A Study Guide for Charles Wright's "Black Zodiac"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Charles Wright's "Black Zodiac," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535819558

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Black Zodiac

Charles Wright

1997

Introduction

Many readers find Charles Wright’s poetry difficult to understand or even inaccessible. Readers often assume that Wright’s work is going to tell a story or be a neat, precise account that makes sense. This poet’s work is, instead, like a loosely woven rug with threads of images, ideas, and descriptions winding in and out of one another, sometimes correlating, sometimes not. Black Zodiac is a typical meandering poem full of stark imagery and common themes that appear in the majority of Wright’s poetry. A poem in the follow-up collection to Black Zodiac, Appalachia, illustrates what Wright’s poems are usually about.

In What Do You Write About, Where Do Your Ideas Come From? the first two lines of the poem answer the questions: Landscape, of course, the idea of God and language / itself, that pure grace. Indeed, these are the principles addressed in Black Zodiac landscape, God (and death), and language with each one standing alone as a theme, but also blending into one another, creating a mesh of nature, religious thought, and the ability to express ourselves. While it would be misleading, as well as futile, to analyze Black Zodiac in terms of what it tells us from beginning to end we can examine it in light of its pieces; the glimpses of lucid description and the obscure strings of images and broken thoughts. What this poem is about, then, is one man’s attempt to express what he essentially feels is inexpressible and to describe that attempt through discourse on landscape, God, and language