The Poetry of Jay Wright
The poetry of Jay Wright is a profound exploration of identity, spirituality, and cultural heritage, particularly drawing from the mythologies of West African traditions such as those of the Dogon and Bambara peoples. Emerging in the early 1970s, Wright's work reflects a broader African American cultural renaissance, yet it diverges from the typical binary themes by incorporating influences from African American, Hispanic, and Native American cultures. His early poems often take a biographical approach, while his later works engage deeply with anthropological insights, elevating African cosmologies to a literary status akin to that of biblical and classical sources.
Wright views poetry as a means of personal discovery and communal understanding, which he articulates through lines that resonate with the natural world and spiritual introspection. His seminal work, *The Double Invention of Komo*, is a cross-cultural epic that captures a Bambara initiation ritual, infusing it with a syncretic worldview that values both Western and non-Western philosophical perspectives. Wright’s poems encourage readers to engage with spirituality as a pathway to address social issues, emphasizing that understanding one’s spiritual essence is fundamental to personal and societal well-being. Overall, Wright’s poetry is characterized by its intellectual rigor and its quest for meaning beyond materialistic pursuits, making it a significant contribution to contemporary literature.
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Subject Terms
The Poetry of Jay Wright
First published:Death as History, 1967; The Homecoming Singer, 1971; Soothsayers and Omens, 1976; Dimensions of History, 1976; The Double Invention of Komo, 1980; Explications/ Interpretations, 1984; Selected Poems of Jay Wright, 1987; Elaine’s Book, 1988; Boleros, 1991
The Work
In the early 1970’s, when many African Americans adopted such aspects of traditional African culture as wardrobe and hairstyle, Jay Wright chose to explore the complex mythologies of the West African Dogon and Bambara peoples. Early poems in The Homecoming Singer are often biographical, but later poetry, drawing upon Wright’s study of anthropological works, approaches these African cosmologies with the gravity that English-language poets previously have accorded to biblical and ancient classical sources. A full appreciation of The Double Invention of Komo depends upon the reader’s willingness to investigate these sources, but many of Wright’s shorter poems in Explications/Interpretations and other books are accessible to more casual attention. In every case, Wright views poetry as a personal means of learning about spiritual and communal realities. “My speech is a plumb line/ to the echo of the earth” he writes in “Inscrutability.”
Raised in New Mexico and Southern California, Wright was directly influenced by African American, Hispanic, and Native American culture and his literary search for identity avoids the binary black-white focus of much African American literature. In his notes to The Double Invention of Komo, Wright asserts that “history and poetry have the same creative ground” and are tools for individual discovery that “permit a man to know himself.” As a result, Wright’s poetry is an ambitious and demanding intellectual exercise, demonstrating his belief that traditional African cosmologies and rituals effectively define the relationship of the individual to society and the natural world in ways that are unavailable through European philosophy. Well read in religion and modern science, Western and non-Western philosophy, Wright requires his readers to see each of these as equally complex and valid approaches to understanding reality. The Double Invention of Komo is a crosscultural epic that dramatizes a Bambara initiation ritual, recording Wright’s intellectual quest and introducing his readers to a syncretic view of the world.
Wright is primarily a religious poet—in the sense that his works seek to engage the spiritual dimension of human life—and even his scintillating love poems seek “the gift of being transformed.” What there is of social commentary in his work may be found in his suggestion that actively pursuing an understanding of spirituality may be the most effective way to deal with social problems. He writes in “Journey to the Place of Ghosts,” “It is time for the snail’s pace/ of coming again into life,/ with the world swept clean,/ the crying done.” In Wright’s poetry, even the most minute achievement of personal intelligence counts more than Western notions of material progress.
Bibliography
Barrax, Gerald. “The Early Poetry of Jay Wright.” Callaloo 6 (Fall, 1983): 85-101.
Kutzinski, Vera M. Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolas Guillén. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Stepto, Robert B. “After Modernism, After Hibernation: Michael Harper, Robert Hayden, and Jay Wright.” In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Art, Literature, and Scholarship, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1979.