Bird in a Corner

After Charles Wright's reading last week, the Seattle Arts & Lectures staff and several of the audience members and Charles Wright himself ended up at a party in an artist's studio on Ninth Avenue, in that vacant part of downtown near the Braille Library. The studio belonged to Randy Hayes, whose white walls were pinned with gray and green works depicting cars and trees in rural towns, each of the works slightly abstracted because they were tiled, each piece of the larger picture a painted-over photograph. With the pieces slightly misaligned, the curve of a car or the edge of a tree in these works was not always seamless, and occasionally a larger picture was interrupted by a part depicting, for example--and unfitting the rest of the picture--a dead bird.

There was a dead bird elsewhere at the party, too: black, unpretty, smaller than a crow, stuffed. It presided over a food table on which stood a tray of dressed-up deviled eggs, a pitcher of carbonated water, bottles of red wine and sweating bottles of white, huge grapes, sesame seed crackers, sliced baguette, walnuts, a purplish pâté loaf, glistening dolmades, a glistening slab of salmon, oily black olives, a wedge of brie, a half wheel of hard cheese, and a bowl of mashed-up red-orange pimento cheese spread (sharp cheddar, diced pimentos, mayonnaise, a dash of cayenne; it's a Southern thing, and it was one of the party's selling points). "I told Charles, they have pimento cheese," said Margit Rankin, Seattle Arts & Lectures' executive director.

Wright, who was born in the South, was spreading pimento cheese onto a bread slice when it occurred to me that there's something birdlike about Charles Wright, and not just because of his helmet of silver hair and his reedy legs, his physical presence all limbs and posture, but also because of the high-up, watchful quality of his poems. They are studies of rural stillness ("Easter again, and a small rain falls/On the mockingbird"--I didn't even intend this, but there's another bird--"and the housefly,/on the Chevrolet/In its purple joy/And the TV antennas huddled across the hillside--") and numinous observations of the Earth from somewhere above it ("At night, in the fish-light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts/To stay warm, and litter the fields").

In person Wright has a voice so low it's barely audible. His work, too, is restrained: it resists imposing a narrative on the act of seeing. "I can't tell stories," he said at his reading at ACT Theatre before the party. "I'm the only Southerner in the history of the South who can't tell stories." His work is, primarily, accumulated images. At the party, I couldn't stop staring at Randy Hayes' bird's-eye view of cars floating in the Mississippi Delta; houses and hills in the distance; that misplaced bird in the corner. It looked like a Charles Wright poem.

frizzelle@thestranger.com