The Presentable Art of Reading Absence

The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself: "Here begins the revelation of a kiosk." With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user's guide to evanescence: "I have become attuned / to the disappearance of all things / and of my self ..." This is not the postmodern removal of subjectivity from artistic creation, nor is it a motioning toward death or finality; it is, instead, the literal removal of a self from noisy, populated ruins and its return to being.

Jay Wright--poet, essayist, playwright--was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1934. He has been the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship, the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, and the 1996 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Most recently, Wright was named the 2005 recipient of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He lives in Brad