Jay Wright (poet)

However, in discussing Wright's first five volumes of poetry, from Death as History to The Double Invention of Komo, Gerald Barrax sees a thematic and technical unity, describing these books as "so remarkably unified and consistent in subject, theme, tone, and technique that they might all constitute a single work." Indeed, Wright himself has suggested that his books up to Explications/Interpretations (excluding the disowned chapbook Death as History) constitute a unified, ordered series, “a dramatic process, with all its tensions and resolutions.” Furthermore, the back cover copy of 2007's The Guide Signs: Book One and Book Two suggests that that volume, together with the eight volumes brought together in Transfigurations: Collected Poems, should be read as a single work.

In 1971, Wright's first full-length collection of poetry, The Homecoming Singer, was published by Corinth Press. This book included poems including "The Homecoming Singer", "The End of an Ethnic Dream", and "An Invitation to Madison County". In this book, Wright "attempts to bridge past and present and meditates on feelings of exclusion from society or personal identity using geographical settings as backdrops for the autobiographical persona’s spiritual, emotional, and intellectual growth." The poem that opens the volume, "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting", has a narrator who is mostly detached from the scene described in the poem and then becomes ironically part of "the uncertain, inconclusive encounter between man and God in a Black church.". The poem suggests an ambiguous, questioning attitude towards traditional religion that is revealed in the congregants' Africanization of Christianity: "They have closed their night / with what certainty they could, / unwilling to change their freedom for a god." Critical reception of The Homecoming Singer was positive, and Wright was immediately recognized as a major voice. The New York Times hailed it as "a tense and memorable collection", in which Wright "is making his way among troubled alternatives", in search of an independent black voice. However, in contrast to Wright's later work, the themes of this book have been described as "conventional".

Wright's first publication was a 22-page chapbook entitled Death as History, which contained 15 poems, published in 1967 by Poets Press. Although this collection has never been republished, some of the poems were included in Wright's first full-length book, The Homecoming Singer. Wright himself has disowned the book in print, saying that it was not intended as a unified work, but merely as "a group of poems selected from those [he] had on hand". At the time the book was published, Wright was employed on a tour of black schools in the South for the Woodrow Wilson-National Endowment of the Arts program, and Carolyn Kizer thought he ought to have a book of poems; therefore, she helped him publish the book with Diane DiPrima of Poets Press. In the poems that were not republished in The Homecoming Singer, the language, imagery and sensibility have been described as romantic and conventional in nature. In other poems from this collection, however, the tone, style and subject matter are not dissimilar to those found in poems published many years later as regards their concern for religious experience and the exploration of African myth and religion.

Upon returning from Europe, Wright studied comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rutgers University. He received his BA from Berkeley in 1961, and his MA from Rutgers in 1967. In 1964, he taught English and medieval history for a year at the Butler Institute in Guadalajara, Mexico. After this experience, he returned to Rutgers to finish his MA and begin work on a PhD, but left before completing his doctoral degree.

As a young man, Wright played minor-league baseball, appearing in 76 games over two seasons (1953–1954) with the Mexicali Eagles of the Arizona-Texas League and the Fresno Cardinals of the California League. In 1954, Wright abandoned his baseball career to serve in the U.S. Army medical corps in Germany until 1957; in this period he was able to travel in many countries in Europe.

Jay Wright (born May 25, 1935) is a poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim, with some comparing Wright's poetry to the work of Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. Others associate Wright with the African-American poets Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson, due to his complexity of theme and language, as well as his work's utilization and transformation of the Western literary heritage. Wright's work is representative of what the Guyanese-British writer Wilson Harris has termed the "cross-cultural imagination", inasmuch as it incorporates elements of African, European, Native American and Latin American cultures. Following his receiving the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 2005, Wright is recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry in the early 21st century. Dante Micheaux has calle Wright "unequivocally, the greatest living American poet"."