Jay Wright

Jay Wright Poems

Jay Wright Biography

Jay Wright (born 1935) is an African-American poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he currently 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. Wright's work is emblematic of what the Guyanese-British writer Wilson Harris has termed the "cross-cultural imagination." Before embarking on his writing career, Wright played professional baseball, mostly with the Pacific Coast League minor league team the San Diego Padres. After his baseball career, Wright studied comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rutgers University. In the 1960s, he befriended fellow African-American author Henry Dumas and later wrote the introduction to Dumas's Play Ebony, Play Ivory: Poetry. Over the years Wright has been poet in residence at Yale University as well as historically black colleges and universities such as Talladega College, Tougaloo College, Texas Southern University, and the University of Dundee.)

The Best Poem Of Jay Wright

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.
The harmonies I could never learn
stick in Ayler's screams.
An African chant chokes us. My image shot.

If you look off over the Hudson,
the dark cooperatives spit at the dinghies
floating up the night.

A young boy pisses
on lovers rolling against each other
under a trackless el.

This could have been my town,
with light strings that could stand a tempo.

Now,
it's the end
of an ethnic dream.

I've grown intellectual,
go on accumulating furniture and books,
damning literature, writing "for myself,"
calculating the possibilities that someone
will love me, or sleep with me.
Eighteen-year-old girls come back from the Southern
leers and make me cry.

Here, there are
coffee shops, bars,
natural tonsorial parlors,
plays, streets,
pamphlets, days, sun,
heat, love, anger,
politics, days, and sun.

Here, we shoot off
every day to new horizons,
coffee shops, bars,
natural tonsorial parlors,
plays, streets,
pamphlets, days, sun,
heat, love, anger,
politics, days, and sun.

It is the end of an ethnic dream.
My bass a fine piece of furniture.
My brain blistered.

Jay Wright Comments