By Way of Gratitude for CD Wright, Her Books, Her
Poems
I’ve been
thinking about missed connections since CD Wright’s death. I adore her work, and
books like “One Big Self” and “One With Others” are mentor texts. A while back,
as I worked on poems from the perspectives of various people, I actually hoped to
meet CD Wright and talk about her process of gathering materials to represent
others’ stories through poetry. We emailed back and forth. She was traveling. I
was teaching. Then I didn’t follow through and we never did connect.
Her new book, with its gloriously
long-winded and whacky title – “The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El
Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring,
Midnights, Fire & All” – underscores what we will miss. I’m particularly
taken with the piece, Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the
World’s Biggest Retailer.
It’s not news that poetry is missing
from the ordinary places of our lives – supermarket, drug store, subway stop, airline
terminal, hospital corridor, lunch room, nursing station, police station, radio
station, state house, big box store, you get the idea. Numerous books and
essays have studied and theorized as to why.
“Distraction trumps concentration,”
CD postulates, “and nothing is more distracting than buying a ginormous pallet
of stuff.” And so, as I was running the
other day, this idea came to me. What if I could get poems in the corridors of
commerce? Thus – the Big Box Poetry Project. Wherein I’ll disperse poems daily
throughout April in various places of business so that they might, “enlarge the
circle,” as CD writes. Perhaps these poems, placed among soda packs or
toothpaste cartons or palettes of mayonnaise might, “avail themselves of the
shrapnel of everything: the disappearance of cork trees and coral, the
destroyed center of Ramadi, the shape of buildings to come, the pearness of
pears…”
Here’s the deal: I’d like your
help. Send poem suggestions and let’s build a list. Poems that “keep a big box
sense of humor at the ready,” as CD suggests in her book, or just your favorite
poems. During April, I’ll put the poem in a place of human endeavor, in the
hopes that someone, while shopping or waiting for the bus or dentist, might
pick up the page, read the poem, and consume its words and ideas. I’ll even
post photographs!
So, if you want to contribute a previously
published poem – of your own or written by someone else – send me a note and I’ll take
it from there. I don’t want to miss another connection.
