to visually repeat, to reproduce an image accurately; or to scale without distortion, rendering a figure larger or smaller. John Elderfield writes that Minimalism's use of the grid deviates from this tradition, "not working in a fully pictorial way"; the Minimalist grid instead "signals art's surfaceness."21 That is, Martin's paintings do not use grids to correct proportions of other figures or to accurately render objects; they are not tools of scale. In her hand, the grid is its own end: "The organization does not function as the invisible servicing of the work of art, but it is the visible skin."22

Grids invite doubling. Elderfield names the grid's potential to "cohere a surface" and to "fracture" it. Grids render and grids rend. He proposes two kinds of grid structures — cumulative and subtractive. The cumulative grid brings together modules of space to create the picture plane whereas the subtractive grid "divid[es] a preexisting surface."23 Elderfield recognizes some slippage between these two, but ultimately places Martin's work in the subtractive camp. By distancing Martin from the cumulative grid, he also distances her work from its "potential temporal suggestiveness;" moving from module to module in a cumulative grid encourages a narrative formation.24 However, in her writing about her paintings, Martin claims they are dynamic entities: "My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything — no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn't think of form by the ocean."25 Merging, breaking down, the cyclical movement of the ocean that goes neither forward or backward but entertains a constant, unsetting current. Returning again to Martin and her two "endless directions" — in and out, the tidal pull, the painting as a mirror, another self staring back from the other side of the grid. If Martin's work does not encourage movement across the picture surface, perhaps it encourages movement into it. The flatness a gateway rather than a destination.

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The title of the catalog for the exhibit Lucy Lippard curated at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadephia in 1972 is "Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids." How many repetitions before you get rid of something, inject something new (fracture); how many before you grin giddy (Martin's finding in artwork "very small gesture of exultation")?26 To elide is to fracture and cohere. Where is the hard edge of the muted paintings? How does color disrupt? In a moment of rare ideality, Truitt wrote in one of her artist notebooks, "This winter is bringing me to a confrontation with the truths behind truths, like the color I know to lie just beyond color."27 Her process literalizes a version of this — Truitt creates the saturation of color on her columns by layering many thin washes, laying color behind color — but beyond it?  Wright was so drawn to Truitt's description of her process as "laying down color" and "lifting color" as to cite it.28

Wright's use of the grid of the page differs from Martin's grid of the painting: the grid is not the poem, but what allows the poem to unfold. Not the skin of the page, but a way of measuring language, a groove for new pathways to extend. Is Wright's grid a cumulative one? Certainly, blocks of language build and build. But Wright is also no stranger to fracture; she cuts up the page into silences. If she moves across, she also hovers.

***

Rising, Falling, Hovering, the title of Wright's both 2009 Griffin-Prize-winning collection and a long poem within it, could easily be read as a description of the placement of text throughout its pages. While working in a recognizably lyric mode, the poems alternate between stacked columns of short lines, long lines that make abundant use of the caesura to create a scattering of text across the field of the page, and condensed prosy blocks. It is always tempting in the wake of Olson's "Projective Verse" to read a poem's visual form as a primarily sonic cue that coordinates breath and articulation, but this explanation is not sufficient to Wright's use of the page. Certainly, her caesuras do some of this work, and she admits as much in The Poet when she evokes "breath, cadence, phrasing." But her hanging indents? The alternation between taking up an entire page-spread's space and then only a fraction of it?

Martin's work approaches light; as previously noted, she writes about moving beyond form as she moves through form: "My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything — no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form."29 Truitt's work approaches color; again, moving beyond form through form:

In her manipulation of the space of the page, what is Wright approaching? What is she setting free? Is this a freedom from the grid or through the grid? From the page or through the page? "Honestly if she were able she would haul in one of the more animate clouds."31

When I was preparing to write this essay, I thought back to my first experience of reading Rising. I remembered the impression of the language moving like a flock of murmuring birds, gathering in clouds, diving in unison, dispersing across fields to alight and rest, rising again in a wave. Upon rereading, I was surprised to find that this was not merely my impression, but an image Wright had provided for me:

Reading this poem, I cannot tell if I am falling or rising — drawing near or moving away from the point of the thing — a remarkable achievement since books have taught us since childhood to read across,  to read down the page. This opening image of the book's title poem sets a scene, a couple talking to and past each other: "she had been thinking about what he said." The "she" reflects on their conversation and looks for subtext among the text — reading between the lines — "sifting for some interlinear significance." But the looseness of Wright's line, its floating quality, encourages both a forward and a backward movement. I can comfortably attribute this "sifting" to the birds that follow. Their wings rise to the line before them or settle upon the one after. That is, the starlings, which are indeed the birds best known for murmuration, can be read both to be "sifting for some interlinear significance" and to "accumulate chromatic density" — creating meaning by both subtraction (sifting) and addition (accumulating). Birds are often allegorical, the loud symbol of the poem within a poem, and I am inclined to see a shade of this here: the birds in their motion mimicking the poem by weighing ambiguity, measuring intensity. The dark birds on the "pallid grass" evoke the black text on the white page — their accumulation itself a kind of sifting for meaning between the dispersed lines — some interlinear significance that emerges like Truitt's color as "counterpoint to the structures of fences and the bulks of weights." The poem encourages this hovering and repeated evaluation, listing to one side, righting oneself, proceeding. In their cloud, these birds are silent, becoming visual presences rather than sonic ones. Birdsong not the figure the poem evokes but their visual constellation, that is itself a pun on the echoing sound that is barely audible, a murmur(ation). Their image brings us back to the couple's conversation, not what was said, but the murmur of the unsaid emerging — "his voice spectral / as he looked             his look spectral as neon in fog."33

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The grids are not about territory. The columns are not about monumentality.

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Regarding Minimalist art, the preceding statements are not controversial. But regarding a poem? I am tired of the assumption that the long line is shouted, the mistaken equivalence between extension and loudness, that is between volume (of sound) and volume (of space). This is, of course, a holdover from Whitman's expansionist ecstasy and Ginsberg's adoption of the Whitmanian line as he railed against Moloch with apt stentorian rage. What would it mean, in contrast, to quietly persist, to move inward rather than outward? Up rather than out? To build upon and upon and beyond. To hover. In Rising, Wright's long lines broken as they are by caesuras are quiet, cloudy and clouding, the words in their settling create an atmosphere. The extension of the line serves as a reminder of the distance between people, the interruption of the unsaid in our conversations rather than a conquering of that distance. At the end of the first section of the same poem, the line lengthens, not in triumph, but in apology:

The "you" and its "clockwork disciplines" is incompatible with the poetic project. There is no time for poetry, the business of the world makes no space (time) for it? Or, as poetry repeats itself, "What is said has been said before" — it moves outside of time, it is of "no time"?

The demure resignation of this line, and its admission of poetry's tenuous place in the world, is countered elsewhere in Wright's oeuvre, where she takes on a more Whitmanian air. In The Poet, Wright commands her poems with the anaphoric imperative "That they extend the line into perpetuity/ That they enlarge the circle . . . / That they clear the air . . . / This is our mind. Our language. Our light. Our word. Our bond. / In the world."35 The confidence here enthralls, and the shift to the plural pronoun is a marked one. I do not mean to imply that Falling is all soft tones. It has rage; it has smoke, bodies. Still, I appreciate its suspicion of itself — its continued and attentive reevaluation — its tendency to move "Like Something Flying Backwards." Its optimism comes in flickers and, at the very end of the book, as spots shining "through a slow intensification of color in the lower corner of the morning."36 I trust the poet who admits that poetry can and cannot give protection, its salvation attenuated. In one of her columns of text, Wright does not shore up the poem as monument (which braces against the erosion of time), but offers a spindling line, running down, vulnerable to history's violence:

Wright acknowledges the limits of language's tentative experiment even as she seeks to move beyond it. A face "unfurls furls." The Martin sentences I cannot stop repeating: "Not to know but to go on. Anything is a mirror. There are two endless directions. In and out."

"My work is anti-nature . . ." Martin wrote elsewhere; "[n]ature is conquest, possession, eating, sleeping, procreation. It is not aesthetic, not the kind of Inspiration I'm interested in."38 Martin contrasts "inspiration" with what she calls the "ideal in America": "the natural man / The conqueror, the one who can accumulate / The one who overcomes disadvantages, strength, courage."39 Even if I have reservations about Martin's commitments to ideality, "classical art," and her pursuit of "perfection" as notions tied up with universality (itself often a white mythology), I appreciate Martin's suspicion of mastery, her rejection of territory as such. She is not acquisitive, preferring to break down the forms that would allow for property in the first place. Martin takes up space but does not own it. She affirms the necessity of making bad work, of working through, again and again.

Truitt's notebooks dilate in a similar suspicion of mastery. More revealing in its biographical details than Martin's gnomic writings, Daybook shares a process of living — humble, moving, frustrated, inspired. She was motivated to start her journal after a moment of great professional success, the premiere of a retrospective at the Whitney in 1973, but with this success came the feeling of being lost within herself. Not knowing herself as an artist, being painfully aware of her own work, she describes feeling drained, fallow of inspiration, her hand becoming yet another piece of meat deprived of creative gesture. She writes of her financial insecurity, her debts. One of her early entries recounts the story of an old woman lost in the desert who succumbed to the elements, becoming part of the landscape that exceeded her. Truitt talks of being lonely without her sculptures. They exist independently of her; they keep her company, of her but beyond her.

Wright's discussion of her own poetic process is likewise provisional and social: "Poems are my building projects. I inhabit them for the time it takes to have every corner lit, and then I clear out, taking what I think I need to start over. . . . Sometimes I work in discrete units; other times I work on an extended complex. . . . More are welcome than can fit inside."40

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Rosalind Krauss identifies the origin of the modernist grid in the windows that populated Symbolist art: "the material presence of their panes expressed by the geometric intervention of the window's mullions."41 Windows rehearse a play between border and void, reflection and transparency, transport and containment. If Martin's grids are a window to an ideal place of beauty beyond form, and Truitt's sculptures are colors that affectively transport the viewer to memories past, Wright's grids — that is her pages — instead offer a window into this world, a peek through a screen door, a "sifting" inflected by language and its sediment: "Her vocabulary refined by years of looking through the screen at the lilac that absorbed her witness."42 The singular lilac, a plant and a color. "And color," Truitt writes, "is the least material of matter: vibration as light. A touch."43 Through form and beyond it.

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Kelly Hoffer (Bluesky: @kellyrosehoffer, Instagram: @kellyrosehoffer) is a poet and book artist. She is the author of two full-length collections of poems, UNDERSHORE (Lightscatter Press, 2023) and Fire Series (Pitt Poetry Series, forthcoming 2026), and a microchap, the photo I don't write about (Tilted House, 2025). Her essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Jacket2, Cultural Critique, and Inscription, among others. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Poetry. Learn more at: https://www.kellyrosehoffer.com/

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