Jay Wright (born May 25, 1934) 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 called Wright "unequivocally, the greatest living American poet"."
Life and education
Wright's family origins are emblematic of the multi-cultural nature of his literary work. His mother, Leona Dailey, was born in Virginia and had both African and Native American ancestry, while his father, George Murphy, or Mercer Murphy Wright, as he was also known, claimed African, Cherokee and Irish roots. Murphy held diverse blue-collar jobs, which included working construction, driving a jitney, and working as a handyman. However, Wright grew up in foster care in Albuquerque, and moved to San Pedro, California, in his teens to live with his father.
When he was in high school, Wright began to play bass, and when Neil Arditi met him in the late Nineties, Wright was still performing as a jazz bassist. Jazz music informs Wright's work and aesthetic in various ways, in poems such as "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting", "Billie's Blues", and "Twenty-Two Tremblings of the Postulant". The poet's experience as a jazz bassist is referenced in the poem "The End of an Ethnic Dream": "Cigarettes in my mouth / to puncture blisters in my brain. / My bass a fine piece of furniture. / My fingers soft, too soft to rattle / rafters in second-rate halls."
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.
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 student at Rutgers, Wright lived in Harlem, where he met African-American writers associated with the Black Arts Movement (BAM), such as Larry Neal, LeRoi Jones, and Henry Dumas. Wright would later write the introduction to Dumas' posthumously published collection of poetry, Play Ebony, Play Ivory: Poetry. Wright has been described as a member of the Black Arts Movement, although in a monograph dedicated to the movement, only Wright's first book, The Homecoming Singer, is discussed in connection with the group. Indeed, Wright's poem "Idiotic and Politic", from The Homecoming Singer, has been read as "a virtual declaration of independence from BAM," addressed directly to LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), the founder of the Black Arts Movement.
Over the years Wright has been poet in residence at Yale University as well as the University of Dundee and historically black colleges and universities such as Talladega College, Tougaloo College, and Texas Southern University.