“Licked by Many Other Tongues”: C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining

In 1999, Carol Muske, writing in The Yale Review, described C.D. Wright's collection of poems, Deepstep Come Shining, as the culmination of Wright's early formal and aesthetic experimentation: an "undeniably mature work."2 This characterization might be a bit surprising given that Deepstep is, in fact, Wright's tenth collection. Her work to this point had also included several collaborations with the photographer Deborah Luster, including a book and collaborative exhibition on Arkansas. What Muske identifies in Deepstep, however, is a clarification in Wright's approach and focus that holds true throughout her later books: a new set of questions about the broader forces in American life and poetry, rendered personally, explored primarily in long, collaged poems of unending investigation.

Deepstep is a book about sight. Rusty Morrison, reviewing the work in Pleiades, proposes that there are essentially two ways to read it: as "a travelogue through the South" or a "journey into perception."3 A long poem, the book operates through the paratactic arrival of images and idioms from the Southern landscape. As Muske writes, the reader's role in this book becomes to assemble these pieces into meaning, following Wright's "demonstration of the ear-eye-brain orchestra of sensory perception."4 Therefore, the range of sensory expression Wright achieves in this book is often stunning and synesthetic. Equally stunning is the experience of readerly accompaniment on this journey, which depending on one's initial position, may feel like a submersion or even a catabasis. Wright is keenly aware of the unfamiliarity of her location for many readers, as an Arkansan who spent much of her life in New England. Morrison writes, "she is enough of an outsider to understand the shock value, as well as the canny resonances that each [Southern secret] acquires when it is cast adrift from the kindred meanings and mores that keep it safe from scrutiny."5 To do so, Wright voices posits a raw hypothetical break from the self and from place, writing, "If I offer a breakfast of peasant bread and milk. If I practice the poetry of secession. If I tell you my words are not feathered."6 In many ways, I think of Wright's secession poetics as an abdication of expectation as much as a separation from place. Her poems suggest a separation from the bindings of Southern life, but also of its ways of seeing. Related is Wright's subsequent assertion about her language as "unfeathered" — a phrase laden with the weight of poetic tradition left behind. Her work is neither decorated nor condemned (as in a tar and feathering); it also takes on one of the most famous phrases in American poetry, Emily Dickinson's "'Hope' is the thing with feathers." Wright's poetry, then, does not aspire to the fame or familiarity of the canon; it offers a more raw, idiosyncratic look at a country. Wright's consciousness of the South in a national context seems inevitable for someone who lives elsewhere: addressing the namesake of a B&B, she writes, "Take a deepstep, Colonel. Your time is done gone."7 Like many from the region, Wright has to separate from her past, literary and geographical, to see clearly. The question becomes whether Wright can, or wants to.

Wright creates a separation between Deepstep's polyvocal perspectives in the present and an older self, what Wright refers to as "my back life."8 The back life has been sealed off by the act of leaving, which is reiterated throughout the book in Wright's refrain of "Love it Leave it."9 Along with this version of the speaker's life, the book also closes off its consideration of possible other life paths in hypotheticals: "If I had stayed I would have married the no-count."10 The self is torn between assertions of knowledge and an awareness of what has been lost. For example, she both claims memory of the landscape and distances the speaker using the passive voice: "More than magnolia, crepe myrtle is missed. The white bushes especially."11 At times, Wright uses this intimate past knowledge as a way of creating strangeness, as when she describes the extreme green of the landscape: "Illuminating figures and objects. Astonishing our earthliness. I was there. I know."12 At other times, she undercuts: "I don't want to dream the boneman sticking thorns in my arm. In that godless oven of a shed he calls an office. A bug got on me in there I didn't recognize."13 In some instances, Wright finds the extremity of the South "astonishing" to the experience of banality, but in others, like visiting the boneman, its strangeness moves outside of the realm of her understanding. That separation requires her to "recognize" — to come to re-know, to re-inhabit — the place that has been left, but that her body still claims.

Wright encourages the reader to enter the paradoxical depth of these unfamiliar experiences, using the unusual sequence of language that the book's title draws from. She writes, "Deepstep. People just know what they know. (Come shining.)"14 The statement's initial imperative reads as a warning, as though one is telling someone to step off a train carefully, but Deepstep is a real town in Georgia, east of Milledgeville, where a family has owned a country store for several generations.15 Its name invites one into another time of idiosyncratic naming practices. The second sentence, "People just know what they know," is a shrugged assessment of the capacity for human knowledge.16 Perhaps the most interesting element of the title fragments is the parenthetical "(Come shining)," which suggests a role for the reader disembarking in this place — that their vision will offer new light in places where it is needed.

To ask the reader to come shining into this place, wrought with complication and joy, is a reasonable impulse. The book also seems to me as much about the play of inviting the self back into a previous home as it is about inviting outsiders in. Although this book tracks Wright's first foray into this particular part of the South, she encounters these communities with the intimacy of a fellow Southerner; as the speaker encounters a sign about "feet on chairs" in an optometrist's office, her pendular memory swings to another sign from Wright's Arkansas childhood: "Please don't spit on the floor, it said in my father's courtroom."17 Therefore, while elements of Wright's project replicate the approach of investigative documentary writers like Muriel Rukeyser. Wright's documentary approach blends self-identification with encounter, discovering, in the strict application of observational distance to her own life, a stronger sense of the linguistic framework in which it exists: "By the rays of Light I understand its least parts, how my life does not appear in cursive, but in handwrit letters. Crudely executed."18 With the "rays of Light"— the capacity to see the self from afar—Wright has the capacity to recontextualize her life, but she is still the author intimately composing its "handwrit" letters. In a series of probing imagistic refrains, Wright uses another metaphor of getting to the root: that of peeling the onion. Wright playfully repeats, "Now do you know where you are," frequently pairing the question with images of onions ("Onionlight. Vidalia onions")19 or other layered foods.20 While these repetitions ask the reader about recognizing obvious cultural references, they also demonstrate Wright's thinking about moving closer to the self an ultimately disorienting process. As the book continues, "now do you know where you are" seems less like a geographic instruction and more like an invitation to the reader to accept the book's spirit of disorientation. Wright asks the reader to live with her in the motion of image and words, not in time.21

One of the greatest sources of strangeness and knowledge in Wright's work is the same: vision. (This is unsurprising from a poet who habitually traveled alongside a photographer.) In Deepstep, Wright focuses on the function of the iris, specifically — the muscle responsible for expanding and contracting the pupil, and therefore for regulating the amount of light that passes into the eye. In one sequence, which begins, "After the iridectomy," a glaucoma procedure, Wright describes the eyes' return to clarity:

As the eyes gain "recognition" — a word Wright has used elsewhere to indicate an intimate knowledge — they do not return to a previous vision, precise and simple. Instead, the seer enters a world of figurative language, in which each stanza pairs an image with its transformation on the subsequent line into a dazzling or terrifying vision.

For Wright, returning, whether to sight or to the South, is not simply re-focusing, but committing to a place through attention: what Wright calls "persistence of vision, the eyes' ability to perceive a series of still images as continuous motion."23 Poetic attention is a kind of persistence that sets these images in motion, transforming the South from a place that is stuck into one that is actively grabbing and exploding: "the kingdom of cling peaches, fireworks, red ants."24 When this poetic activation reaches its apex, these transformations have enormous resonance, as when Wright describes the magnificent scene of a lightning strike:

Each symbol here — the swan, the lightning — combines into an incident of sheer horror so powerful that it ends night. This transformation, of a single living creature into universal energy, illustrates Wright's practice of close attention as a path toward the sublime.   

Wright also uses patterns of refrain and callbacks to trace new systems of understanding, memory, intimacy, and acquaintance across the sequence. There is the repeated appearance of a chicken named Becky, for instance, and the continued mention of a white piano. The most pointed epistemological intervention is Wright's practice of renaming archetypal figures with contemporary female names (albeit ones with Biblical roots). For instance: once Wright adopts someone else's decision that the sun is named Hannah, and quotes it, then it is so.26 When the sun appears next, seven pages later, the reader recalls the new world of language: "There goes Hannah behind the cloudlet."27 With this name, biblical yet modern, the sun becomes not a distant actor, but a friend walking off into the sky.

In the longest riff of this kind, Wright gives the biblical God a new name: Louise. As with Hannah, Wright has gathered this name elsewhere — in this case, an unidentified piece of writing: "God is Louise. Is that what it says."28 Wright revels in the juxtaposition of commonplace Louise with the self-seriousness of religious language. At times, Louise simply pops into biblical idioms, as when Wright says, "God is Louise. Louise moves in mysterious ways. Coming soon."29 At other moments, Louise enters the hypothetical syntax of the sequence as the subject of questions: "If Louise is the answer what is the question. Are we stuck here or what. Anyway, the singing's not helping much."30 Perhaps the most charming quality of this repetition is that once Louise is established as a synonym for, a replacement for, capitalized God, she simply takes that location in the poem's diction and remains there: "Caterpillar fording the furrows. Mercy, Louise. If it wasn't hot hot hot. Cornlight."31 Whereas Flannery O'Connor famously describes the South as "Christ-haunted," Wright offers us a new way to conceive of its habitual religious allusion, as though everyone is constantly referring to a friend with inscrutable habits.

Taken together, this strange scenery of the commonplace provides a justification for what Wright herself has done by leaving the South: in essence, to transform and escape. Leaving releases one from any responsibility toward religious authority (nobody owes anything to Louise), from any particular ties to kin or geography. Wright latches on in several instances to animal metaphors to explain possible ways of departing. The first, the white elephant, has miraculous resurrective qualities: "At present the white elephant is extinct. That's right, she said, they might come back. O go on."32 Because the speaker herself is absent (seceded) from the South, her reappearance in a previous form, like that of the white elephant, is likely to elicit a similar expression of incredulity. But Wright does not consider her exit to be quite so clean-cut, and her discussion of the "escape" of the cicadas demonstrates as much, when read as an extended metaphor for Wright's passage:

As Wright describes her immersion in the Deep South using the terminology of depth (Deepstep), here she describes a path to the surface of awareness beyond the enveloping world of Southern life. She does so without value judgment, except for the sense in which submersion is physically and sensorily limiting. This metaphor sticks to the facts: she once was underneath, underground, and then rejoiced in finding a new world. This miraculous cycle is multiplied, again, when she beckons to the reader to join in the project of "escap[ing] our carapace" as emerging cicadas. Wright says, "Lights out, Hon. // During which, the hatching of the supernovae. Acres and acres of them."34 Earlier, Wright has referred to them by their connotative genus name, "magicicadae," and now the insects have fully enacted their magic through self-transformation into explosive stars, emphasized by the notable use of the Latin "-ae" to produce a long-distance, multiscalar rhyme. The emergence, and the connection, is fleeting and powerful. It is only through leaving whatever one's borders are that total potential can be reached.

Through her strategies of strangeness and transformation, Wright is drawing the reader into her own powerful experience of displacement in unfamiliar language. She is recreating an effect she has experienced since, and in response to, leaving the South: "I would not describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by so many other tongues."35 Here, Wright's metaphor of licking has the unabashed quality of dog love, but also the gospel-inflected tinge of licking flames. As these systems compound, her experience of encountering other ways of speech is erotic, intimate, and transformative. Therefore, when Wright invites the reader to participate in this process, offering her native idioms as a linguistic caress to the reader, it is not an invitation to selectively excerpt or bracket the South, or to be amused by its anachronisms. It is a request that the reader also allow the process having their own hearing licked by the enthusiasms of the poet.

What, precisely, is the language that Wright offers as potentially metamorphic? Wright layers voices, which range from intimate to distant, without attribution. The text contains an uncountable number of perspectives, collecting the beauty of regional Southern speech. Wright holds that each line, each utterance, has its own integrity and character: "A fact is a fact. Lore is lore. And drunk is drunk."36 In the atmosphere she has created, these classifications simply co-exist within the human conversation, not in tension. In addition, the language's velocity contributes to its disorienting effect. Wright says, "Place yourself inside the damage / Lights approaching top speed / Blur in, blur out / A need for linear relief / Everything going awful fast."37 Wright uses "awful" here in the colloquial way, but also taps into its resonance with the sublime. In order to reach awe, or transcendence, things need to move "awful fast," or we remain in our ordinary gait.

Sight is the path toward transformation we're following in this book, not the end itself. Throughout, Wright even invokes the visionaries of film and photography as her guides. For instance, she writes, "God bless the Lumiere brothers. Lead us, guide us. We are crossing over one by one."(Wright, Deepstep, 63.)) Readers of this book are crossing into a kind of love-sight that Wright conveys through anecdote and metaphor. In her epigraph, Wright frames this goal using King Lear:

Wright follows this invocation of sight another form of invocation, speaking to an unidentified other: "Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I'll never wash it off."38 Wright describes, here, a way of communal seeing, one in which the writer relies on the reader for her tools, her precision, and her capacity to see beyond the standard conception of the genre. Language moves from the page onto the body, in a place where the writer will never be able to see it, and will continue to rely on other people or services to make meaning. The reader is the carrier of the light: "Bear me along your light-bearing paths. Come shining."39 By surrendering the self to the knowledge of others, Wright suggests a way of return: "That's how I know my young feeling has been restored to me."40

For Wright, the act of seeing "feelingly" requires uninhibited attention. Wright's speaker says, "I want to / magnify     praise is the gate to enter in."41 To magnify includes both enlargement and exaltation, the combination of which brings the speaker to the  architecture of joy. Wright suggests that writing is a way to begin this impossible task, preceding a long list of ordinary delights with the following introduction: "Writ by hand. Crudely executed. In the hopeless objective of receiving the marvels that come to one by sight, sound, and touch, merely in order." The subsequent list of "marvels" includes infinitives and elaboration: "to fold / to coax (a tomato) / to keep a pet (antelope)."42 The list contains not objects or personal qualities, but actions that bring the self closer to the magnified joys of living. The transformation is away from the idea of self-containment or self-fear and toward immersion in the work of life.

I'll offer one final anecdote from Wright's text about seeing with love. Wright describes the AIDS epidemic as an instance of "wanting above all to be able to communicate, the alpha and omega of all things unfamiliar to us."43 In a wrenching passage, Wright describes the strange images seen by a young man dying, and his increasingly cobbled use of language. Amidst this storm, his mother and father affirm the young man's reality as it is. His mother affirms the existence of an unseen vision: "That's god's hand said his mother who could not see the spot. Coming to take you home." His father, in turn, shows his love through proximity:

Wright offers us here an example of how to respond to strangeness, to unfamiliarity, with not only love but magnification. This scene frames a family in maximum duress, responding to extraordinary pain-and yet, their presence, and expression of love, makes the next transformation as bearable as it can be.

Therefore, what Wright offers us in Deepstep is not a vision of the South that is polished. It's beautiful and dark. But by presenting us with intimate nooks in language and relationship, Wright gives readers the opportunity to reconstruct the strangeness in a way that affirms its transformative possibilities. When Wright describes the need to "communicate...the unfamiliar," she is issuing us an invitation to a place so intimate that the motion of language and vision stops: "Visions ringed with seas. The hatching of supernovae. Deep music. Balanced between two tones. July by lotuslight. Poetry at a standstill."45 In this space, bugs become meteors and the world is in perfect harmonic justice. But to get there, you have to let go.

Later in the text, Wright returns to her appeal to the unknown: "Lead me, guide me, to the faraway deep down. Then steal away in alligatorlight."46 The project of the alligatorlight, of seeing place entirely through its strangeness, involves both the reader and the poet in the process of discovery and praise. The poet wants to reach those depths, and they allow the reader a new opportunity to "steal away" — to take what they want and abscond onward, leaving the surface for a life submerged wholly in words.

---

Kate Partridge (Instagram: @flannelkate; Twitter: @flannelkate) is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Regis University. She is the author of two poetry collections: THINE (Tupelo, 2023) and Ends of the Earth (U. of Alaska, 2017). Her critical writing on documentary poetry and gender has appeared in Modernism/modernity and Arizona Quarterly.

---

References