Relative Poetics: On C.D. Wright, Appropriation, and the Decentered Self

Winter outside of Providence; winter in northern lower Michigan. Light like a gnat crawling the walls of a milk-glass jar — between snow and cloud cover, the sun's pale ricochets subdued. In a copy room, the small art school where I work, poem packets for adolescents whirl through a machine that inks and collates and punctures the verse. One minute I'm checking my phone — tethered to those algorithmic machines — the next on my knees, clutching the carpet, face breaking over the folds of a brown suede skirt, like a woman thrown from a Western romance, sobbing. 

C.D. Wright and I would not someday be friends.

It was the first anniversary of my MFA graduation. I was forty-one. Late to the grad school party and now out on my own again, those days found me pining for my literary kin, even before news came of her death. In truth, I'd never met C.D., never seen her, heard her read — she was not part of any program I'd attended. But I'd discovered her work shortly before I began my MFA, fell headlong in love, then written my critical thesis on One With Others, so it felt like she'd been alongside me the whole way.

Like C.D., I too had grown up in the South and settled in the North, still haunted by the soundtracks, landscapes and politics of my upbringing. Whereas she entered the world via Mountain Home, Arkansas, 1949 and settled in coastal Rhode Island, I came through Tulsa, 200 miles east and twenty-five years later, then made a home near the inland seas of northern Michigan. She was roughly the same age as my Kansan mother and Oklahoman father — she of the mountains, we of the plains. Different elevation, different landscape, same latitude.

Though the primary setting of One With Others — Arkansas Delta late sixties, early seventies — was hardly recognizable to me, having grown up in a 1980s suburb of Houston, the cadences and idioms, maybe even the rhythms of mind, and the sense of a story in hiding, called me home. Adults I knew as I child talked like that.

My father, honest lawyer, as the needlepoint in his office declared, could also spin a yarn: Goldilocks, Princess and the Pea, several versions of the Three Little Pigs, but best of all were "spanking stories": relations of his own childhood misadventures, deeds that necessitated spankings. Like the time he and his cousin painted the cellar John Deere tractor green, the whole basement washed in the trademarked enamel just as far up as they could reach. Another time, visited by a relative with an ugly black car, my enterprising father used a bottle of milk of magnesia to paint it white, making the unfortunate discovery that the digestive aid also strips paint. And once, roaming the alleys behind the town square, he and a buddy discovered half-used gallons of house paint behind a busy beauty salon. They cracked the lids and launched the drums through the back door, the scattershot splatter coating the scene, took off running of course, but no one got away clean.

Tucked in bed, my siblings and I giggled imagining: women in pink housecoats wielding scissors and rollers and combs, women swiveling before mirrors in chrome and vinyl chairs, din of gossip whirring and rising over the domes of hot air . . . before the whole score became the canvas of our would-be Jackson Pollock.

We laughed at the ladies' misfortune, laughed at our father's naughty gall; we laughed with relief: he'd done that and lived to tell the tale.

In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry explores pain's devastating power to unmake language and the redemptive power of the creative act. In so doing she deconstructs the power differential between those who are heard but not seen and those that are seen, but not heard:

That is, to have a body is to be describable, creatable, alterable, and woundable. To have no body, to have only a voice, is to be none of these things: it is to be the wounder but not oneself woundable, to be the creator or the one who alters but oneself neither creatable nor alterable.1

She explains that to be voiced and bodiless "is to have no limits to one's extension out into the world," but to have a body in continued states of alteration (via instruction, cleansing, wounding), "is to have one's sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one's immediate physical presence."2

My father's stories, told in a voice we recognized — one that also delivered instruction, admonishment, comfort, and praise — not only offered a vision of his young, fallible self, but, though he never described it in detail, a vision of corporeal (and corporal) punishment. He revealed himself — a child, just like us.

In hindsight, it is interesting to me how all the misdeeds my father relayed — or the ones I so clearly remember — have something to do with paint, with imagining things other than they were, then acting to alter them. When I grew older I learned his stories were also an alteration of reality, the glossing of a painful time, he as an adult and he as a child wished he could change: memories of a 1950s latchkey kid, often bullied, returning home to a dark house, mother at work, fatherless since the heart attack when he was five.

My father once confessed the white-washing of his childhood was deliberate. While he never hid his father's death, he did not wish to burden us with the pain it caused him then and thereafter; he wished instead to convey happy tales of ordinary orneriness.

Recently, I've come to see how, perhaps, my father's stories not only recast the landscape for us, but for him. By painting for us a more tolerable version of his world, revisioning his past in the humorous light of a child's imaginative mistakes, perhaps he commuted his own sentence, revealing himself to himself — a child, just like us.

Let me take a moment to share that I have begun this particular essay multiple times with different opening anecdotes. Each time I begin with what I think will be a perfect tale to lead you, dear reader, into the work of C.D. Wright, toward what I am calling her relative poetics. And each time the anecdote grows bigger and more complicated than I ever imagined it was, threatening to overtake the essay entire. 

Not today, I say. Not this time.

But that's the thing about Wright's work: it's not about itself, it's about us. And others. It calls us to examine our relationship to others. 

So what do I mean by relative poetics? I think I mean a poetics that privileges relationship between beings above that of an individual consciousness. A poetry that is less an expression of the self's interior than of the interiors of two bodies, what two beings make in relationship to one another. A poetry that crosses intimate distances and pronounces our edges porous, permeable, attending the way selves are entered and altered by one another, colors bleeding together. Perhaps I mean poetry by which we discover our innermost workings through porous exchange with others. 

For a time I thought this attention to the relationship between entities — this betweenness, particularly as regards societal relationships— developed late in Wright's writing life. I discovered her through the late work, first One With Others (2010) then One Big Self (2003/2007) and Deep Step, Come Shining (1998); I marveled at the lyric wingspan of those late, book-length poems, at the way the lyric was leveraged to address systemic ailments through an orchestration of voices not the poet's. As a lyric poet myself, the music was enough to carry me where it went; I did not realize until recently the absence of visual representation of the humans who populate these poems, particularly in One With Others and One Big Self. Here one finds no hyper-realized bodies restricted to the circumstances of their suffering. Was Wright taking a beat from Scarry's notes on the pain of embodiment, vesseling their voices but freeing them of her and her reader's gaze? And then there was the grace with which she interrogated her moral and aesthetic failings, her own subjectivity. I wanted to understand how she came to work these fields with such grace.

While the relative poetics that I attribute to Wright are evident throughout her work, from her earliest published poems to the last, for the purposes of this inquiry I'll focus on One Big Self and One With Others, book-length poems published 7 years apart.  These poems document the suffering of others and as such are particularly dependent on mature techniques of Wright's relative poetics, without which she risks inflicting further suffering. 

One Big Self and One With Others are particularly useful to examine in this critical moment of American history and American poetics as we discuss the uses and abuses of representation. Both books interrogate American justice via a documentary lens that integrates firsthand testimony, and in both Wright wrestles with the ethics of representation. While One Big Self offers glimpses of life inside Louisiana prisons in the late 1990s, One With Others investigates state sponsored hate crimes and other racist violence that permeated southern Arkansas and the nation in the late 1960s and beyond. As the subject of One Big Self might be the blunt instrument of the American penal system and the human lives caught in its teeth, One With Others takes as its subject the silence surrounding institutional racism.

In her Appropriate: A Provocation, poet Paisley Rekdal constructs an epistolary argument though six letters addressed to a hypothetical student, outlining risks inherent to appropriation, and its potential, but hard-won, rewards: 

Speech and stories of others comprise significant portions of One Big Self and One With Others, with the poet's relationship to others playing a critical but subordinate role. Wherever Wright's subject position as poet becomes pronounced, it is often uncomfortably self-aware and adversarial toward its various privileges, which, by extension, invites her readers to interrogate theirs. Wright positions herself, and likewise asks her readers, to witness the voices of others without judgement.  

One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, published 2003, is a collaborative effort between C.D. Wright and photographer Deborah Luster, who, in the late 1990s, convinced Wright to journey with her to three Louisiana penitentiaries in order to photograph and interview the incarcerated. The result was an oversized clothbound hardback replete with over one hundred and fifty black and white portraits of the prisoners and accompanied by Wright's impressionistic text. Luster and Wright took pains to ensure the prisoners would have autonomy over their (optional) representation. For the photographs, prisoners were provided a range of clothes to dress and style themselves in; likewise, no quotes, stories or other linguistic representation of a prisoner appeared without explicit permission. Thus, though some may argue no permission can be freely given from a state of imprisonment, insofar as it was in their authority, Luster and Wright acted to honor the autonomy of those society had by and large counted out. 

In 2007 Copper Canyon released a paperback version of Wright's text, One Big Self: An Investigation graced with but two of Luster's photographs, one for each front and back cover. Absent the bulk of Luster's images, Wright's focus on what inmates said versus how they looked becomes more apparent. Apart from elective adornments (hairstyles, tattoos), features the prisoners have chosen for themselves, there is little physical description — age, race, size, and often gender — for us to visualize. The inmates enter our consciousness less through our mind's eye than ear: 

Here Wright reveals a prisoner's distaste for being photographed, while recalling the offense of the mug shot, that moment of being reduced to height, date, id number, in a no-size-fits-anyone jumpsuit. Wright juxtaposes the humiliation of this capture with the longing for that which makes the ordinances of the body more dignified: a toilet . . . a lid . . . a handle . . . a door . . .

In The Body in Pain, Scarry decries the wounding power of description when rendered without the object's authority but lauds what she deems the reformative power of the creative act. In the case of the photographs, by granting autonomy to the prisoners with regard to clothes, styling, posture and so forth, the camera — for a moment — is transformed from a judicial weapon to a tool of self-expression. In the book, the photographs offer counter-narratives to mugshots; in them we see the grace of humans we'd like to know. In the course of their visits, portrait sessions and the resulting prints were offered to the prisoners regardless of whether they elected to appear in the book, to keep or share as they saw fit. 

On the other hand, Wright's text, while laced with the speech of prisoners (and guards), was not wholly a product of their self-expression, but a fabrication by a skilled poet for an audience on the outside — the prisoners' words forming strands of many (but not all) of the threads she would weave into a larger tapestry. Understanding that translation of the inside world to the outside world resists poetry, or any kind of relation, her intent was not simply to let each inmate tell their tale, but in the lineage of other poets before "to see if [her] art could handle that hoe."5 She writes, "Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain, what I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time." Wright continues later in the same opening statement:

A tall order. To translate "the real feel of hard time"into a language "we in the free world" can understand. And to lay out the case that our inability to understand may have less to do with our innocence and more to do with our never having been charged. In articulating her goals, Wright charges herself with a near impossible undertaking. And how does such a charge sit with Rekdal's call for a poet to subordinate their authorial entitlement to let other voices through?

Elsewhere, I have written at length about narrative strategies in One With Others, specifically atmospheric narrative:

Atmospheric narrative activates much of Wright's work, similarly deployed in One Big Self as in One With Others. Both books address systemic violence in the U.S., issues that are polarizing, traumatizing, and subject to gross oversimplification — subjects to which many readers are averse. Because it privileges atmosphere over plot, this strategy can convey complexity with a subtlety that avoids inciting a reader's aversion, a subtlety which is seductive, coaxing the reader to investigate what resists direct utterance. Just as physical description limits a character's influence, while reproducing their speech extends it, privileging atmosphere over plot illuminates forces whose influence is greater than the particulars experienced by characters.

And yet the particulars are important. One With Others is an investigation of systemic racism in America; it is also an elegy to a friend and mentor of Wright, one Margaret Kaelin McHugh, a.k.a. Mrs. Vittitow, a.k.a V, a brilliant woman of limited means and the only White person to join a particular Black protest march near McHugh's then hometown. For this she was jailed, her car burned, and she was expelled from the state, sans children, sans husband, sans means. One With Others is also the tale of the poet's twenty-first century attempt to uncover particulars regarding the events and circumstances leading to V's participation in the march. While considerable attention is paid to the horrific events that called V to action, Wright subverts traditional narrative cohesion to offer her reader an experience of story that mimics the experience of living in the systemically dysfunctional community both in the past and in the time of her investigation. A gesture that repeats in the long poem, acting as a kind of refrain are the lists of what things cost. These lists, informed by Wright's research in local newspapers, work as foils for heavier relations of violence, allowing a reader a breath of air, but they also depict barometric readings of the times: 

Here cost is calculated in terms of dollars, land, product and labor, indicating the implicit costs of human embodiment. Here, anatomical language ("head of lettuce" and "package of thighs") evokes bodies that require nourishment to survive and recalls voices earlier in the text who relate catastrophic physical suffering. Likewise, what "grown-ups know" suggests the vulnerability of children, what an adult might risk taking a stand against violence — physical harm, losing one's job — and all that might cost. Here the atmospheric narrative reveals a narrative of precarity which negates the claim that there was ever anything sure about the prices. 

Similarly, counting becomes a refrain that reveals atmospheric agents in One Big Self, a book concerned with those who, arguably, no longer count. The book opens with a litany reminiscent of nursery rhyme:

and jumps shortly thereafter to the daily counts of a prison:

Here again Wright reveals the precarity (and indignity) of embodiment, while refraining from identifying and further subjugating individual prisoners. For Scarry, counting is fixed to the landscape of emergency, and certainly in Wright's capture of the penitentiary state, the counting episodes that seem to occupy the prisoners function as a contrapuntal to the objectification of those prisoners as they are counted and discounted — the former a reclamation in defiance of all that has been taken away.11

As depictions of violence in One With Others are punctuated by accounts of what things cost, the counting spells of One Big Self — reminiscent of epigrams and nursery rhymes — provide a benign inroad to and periodic escape from prison:

Here in a list that evokes worries not limited to convicts — money troubles, abusive relationships, home security, pestilence, mortality — the distance between inside and outside begins to collapse. Recognizing oneself in such a catalog of vulnerability, a reader may also see how short the road could be between himself and prison.

Critical to the success of both One Big Self & One With Others is Wright's depiction of her subject position. Though she decenters her experience, she does not disappear, but instead reveals herself fallible before the gaze of the reader, conceding limits to her understanding and authorial skill. Elsewhere, I describe the way Wright creates a narrative parallel between her investigative journey to the southern U.S in One With Others and Dante's sojourn through hell.13 Like Dante, Wright depicts herself as tourist, just visiting. Just visiting also describes her relationship to prison in One Big Self; other privileges include being White, well-educated, financially solvent, in good health and partnered in heterosexual marriage. But whereas Dante's visitor status grants him moral high ground over the doomed citizens he visits, Wright's status has wildly different implications. For Wright's interest is not in God's justice, but American injustice, and the poisonous fruits sprung from the original sin of slavery. In her version of the descent, the "damned" who give witness have been unjustly punished; many, unlike her, are martyrs. Thus, in her parallel construction, Wright cedes moral high ground to others, and as Paisley Rekdal advocates, from her subordinate position, other voices carry through. 

In One Big Self, where it might be easy to flaunt moral high ground as a free citizen among convicts, Wright frequently suggests the difference between being inside or outside is not innocence, but whether or not one has been charged for crimes committed. Further, Wright leverages her position as one who has at least visited prison through epistles that describe the distance between those without and those within, sometimes writing as one looking from the inside out, other times from the outside in. By turns pointed, despairing, and hopeful, these letters variously addressed to "My Dear Conflicted Reader," "My Dear Affluent Reader," "Dear Dying Town," "Dear Unbidden, Unbred," "Dear Prisoner," "Dear Child of God," "Dear Errant Kid," "Dear Virtual Lifer," and "Your Honor" reveal much about the forces at work not just on the prisoners but on entire communities, economies, value structures, all of us:

Here we note the vulnerability of a town in which there are no jobs, no means to feed and clothe and house, or move elsewhere. Note too that the letter seems to be addressed to ourselves, for one may assume the offer "we" received was made to the dying town. Other letters not only offer insight into the atmospheric forces stimulating the economies of crime and punishment, they interrogate the poet's misgivings, failings, questions, allegiance(s): 

Here too, even in its tenor of futility and resignation, the subject and object positions, I and you, bleed together. The I loves what the prisoner loves, the I's confession, as a prisoner's, useless in a court of law. Despite all poetic efforts to the contrary, the I who thought she could write has failed to exculpate . . . who? The prisoner? Or herself? And the slippage — emphasized by the short, period-stopped sentence fragments — between "this grave. Your garden. This cell. Your dwelling": between what belongs to the prisoner and what belongs to the poet — a juxtaposition that asks us to consider the poem as grave, garden, cell, dwelling — such slippage troubles the distinction between inside and outside, prisoner and poet, begging the question: who could ever be"unaccountably free."

Which brings me back to Scarry: "it is part of the work of creating to deprive the external world of the privilege of being inanimate—of, in other words, its privilege of being irresponsible to its sentient inhabitants."16 And it strikes me that insofar as Wright's work interrogates relationship between beings, it is especially interested in stripping the hard enamels built up over the surface of things, the years upon layered years of paint that prevent us from seeing what we are made of. She does this through a kind of impressionist subterfuge, both systemically charged and intimate, that reveals the real feel of a place more accurately than plot points, but like pointillism, or Monet's pondscapes, deconstructs the nature of sight, rendering the reader or viewer responsible for connecting the dots, the brushstrokes — an active participant in the art-making and so complicit in the newly realized vision of the world. For, as Scarry explains, "the poet is working not to make the artifact (which is just the midpoint of total action) but to remake human sentience; by means of the poem, he or she enters into and in some way alters the alive percipience of other persons."17

As I think of the making and remaking of human sentience, I think again of my father's stories. How, in so many ways, they reflected a desire to alter the world as it was for him, while nevertheless telling us something true about his life — something that might be useful for us, might connect us — how he decentered an irrevocably personal pain in order to create for us a world that was safe for a child to make mistakes. It would take a long time for me to connect the dots between my father's pain and his actions, minor rebellions that followed him through adolescence. I am lucky.

If we are lucky, as children, adults in our world make the world safe — but not so safe that we cannot see, in ways first necessary for our own protection, then for the protection of others, that it is not. And if we are lucky we grow up.

Another reason I have remained fascinated by Wright's work is that I observed her doing something I saw few White writers doing well: interrogating racism, poverty, and other systemic ails that plague American society; decentering her own experience, decentering White, hegemonic experience, while interrogating her relationship to these ailments; rendering herself complicit; requiring that her reader, too, as co-creator of the worlds revealed, revise their relationship to others. In the closing pages of her argument for conscientious appropriation, Rekdal writes, "if you treat appropriation as a solely negative practice you ignore one of its accidental benefits, which is that it enlarges rather than shrinks our sense of connection by requiring us to interrogate the historically enmeshed relationships we have and don't have with one another."18

It is worth noting that the particular works explored here, One Big Self and One With Others, did not spring forth on a sudden political whim, but evolved from decades of writing that illuminates "relationships we have and don't have with one another." In the lyric preamble to her 1986 collection, Further Adventures With You, Wright professes herself the Arkansas daughter of county judge and court stenographer and claims "my poems are about desire, conflict, the dearth of justice for all. About persons of small means."19 And indeed, a path can be traced through Wright's earliest work, to the last, revealing work that listens for and amplifies the voices of people and even species erased by the machines of hegemony, work that calls us each to "move at whatever pace we can tolerate in the direction of our blind spot."20

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Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's (Instagram: jenssread, Twitter: @JenSSread) books include Boys Behind Glass (TRP, 2026), A Wake with Nine Shades (TRP, 2019), & Her Read, A Graphic Poem (TRP, 2021), recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters' Fred Whitehead Award and a Foreword Reviews Prize in Poetry. A poet, interdisciplinary artist, scholar and licensed builder, she lectures at the University of Michigan, spins the O is for Octopus substack, and is the biographer of CD Wright. The recipient of residencies and fellowships from Yale, Vermont Studio Center, Community of Writers, and elsewhere, she writes and teaches to commute chronic pain.

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