Spring had come
to Cincinnati, and so had C.D. Wright. Straight into town from Arkansas via
Rhode Island. I was not yet a student at the University of Cincinnati, so that
I have an Elliston story to tell from that spring is even better I think. The
Elliston poet, in that era, would teach two classes a week for five weeks.
Lesley would be off in McMicken (this long, narrow, lasagna-like building with
two lions out front) and I would be looking for news: “So what is C.D. Wright
like?” She had them writing an abecedarium. I found out that she liked Bob
Dylan. Everyone likes Bob Dylan. But I found out that C.D. Wright might have
liked Bob Dylan with the same intensity that I liked Bob Dylan. (I was then
working on an advance elegy for him, never completed. I must have on some
undetectable level wanted him to live so he could sing through more rags.)
I am from southeastern
Ohio. Cincinnati is in The West. Folks from southeastern Ohio are denotatively
Appalachian, but they are not southern. But, they might be mistaken for being
southern. (Once my mom visited the northern city of Columbus, OH—birthplace of Jim Cummins—and was
questioned intensely by some salesman about her accent.)
C.D. Wright is
southern, legitimately. She also learned from The Waste Land that the connections between things don’t need to be
made clear. I wasn’t a student, but I was already a student. I was some kind of
lurker, wishing I could gain some entry into the class.
And then one day
she said something like, Does anybody know anyone who records things? I wasn’t
in the room.
But that was me.
I was all about recording things. I had a Pro Tools rig and had made it a goal
to be some kind of homemade recording artist. (That sounds like I was baking
bread.) When Lesley came home with the news, I affirmed that I could do it, while
in some way I also probably tried to communicate that I wasn’t a pro. Shyness
coupled with intense interest makes for one sorry dude.
Wright needed to
record four pieces from her recent collaboration with Deborah Luster called One Big Self. The poem
and photographs lyricized and documented life in the Louisiana prison system. Through
anaphora, Wright becomes a sort of shorthand, contemporary Whitman:
Count your fingers
Count your toes
Count your nose holes
Count your blessings
Count your stars (lucky or not)
Count your loose change
Count the cars at the crossing
Count the miles to the state line
Count the ticks you pulled off the dog
Count you calluses
Count your shells
Count the points on the antlers
Count the newjack’s keys
Count your cards; cut them again
She writes of
the poem:
What
I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time. I wanted it
given to understand that when you pass four prisons in less than an hour, the
countryside’s apparent emptiness is more legible.
We lived on
Salutaris Ave. And when C.D. Wright walked down that street in the super daylight,
I remember thinking about walking away. I was a bit shy and of course anxious.
No need. We climbed the stairs. The “studio” was on the third floor. She met
our spaniel, Bailey. It’s never unexpected when someone is nice to your dog,
but it is nice. Bailey is prone to spinning (she’s still around, spinning) and
would’ve spent the session elsewhere.
In Cincinnati
that spring we had a plague of cicadas. You have heard that word; you may have
seen that bug in person. You’ve certainly seen that bug plague poems. But those
bugs did come up out of
the ground, and if you were to experience them, you’d ban them from poems.
They made the city into a motor. In 2004, in Hamilton County, they were a brood
labeled specifically Brood X.
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I didn’t figure
there were cicadas in Louisiana, at least not when C.D. Wright and Deborah
Luster visited the prisons. So I taped the third story windows with egg crate
(I had inherited it from somewhere). I would be paid by Brown University for
this work. There could be no cicadas.
We would record
four excerpts of the poem. The poems were to be played at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New
York. Gallery goers would pick up a phone and hear the poet’s voice. There
could be no cicadas.
I had handed her
CSNY’s Déjà Vu to use as a lectern,
or stand. Unfolded, it is a perfect surface. She asked me who the bass player
was? It was Greg Reeves, a former Motown bassist schooled by James Jamerson.
Reeves was possibly as young as 15, though more likely 19. Stills would ask him
to leave the group when he began to believe he was an Apache witchdoctor. I
wonder what might have brought that on.
We began
recording. I think she wore headphones so she could hear herself. This is
recommended of course. There’s no narcissism in hearing what you are doing. Or
perhaps I wore the headphones.
She read parts
of the poem. There were lines that she skipped. She would cut whole sections.
The slashes over the type spoke to both a sense of improvisation and
preparedness.
It was a sunny
day outside. I could hear the cicadas. But C.D. didn’t hear them, nor did she
hear the phone ring—a landline—that would have set the poems far from Angola.
But then one of the opening lines of the poem reads:
Count
the times your phone rings
We did multiple
takes. I looked for the tracks last night, but my old Mac can’t seem to find
the data. I can see though where one track was over 15 minutes long. And I seem
to remember her reading the line “This is where you enter the eye of / the
fart” numerous times.
A week or so later
we had dinner at Arnold’s
Bar and Grill. I think she ordered a Caesar salad and fried green tomatoes.
Lesley probably had something with chicken on it. I had salmon en croute.
Arnold’s is not the kind of place where you order salmon en croute. They are
known for their Greek spaghetti. I am not sure what makes it Greek. It’s an
olive oil and garlic sauce. You can have it with bacon or olives, or both.
Over dinner, she
talked about T.S. Eliot freeing everything up. I wonder what he would think
about her prison poem, or Deepstep Come
Shining. Depends on which Tom she would get.
I recall saying
something about feeling like a “citizen” again since I was (temporarily,
at least) no longer in graduate school. She seemed taken aback by this, and said: “I
am always a citizen.”
I remember
feeling like I shouldn’t have said I wasn’t a citizen. I definitely shouldn’t
have ordered the salmon en croute.
Wright was good
fun while on her post as EP. She was good for beers at the Mecklenburg Gardens. Like most great
poets that I have had the fortune to meet, she was a normal person. (I recently
drove Sharon Olds to a dinner. She was wearing a Cabela’s
hat. Normal, folks.)
Wright had
everyone over to her hotel suite a few times. I remember trying to get iTunes
to work so we could listen to music. She was reading the fat Dylan biography—the
one with shades on the cover—that I hadn’t yet read.
A month or so
after she left Cincinnati, I got a check from Brown University. It was for a
couple hundred bucks.
This was all
nearly ten years ago. They seem like bright days. There was always so much
sunlight. I am not just being wistful, though that would be right.
And there were cicadas: a different kind of “one big self.”
Joshua R. Butts received his doctorate in
English from the University of Cincinnati in 2009. His first poetry
collection, New to the Lost Coast, is forthcoming from
Gold Wake Press. His poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Quarterly
West, Sonora Review, and other places. He teaches at the Columbus College of Art and Design.