The Medium-Close Poetics of C.D. Wright’s One Big Self

The lines, "That's hard / I don't go there," appear twice, near the beginning of C.D. Wright's One Big Self: An Investigation, a poetic collaboration with the photographer, Deborah Luster, that uses fragments from interviews, epistolary poems, found text, and landscape poetics to document the prisons of Louisiana.1 Wright's project juxtaposes the experiences of incarcerated people with a framing lyric "I," whose outside perspective as a "resident of the free world" observes the widespread effects of prisons on people and places.2 The refrain, "That's hard / I don't go there," may seem antithetical to such an endeavor, given the typically revelatory and intimate nature of documentary poetics. For instance, Adalaide Morris suggests that the genre of documentary poetics "consists of . . . purportedly objective records of facts or events but uses those records to support, elaborate, or advance an often passionately held partisan position."3

My approach here wonders if One Big Self can be one of these "records of facts" that argues a "passionately held . . . position," if it describes some facts as too hard, and won't "go there"? What does it mean for the lyric "I" (operating in a documentary mode) to state that some elements of incarcerated experience are too hard for her and, therefore, too hard to translate to the reader, perhaps, too hard for both the speaker and the reader to understand? To read One Big Self as it situates incarcerated people's words and experiences in relation to the lyric "I," the reader, and in relation to Louisiana's landscape and history — it is necessary to reframe the genre of documentary poetics, especially as worked through in Wright's poetry.4

To do so, I propose a new term for the style of witness that Wright employs in One Big Self: medium-close poetics. One Big Self creates this sense of medium-closeness between speaker and subject by placing the intimacy of the lyric speaker and language from interviews with incarcerated people against a stark background of found text (particularly of legal and historical fact) and sensory descriptions of prisons and their environmental impact.

The term medium close-up is used in film studies to describe a shot of a figure from the chest up; the subject is "fairly large," but does not take up the entire frame.5 When a medium close-up is used, the camera does not fully encroach upon the subject's face to capture the details of her expression (as a close-up would). Instead, a medium close-up allows the subject to remain anchored in her context. Unlike a long shot, which shows figures daunted by their landscape, the shot still retains focus on the subject. By taking up C.D. Wright's documentary poetry in One Big Self,we can see how the medium-close view gives the participant autonomy through context and defines limits between the observer and the observed. Discussion of scale in cinema has primarily focused on the close-up, often in Classical and contemporary Hollywood films. Gilles Deleuze reads the close-up metonymically as offering "an affective reading" of the whole film, while David Bordwell sees close-ups a marker of the "intensified continuity" style of contemporary Hollywood,"limit[ing] the expressive resources available to performers" by denying their bodies presence on screen.6 I follow Mary Ann Doane's recent suggestion that the close-up in early cinema also points to the screen and the image's boundaries from our reality: "The close-up of early cinema seems more acutely to evoke the possibility of breaching the limit of the screen, the protective barrier of representation."7 Considering this sense of the close-up's potential for imposing representational limits (and the medium shot's introduction of landscape and context), it seems fitting that Wright's collaborator, Deborah Luster, also selects a process of photography more typical of early photography and the nineteenth century — uncoincidentally, the advent of our current "redemptive suffering" model of incarceration in America — than the twenty-first.8

Deborah Luster's silver emulsion photographs of hundreds of incarcerated people, which accompany the poetic text of One Big Self, originally published in 2003 by Twin Palms Press (before its publication in a solely text format in 2007 by Copper Canyon Press), are often shot from this medium-close perspective. The majority of these medium close photographs in the earlier, largely photographic text, fully titled One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana — a title that lacks the legal language of "An Investigation"which seems integral to the politics of Wright's work — are shot against a black background. The black background, a negation of place and the conditions that produce feeling, becomes a space through which to examine context and contrasts in experience, all of which are filled in by Wright's poetry.

Wright describes the vision for her poetic project in the introduction to One Big Self: An Investigation. This vision is distinctly anchored in her subjectivity, which admittedly lies in "the free world," the world outside of incarceration, yet reaches toward the embodiment of landscape and the representation of idiom. Because she defines her poetic intent in the via negativa, "Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not anathematize," readers have a sense that Wright is working experientially to "unequivocally lay out the real feel of . . . the hard time," which is distinctly not her own.9 The use of the via negativa also resonates with photography as a sister art: photographic negatives and her collaboration with Deborah Luster. The word "unequivocally" acknowledges the pitfalls of mediated representation that might riddle such a project. Wright's solution is the fragmentary use of interviews, "the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech," which fall outside of dominant rhetoric surrounding incarceration, "mass media myopia," as well as an attempt at embodying "the fecundity of Louisiana."10 Undoubtedly, the poet bearing witness is aligned with the "we in the free world," implying also that her reader is part of this "free world." For Wright, distinguishing between guilt and innocence, our presence in the "free world," has little to do culpability and everything to do with the legal system, its racial and class biases; "we" in the "free world" were simply "never charged" for our committed crimes.11

Before discussing how a few poems in One Big Self create this medium-close mode of bearing witness, I will ground my thinking about the medium closeness of Wright's text in a few sources. Roland Barthes's theories of photography, Stanley Cavell's filmic ontology, Donna Haraway's situated feminist epistemology, and Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda's interrogation of the racial imaginary, all suggest that distance tempers intimate revelation and lyric vision.

Both Barthes and Cavell mention space and doubt, between what is contained and what is not in, cinema and photography. For Cavell, framing and the reality that exists outside of the frame, what the frame negates and contains, is one of cinema's most significant features because it makes space for interpretation: "The camera has been praised for extending the senses; it may, as the world goes, deserve more praise for confining them, leaving room for thought."12 While Cavell sees the medium as creating this space for thought because of the role of framing (how a subject is situated in relation to her context), Barthes makes a distinction between the perceived certainty of the photographic image and the more capacious, but insecure status that language confers upon the subject: "The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer but only and for certain what has been . . . . No writing can give me this certainty. It is the misfortunate (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself."13 Wright's medium-closeness occupies these positions. This medium-closeness is the "room for thought" that the frame leaves for what cannot be perceived by "we" in the free world. Yet, from the standpoint of the "free world" looking in, Wright's lyric "I" supplies this doubt, the "voluptuous pleasure" in environmental, contextual detail.

But what of the legal and scientific "investigation" in the book's full title? Where does this aesthetic uncertainty meet observational rigor? The term "an investigation" can be legal, journalistic, philosophical, or scientific. As an investigation, Wright's project can be understood as a fluid continuation of American poetry's documentary tradition and its insistence on social justice from its origins in Charles Reznikoff's Testimony and Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead.Both texts incorporate court records, transcripts, and interviews, while Book of the Dead includes scientific data and medical reports.

With this history in mind, I suggest that Wright's medium-close docupoetics ought to be considered adjacent to the type of truth pursued in feminist standpoint epistemology as it meets the law. Donna Haraway's feminist epistemology prompts scientific investigation to realize that "location, positioning, and situating" are crucial to the work of experimenting and observing; Wright's desire to make the "fecundity of Louisiana travel right up the body" resonates with Haraway's argument for claiming knowledge emerges within an "always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body," which is contrasted to "a view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity."14 Wright's "investigation," like Haraway's "knowledges," is one of many possible investigations into the subject of mass incarceration. This is a docupoetics of medium-closeness, striving for a "real feel," conjured in the reader, rather than a scientific or legal positivism.

To enact a medium-close poetics as a white experimental poet from Arkansas writing about incarcerated people in Louisiana — the vast majority of whom are Black — Wright contends with the racial imaginary in the act of sympathizing. One Big Self precedes Rankine and Loffreda's The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, in which the authors elucidate a need for boundaries between white writers and the imagined experiences of people of color: "We acknowledge that every act of imaginative sympathy has limits. Perhaps a way to expand those limits is not only to write from the perspective of a racial other but instead to inhabit as intensely as possible, the moment in which the imagination's sympathy encounters its limits."15 A key question that provides a transition from theorizing medium-closeness into its poetics is whether Wright in her poetic project acknowledges these limits and inhabits them.

To answer this question, I read the poem "Black is the Color" which brings together Wright operating in a lyric mode and fact functioning as found text. The poem is situated midway through One Big Self: An Investigation and appears as enclosed lyric poem that uses fact to push up against lyric sensuality and description:

In the first stanza after the title/first line, the poem shifts line by line through a gestural, metaphorical mode, emphasized by the undetermined deictic "that," in "Of that big old ugly hole," which then moves into the mode of fact and investigation: "Of 77% of the inmates in Angola." While the reader cannot know with certainty which "big old ugly hole," the speaker refers to with such forceful consonance, the word "hole" presents several possibilities, both literal and metaphorical. In the context of prison, a literal interpretation combined with the deictic, "that," suggests a meaning in circulation since the sixteenth century to mean "dungeon," particularly "one of the worst apartments in the Counter prison in Wood street, London," that has evolved in the lexicon of the modern prison system to mean "solitary confinement." The figurative definition of "hole" can simply refer to any "position from which it is difficult to escape."17 The next line moves almost satirically into a traditional lyric mode, intimately addressing the reader, "Of the color of your true love's hair," but this line also belongs to an Appalachian folk song popularized by Nina Simone. The connection to Simone, alongside the statistics in the surrounding lines, makes this a simultaneously close (intimate) and distant (contextual and public) line. The last lines of this stanza push the reader towards both intimate, tactile sensation and the brutality of public execution, "Of the executioner's corduroy hood," a reminder that Louisiana retains capital punishment.

The first stanza in its call-and-response form (as each line responds to the title "Black is the Color") inscribes each of these facts and objects within the color black. In doing so, the white poet employs a verbal form core to Black musical traditions from spirituals to Simone's jazz cover of "Black is the Color."18 Rather than simply state statistics demonstrating mass incarceration's racial inequity and create images voicing the horror of solitary confinement and execution, Wright's poem departs the call-and-response to follow the executioner's black "corduroy hood" home in its next stanza. By splitting the first stanza's call-and-response form from the executioner's home in the following one, the poem visually renders Black lives segregated from the white imagination's sympathy through incarceration.

The tension between public and private, fact and the lyric, culminates in the last stanza, whose altered language starkly delineates the limits of sympathy. Though it refers to "the executioner's corduroy hood," this stanza switches back into a closer, lyric mode and reveals the home of the executioner, where he places his hood: "hung on an ice hook / in the tool shed." Visually and sonically, the lower-case lettering, short lines, and monosyllabic words belong to the literary history of objectivism or imagism. This transition — from the found language of fact and the spectacle of execution into the domestic sphere rendered simply where the reality of a parent's occupation is kept "away from the kids" — reveals a dynamic irony between the public, at a distance, and the private, close-up. Wright's medium-close poetics in One Big Self excel at exactly this type of juxtaposition. Stylistically, the transition from Whitmanesque, but self-ironizing anaphora into an imagist mode, reveals a tension between the reality of race as a decisive factor in incarceration and the white poet's need, in Rankine's words, to reveal the executioner's "limits of sympathy." The executioner continues doing his job despite implicitly acknowledging its brutality by hiding the reality of his work from his children. Blackness and incarceration mark the limits of the executioner's sympathy.

Given that the collection is made up of revelatory lines from interviews with incarcerated people, which Wright transcribes into her poetry and pairs with the lyric I's disclosures, at certain points the book risks a conflation of perspectives — a hazard of navigating distance and the medium-close. Wright often cites direct speech from her recorded interviews with incarcerated individuals using dashes. The lyric speaker riffs on their words with her own indirect discourse that speaks to the topic at hand. Take these lines on love, which, without attribution, blur the lyric I and recorded "we":  "We're both here because of love. — Zabonia of herself and her best friend / I am highly hypnotizable / I would wash that man's feet and drink the water."19 As Zabonia empathizes with her best friend, implying that their crimes were ones of passion, the speaker pivots to her own confession: that her kind of love blurs the lines of self-degradation and self-sacrifice, a kinky Mary Magdalene. But this discomfiting closeness is tempered by distance in Wright's medium-close documentary poetics. Distance appears in the poem's deep sense of human and environmental context. While Wright uses statistics to give us the big picture of mass incarceration's racial disparity in "Black is the Color," she zooms out to survey the prison system's ecological damage elsewhere in One Big Self.

The ecopoetics of One Big Self, whether imagined or observed in Louisiana, create an opposing sense of distance, imperative to Wright's medium-closeness. To give a sense of how both imagined and observed environments function as distance in the text, I will first read the imaginary landscape of "the free world" before comparing it with the poem "Dear Dying Town," one of the many epistolary poems in One Big Self.

The untitled poem involving an imagined landscape has two distinct sections — "if I were you:" and "If you were me:" — a play on empathy's limits. The stand-alone line that divides these sections, "I don't have a clue, do I," acknowledges and enforces the sympathetic limits of the poetic imagination, a key function of the medium-close. Also, the section, "If I were you," is substantially shorter and only descriptively functions through metaphors like "the eye of the fart" and "the dirt is gumbo:" "Screw up today, and it's solitary, Sister Woman, the padded dress with the food log to gnaw upon. This is where you enter the eye of the fart. The air is foul. The dirt is gumbo. Avoid all physical contact. Come nightfall the bugs will carry you off."20 In contrast, the section "If you were me:" is idyllic, substantially longer and offers sensory experience as knowledge, marking Wright's experiential claim to knowledge in the context of "the free world."

The prose poem in the section "if you were me" reveals the speaker's privilege: her total freedom and joy. The number of conjunctions that begin sentences in this prose poem — "If you wanted blueberries you could have a big bowl . . . If you want to kiss your kid you can. If you want a Porsche, buy it on the installment plan " — demonstrate that each of these acts, eating "blueberries" or "kiss[ing] your kid" are conditional: the condition being freedom, possible only for the speaker and people living on the outside.21 The prose poem's sensory language voices the speaker's depth of knowledge in the free world, but addresses it to the reader, creating a synesthetic account of the environment meant to be shared: "Septembers you can hear the blues jumping before seeing the water through the vault in the leaves. Watch the wren nesting in the sculpture by the shed."22 The rhymes clustered within the paragraph, "If you want to kiss your kid you can. If you want a Porsche, buy it on the installment plan," create a sense of caprice, a joyful occasional rhyming that ends in an appreciation for place and routine: "Walk the dog to the bay every living day. The air is salted."23 The prose poem's concluding line, "The mornings are free," points to two differing senses of freedom. The first is the sense of "free" in the world outside of prison, downtime or "free" time away from work. Though for the speaker, even the work includes, "so many good books you can't even begin to count them."24 Instead of having the mornings "free," the prose poem ends in a different type of conditional statement: "If I were a felon I'd be home now."25 This phrase negates its own conditionality through both thematic and linguistic imprisonment. Unlike the authentic language of the previous conditional statements, this one is confined in the stock language of real estate marketing found on billboards across America, brimming with ersatz joy: "If you lived here you'd be home by now!"

While the environment of "if you were me," demonstrates the boundary between the speaker's experience and the experiences of incarcerated people, the epistolary poem, "Dear Dying Town," addresses how prisons affect the landscape of Louisiana and NIMBY-ism masquerading as environmentalism. One Big Self is full of epistolary poems and direct address, often to the reader ("My Dear Conflicted Reader," and "My Dear Affluent Reader,"), to prisoners ("Dear Prisoner," and "Dear Unbidden, Unbred") and, in the last poem ("Your Honor,") to the legal system. But "Dear Dying Town," takes the form of direct address to a place and the society it harbors. The implied situation that "Dear Dying Town," refers to is a town hall meeting, indicated by the collective "we," during seeking a solution to an economic crisis in  an American manufacturing town: "the box factories have all moved off shore."26 The prose poem begins with two purely descriptive statements in juxtaposition with a semicolon, one of economic fact — "the food is cheap;" — and the other of natural observation: "the squirrels are black." This creates a sense of place as determined by a combination of the economic concerns and environmental ones.

The prose poem, full of such juxtapositions via semicolon, sets up a disturbing moral equivalence for the NIMBY-ish townspeople between projects with greater and lesser ethical and environmental costs: "but we have an offer from the Feds to make nerve gas; the tribe is lobbying hard for another casino; the bids are out to attract a dump; and there's talk of a super max."27 While this chorus of townspeople mentions that "the light reproaches us," speaking to light pollution as an environmental cost of any of these businesses, there are undoubtedly different levels of ethical problems with each. Their false equivalence, demonstrated through the semicolons in this prose poem, creates a critique of white NIMBY-ism. The two greatest of these costs to the world outside of the small town, the "nerve gas" and the "super max," begin and end the list of possible sources of revenue. However, for this chorus, a super max, chemical weapons manufacturing, a dump, and "the tribe . . . lobbying for another casino" are held in equivalence, despite their varying impacts on the local landscape and on society outside of the town. NIMBY originated in the US just prior to Reagan's presidency, during which America's incarcerated population nearly doubled; the word describes an isolationist attitude that privileged communities are able to uphold: "An attitude ascribed to persons who object to the siting of something they regard as detrimental or hazardous in their own neighbourhood, while by implication raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere."28

The hierarchical thinking of the lines, "In the descending order of your feelings / please identify your concerns," also reveals how feeling often does not correspond to social impact. The casino likely is less harmful to society than the super max, but the town may desire it less. The postscript, "PS.: Remember Susanville, where Restore the Night Sky has become the town cry," conjures the real town of Susanville, California where its own maximum security prison has rendered the landscape unrecognizable, creating an eerie sense of ever-present daylight.29 The encapsulating rhyme, of "Night sky" and "town cry" cordons off the town and the poem from the rest of the text, like the relationship between the town, the landscape, and the prison.

Whether critical of white NIMBY-ism like "Dear Dying Town," filled with environmental description and the poet-speaker's positionality in "if you were me:," or a juxtaposition of found fact, interview, and imagined detail in "Black is the Color," One Big Self enacts a documentary poetics of medium-closeness. In a tricky balancing act, the book, at its best, renders both "the real feel of the hard time" and provides autonomy and space for individual experience through its emphasis on fact and environmental detail. The tension between Wright's lyric mode, at points bordering on confessional — "For whatever it's worth / my friend here her mother was murdered / sleeping in her own bed" — and the distance that landscape and found text provide, conjure this medium-closeness.30 The notion that position and boundary are integral to an ethics of witnessing is not unprecedented; One Big Self, however, lyrically explores and recognizes these limits and suggests that poetry offers the possibility of a simultaneously distant and intimate view that other modes of visual documentary historically have not.31 I leave you with these lines from One Big Self that gesture toward the reparative potential of such an approach to documentary poetics: "the ineffable joys for those who / unfeignedly love, transcend the documentary constraints / pledge mercy etc."32

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Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth (Bluesky: @dr-b-i.bsky.social‬, Instagram: @zbillin) is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Texas State University. Her scholarship examines the intersection of cinema, new media, and literature, particularly poetry. Prior to her appointment at Texas State, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities funded by the Mellon Foundation at the University of Texas. Her writing appears in Feminist Media Histories, ASAP/J, and Literature/Film Quarterly, among other venues.

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