This tests my limits of badness in another way--



This time, I have left my body behind me, crying

In its dark thorns.

Still,

There are good things in this world.

It is dusk.

It is the good darkness

Of women's hands that touch loaves.

The spirit of a tree begins to move.

I touch leaves.

I close my eyes and think of water.

--James Wright, "Trying to Pray"

This kind of poem was such a stylistic influence on so many people when I myself first began writing, the decade of the 70s. This epoch was also the heyday of kahlil Gibran, and some of the language comes uncomfortably close to that. The particular kind of speaker of this poem is found in many others of the period, by everyone from Simic to Orr and Kuzma. There's something oddly unidiomatic, "translated," in the tone, as if the speaker were not native speaker of English. Nobody talks like that: "I touch leaves." "It is the good darkness."

So there are aspects of the poem that come up against my own ideas of "acceptability." Its sententiousness and simplified language, for example. This badness is potentially interesting, but only if I conclude that it's not wholly on the side of badness. Otherwise there would be no limit testing at all. It's a very beatiful poem in some ways. You can see why this particular mode became influential, and remains so to this day.