SOURCE: “Charles Wright,” in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 388-97.

In the following essay, Vendler examines Wright's meditative approach to history, time, art, and the physical world in Zone Journals.

Lashed to the syllable and noun,                                                             the strict Armageddon of the verb, I lolled for 17 years Above this bay with its antimacassars of foam On the rocks, the white, triangular tears                     sailboats poke through the sea's spun sheet, Houses like wads of paper dropped in the moss-clumps of the trees, Fog in its dress whites at ease along the horizon, Trying to get the description right.                                                                                 If nothing else, I showed me that what you see                                                             both is and is not there, The unseen bulking in from the edges of all things, Changing the frame with its nothingness. 

(“A Journal of True Confessions”)

Restless and observant senses provide the words for...