570
PARTISAN REVIEW
movies; desire for instant recognition; the instant lives our lives
have become through television; the current popularity of the
" lyric" poem; it's too hard and it takes too long. One might also
add that
nothing
is a poem the way the
Commedia
is a poem or
one poem. It is the great triptych of literary history. My three
little mice huddle in the vast shadow of its wings.
Remnick:
The fifth section of "Tattoos" is one of your most
skeptical poems on religion.
Wright:
Not only this poem, but almost all of
Bloodlines
and
Hard Freight
are about my ten-year struggle with the
Episcopal Church, from age six to sixteen. In this poem I faint
at the altar as an acolyte because they wouldn ' t let you eat
before you took communion. I must have been eleven or twelve
and I just sort of keeled over. I was all right but that all seemed a
little foolish to me. A ten-year-old can't eat before he takes the
wafer and the wine? There's not much point in getting into that
but it has given me much subject matter and has directed my
life to a great extent; which is to say, had I not been forced by my
mother (my father couldn' t have cared less) to go to Sunday
school and to church, I would not have the nature I have now.
It's a little more of a spiritual nature than it might have been
otherwise and I'm glad of that. Also, going to Sunday school
was good because you learned the Old Testament, which you
wouldn't have done otherwise. You come to know all the
wonderful stories and you get
to
read the Bible. The greatest
translation that I know of is the King James Version of the
Bible. So my work is full of Christianity and ex-Christianity.
It's funny . I woke up this morning, remembering my last
dream. A man came up to me in a Volvo agency and said, "You
look like the kind of person who would contribute to this
cause." And I turned around and he handed me these papers
and said, "Here. Take this. I know you 're a person who loves
his mother. You'll contribute to this, won't you? " I said,
"What's this? Oh yes. Maybe so. How would I make out the
check?" And he said, "Just make it out to Jesus." I said, ''I'm
sorry. I can' t do that. Please excuse me." I felt a very terrible
coldness in the pit of my stomach knowing that I was doing
what I shouldn't have done according to what my mother
would have thought. So one grows up and one moves away but
