Alicia Wright is originally from Rome, Georgia, and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Poems appear in Ecotone, The Greensboro Review, Flag + Void, Poetry Northwest, and The Literary Review, among others, and she is the recipient of the 2017 Wabash Prize from Sycamore Review. At present, she is working towards a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Denver, where she serves as Conversations Editor for Denver Quarterly.
Alicia Wright
3 Poems
A people’s way of fighting reflects a people’s way of thinking, and the lessons of fighting are very apt, in a kind of dialectical progression, to modify and refine the thinking. …[T]he pragmatic bias of American philosophy is not without significant relation to the encounter between the Monitor and the Merrimac, the Confederate submarine, the earthworks of Petersburg or Atlanta, the observation balloon
Alicia Wright
3 Poems
War Theory *
A people’s way of fighting reflects a people’s way of thinking, and the lessons of fighting are very apt, in a kind of dialectical progression, to modify and refine the thinking. …[T]he pragmatic bias of American philosophy is not without significant relation to the encounter between the Monitor and the Merrimac, the Confederate submarine, the earthworks of Petersburg or Atlanta, the observation balloon and field telegraph, General Herman Haupt’s use of the railroad at Gettysburg, the new use of mounted riflemen, Grant’s systematically self-nurtured gift for problem-solving, or Sherman’s theory of war. —Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961)
*
Enigma machine submarine encrypted is total war
initial ironclad encounter river mouth clang batter ram
mounting for to fire in all directions maximum clip
ships shooting in equivalence no damage existing circumstance
Target totality every thing around that resuscitated rust
failed fish boat torpedo deployed inward effort suffocating
floating tactic for final vision defense hunkering down
allow detonation of artifact alliance artificial factual
reconstruction reconnaissance in bodiless narrative
text allegiance friendless foeless tainted civilian implements
buckle rotting ornaments corroded soldier redox mission
Battles fought for the open field rigging reenactments
Felled infernal contraption feinting single shot at event horizon
in Dickey’s dream fragments reassemble metal magnetized
* The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 31: How someone beginning this work should conduct himself in opposing all sinful thoughts and impulses.
Subject Matter Comes Winging Towards Them *
after William Christenberry’s Palmist Building with Camera, Havana Junction, Alabama, 1980
A cell, a small box
& breadth
In the light cast
on its chosen substance,
others begin to glow
like a tripod silver
stake marking grass
height & depth
if that’s clear
We verge to a point
Patches grassless sparse
green frame
Is that a rangefinder
or a window & in it
a grid gives balance
What the frame holds
Is it a house we can walk in
A looker looking a hand
downward Is it backward
frontside or otherwise to be
looking like that
Is that a tree-of-heaven
its compound spill of leaves
a netting fringe drawing
the sideboards back in
the thicket is
no sacred grove
We can tell you what
is leaving color, order drained
did you just
structure your sight
*The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapters 37 & 39: (37) The special prayers of those who are persevering workers in the work described in this book. (39) How a perfect worker is to pray, and what the nature of prayer is; and, if someone is to pray in words, which words agree best with the nature of prayer.
Human Bone, Worn Lyre
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida
Sunk whole in flesh still
in a moment water air still
animate still currented
femur curve backbone link
is it empty the water touch it
is dark & falls away white to
black shift water cinder at
wave’s touch pieces pressure
curve spine canal brush uplift
dredged path dredged to
sand trace my hand in shore
I heard it shaped in
thought I heard
it in the hand I heard
it reencountered
in the sound between
the hearers on the
beach up in the
mouth collected in
the hand forgotten
place I heard
a self among the
upswelled things
myself a fossil out of
air*
*The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 51: We should be extremely careful not to understand in a bodily sense what it meant spiritually; and it is especially desirable to be careful in understanding the words IN and UP.
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Alicia Wright
2-3 stunning books that I've read this year:
Supply Chain by Pimone Triplett interrogates systems beautifully; The Psychology of an Art Writer by Vernon Lee is a moving, intricate record of an aesthetic mind's growth and insight, and Hélène Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing pulses into and out of the terrain of the writing self I’ve glimpsed but rarely articulated except in poems themselves.
What article of clothing from your childhood / adolescence do you still wear or would want to wear if you could?
In my adolescence (and maybe still) I was known for wearing clothes that others found, well, weird…a teacher at my conservative, southern high school said that the school adopted uniforms the year after I graduated because of me. I had a pair of jeans that fit so well, that I loved so much, that as they fell apart I hand-patched them, then painted on them, friends painted on them, and I embroidered parts of them…eventually the patches (fabric scraps from curtains, upholstery, and pieces I found in my grandmother’s sewing basket) would wear out too, and instead of ripping them out completely, I added to them.
The legs became bell bottoms with shreds and flaps. The frills on seat area looked especially wild. The first visual art I really loved was by Nellie Mae Rowe and Robert Rauschenberg, and I think I was making these jeans as a kind of rudimentary creative echo, an exercise in scrap-making I'd wear around town. I have them still, but they’re such a collage of my youth, they’re more funny artifact than wearable.