Contributor’s Marginalia: Ashley Anna McHugh on “Kyrie for the Gut” by David Wright

David Wright’s “Kyrie for the Gut” is a striking poem—not only in its handling of the double exposure form, which can sometimes feel more like a parlor trick, less like a poem—but in the way it leverages its full weight against the fulcrum of “a song” to vault itself into a transcendent moment.

Even though you can read both columns together, I liked reading them separately most, where I could see the speaker of the poem turning against himself in the pursuit of his art.

In the left column, the speaker is indulgent and defiant, describing himself as “a devouring / dark belly of / pleasures, sugars, whiskeyed words / lipped and slurred.” Here, the poem seems drunk on its own gilded language, and the speaker seems to revel in the deliberate artifice inherent in all artistry. Even the enjambments are more abrupt, demanding attention.

Meanwhile, in the right column, the poem seems to resent the superficiality of its own “numb mouth, / bullshitting about character” while “eating itself alive / inside of my own / ravenous habits.” In this column, the speaker turns against the hedonistic pleasures of pure language play, using a rougher diction and eventually falling into a more direct syntax. Here, the line-breaks are more predictable, less intrusive.

However, in both columns, the speaker struggles to strike sparks in his work. On the left, there are “dressed up actors, hands that tender stupidly without syntax.” On the right, the speaker writes “word after word” but only experiences the “catharsis of doing, / well, nothing.” But then we reach the moment when both voices come together at the fulcrum of “a song,” and we’re left to wonder in awe at the moment of creation.

Even the position of the “song”—hung in the middle of the page—suggests that it belongs to neither column specifically, but that it came from some outside force.

Of course, whether the creative moment of inspiration is achieved through dumb luck or divine intervention depends on your own interpretation of the poem—and to some degree, on which column you’re reading.

Either way, in “Kyrie for the Gut,” David Wright speaks to the balance of the body and the mind, the self-indulgent pleasure of the artist and the hypercritical nature of self-doubt, the divine moment of inspiration and the routine practice of the craft—and invites us to have mercy on ourselves as we go about our work of creation.