“There is this cave / In the air behind my body”: Transatlantic Travel and James Wright’s Midwestern Gothic

Abstract

Abstract:James Wright’s final two poetry collections, To A Blossoming Pear Tree (1977) and This Journey (1980), both describe a poetic transcending of borders that infuses the present with the past within the body of the literary traveler. What Wright accomplishes with his poetic border crossings is to radically redefine the humanity’s relationship with the world it occupies. In his later work, Wright muddles the boundaries between human emotion and place not because of an emotional catharsis at the end of his career, nor necessarily as an indication of the land as his poetic motivation. Instead, Wright indicates instead that the human is inseparable from the other-than-human, and that social division and cruelty within human society are a microcosm of the anthropocentric violence humans commit and summarily disavow.Wright’s poems ask readers to cross the anthropocentric divide that dominates Euro-American epistemology and to examine and recognize the points of contact–literary and physical–that suggest another language is being spoken by the other-than-human world. Wright’s journey through Italy opened up a geographic and cultural distance from Ohio, enabling him to collapse the temporal divide between his past and present in “The Journey”. In that moment, Wright locates the “heart of the light / shelled and leaved” (Wright 338) as he overlays the Ohio of his memory onto the topography of Italy. Wright, from the mobile position of the traveler, enacts a Midwestern Gothic poetic that ultimately displays a life-affirming language that pushes against the violent human domination of the Anthropocene. Wright, as traveler-poet, articulates fractured human kinship as the product of constructed divides between the Earth and all its residents.