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The Presentable Art of Reading AbsenceAuthor: Jay Wright American Literature Series April 2008 88 pages, Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 Paperback, 978-1-56478-498-8 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.36—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself: "Here begins the revelation of a kiosk." With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user’s guide to evanescence: "I have become attuned / to the disappearance of all things / and of my self . . ."
About the Author
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Jay Wright—poet, essayist, playwright—was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1934. He has been the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship, the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, and the 1996 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Most recently, Wright was named the 2005 recipient of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He lives in Bradford, Vermont.
Photo by Don J. Usner. |
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Praise
“Jay Wright is one of the five or six living American poets whose work will survive.”—Harold Bloom“Jay Wright is a brilliant and original poet, difficult and allusive, beating his own unpredictable path through a variety of terrains.”—John Hollander, New York Times
“Wright invites us to roam the cultures of the transatlantic world, to speak and know many tongues, to partake of the rituals through which we may be initiated into modes of individual and communal enhancement. In yet another age of great uncertainty, Wright enables us to imagine that breaking the vessels of the past is more an act of uncovering than of sheer destruction, and that we need not necessarily choose between an intellectual and a spiritual life, for both can still be had.”—Robert B. Stepto
“Wright is an intellectual poet, a poet’s poet, upon whose tabula rasa may be read influences of Dante, Eliot, the African griots, Alejo Carpentier, and Nicolás Guillén.”—Library Journal
“A major voice in American poetry.”—Publishers Weekly
More Information
Also by Jay Wright:Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms, and Praise for Lois
Here begins the revelation of a kiosk
beside the road: the white eggs
nestled there in straw
turn blue in the amber light
Make of that what you will,
say, what you desire,
a pilgrimage,
a secular mourning,
a morning given over to mediation.
This is the place set aside
for creating the body,
a source of fluctuations, unmarked
by singularity.
Call this wandering along this road
a colonization.
Somos ese quimérico museo de formas
inconstantes,
"In the duration of time . . . "
But that, along this road,
is the question,
a movement beyond anxiety.
Read again that archaeological sentence,
that syntax that determines a cursus planus.
Now through the metonymic night
I knew
The scuppered scansion,
and behind the name (Borges I name you)
lay the blue needle of namelessness,
but one must not insist on the musicality
of terms.
So must I inscribe the dog star
just there,
just where
sentences sound a diminished seventh,
though a raised sixth had been a possible
emplotment.
Let's get on with it
and, yes, getting on with it is the point.
This room is as close as you will get to sorrow.