On Tuesday, Apr. 9, the English department and the Blackburn Fund will host a poetry reading by Blackburn Visiting Poet Jay Wright and a play reading the following night. Wright is widely hailed as a prolific American voice and has won numerous awards, including Yale University’s prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry.
“Jay Wright is a great American poet,” Harold Bloom, literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, wrote in an email. “He is difficult and requires erudition and close reading, but he rewards these overwhelmingly.”
Wright has built a career out of illustrating the connection that all people, regardless of heritage, share. His often-allegorical depictions of human existence draw upon a massive accumulation of cultural knowledge. Over the years, he has researched the practices, beliefs and mythologies of numerous African tribes. His exploration culminated in the publication of The Double Invention of Komo, a volume of poems that depicts the initiation rights of the Bambara people of west Africa.
“He is a student of world religious cultures, steeped in African-American history and literature, in African literature, mythology, religious thought [as well as] in the Amerindian and South American influences he absorbed growing up in New Mexico,” Joseph Donahue, professor of the practice of English at Duke, wrote in an email.
Donahue, who is organizing the readings, considers Wright to be an important African-American voice. Wright has been celebrated for his ability to capture the experience of exclusion and the process of historicizing human experience.
In his poem, “The Albuquerque Graveyard,” he laments the way that memorializing the dead has become a hierarchical, political statement, and the tendency to give more significance to some lives than to others. In “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting,” he speaks of the difficulty in aligning a belief in God with a conviction for personal freedom.
“It’s been said that poetry is not made from ideas, but from words,” Donahue said. “Which is not to say that Wright’s poetry is not brimming with ideas, drawn from mathematics, music, mythology and just from living in the world, but it is the music of thought that he offers, the interweaving of mind and heart in the measures of poetic speech.”
It is often remarked that Wright is a poet who writes for other poets, one who attracts a reader that is more an artist than a critic. Poetry readings offer a rare opportunity to experience writing from a different receptive position than personal reading does. The listener’s critical gaze is not only affected by the language itself but also by the performative aspect of the social setting.
“Readings can be quietly transforming events… I count the chance to hear the writers of one’s time [to be] one of the great experiences a college or university can offer,” said Donahue.
Poetry readings are events that the English department is especially dedicated to providing. “This is the second major reading sponsored by the English department this year, following upon the appearance of Lydia Davis last fall, and it reflects the department’s commitment to writing as a living, breathing, joking, lamenting, chatting, philosophizing and sometimes singing verbal art form,” Donahue said.
But Wright’s accomplishments are not solely limited to poetry. Before becoming a writer, he played professional baseball for the San Diego Padres, and he is a distinguished playwright and essayist as well. In all of his endeavors, Wright strives to illuminate the tethers that bind people together. Donahue refers to an anecdote that Wright uses to summarize his artistic goal: “A young man, hearing me read some of my poems, said that I seemed to be trying to weave together a lot of different things. My answer was that they are already woven, I’m just trying to uncover the weave.”
Jay Wright will read on Tuesday, Apr. 9 at 7 p.m. in McClendon Commons. The following night, there will be a reading of one of Wright’s plays at 8 p.m. in the East Duke Parlors.
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