Reading “Privacy” by C.D. Wright

Reading “Privacy” by C.D. Wright[i]

Prompted by the enforced isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I was moved to return to Wright’s poem, “Privacy”, a contemporary elegy that, contrary to its pastoral origins, lacks the outright expression of bereavement that typifies Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Milton’s “Lycidas”, Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”, and other well-known elegies. Yet,  though its most famous exemplars are poems that mourn the passing of family and friend, the elegiac form has more expansive applications than generally recognized and is just as often used to express a sober assessment of life, even employing humor and irony as Donne, Ovid and Propertius did.

Though a relatively short poem, “Privacy” contains a mixture of elements that we associate with the elegiac tradition. There is a nod to classic elegies (e.g., Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”) in nature’s sympathetic response to the death of the poem’s subject, with animals leaving the safety of their natural habitat and a bay “barely breathing”. There is an exceptional lyrical passage (lines 8-11) that characterizes the personified image of privacy in a “glass dress” lying upon her bed, which imports allegory. Also typical of some modern elegies, particularly Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” and W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, is the journalistic style of reportage that evidences a determined resistance to sentimental reflection and an intent to contextualize the poem’s circumstances within the larger world.

The poem’s form is simple enough: fifteen lines of unpunctuated, unrhymed free verse, embracing six discrete scenes in eight stanzas which are arranged, with one exception, in couplets. Line lengths range from four to twelve syllables. The system of couplets established by stanzas 1—2 and 4—8 is broken by the single line in stanza 3, which functions as an introductory subordinate clause to stanza 4. Although this hiccup in the form does not appear to have a structural purpose, it does give the reader pause to attend more closely to the narrator’s choice of words. Aside from its formal elements, however, the difficulty of the poem lies in its allusive, elliptical nature, which challenges the reader to solve the mystery of how the discrete parts of the poem work together.

In “Privacy” our attention is divided among the roving observations of the narrator, who regards them with the emotional detachment of a news report. Though the details seem spare, we can tease enough information from them to flesh out the picture. The house is large, with two wings, and equipped with a security system whose purpose is to alert the owner to the presence of every guest as well as, we suspect, any intruder. Its geographical setting is not in a middle class suburban development accented by decorative trees and shrubs, but in a forested area where animals normally shelter themselves. There is also a neighboring bay, not a humble brook, cozy pond, or even more substantial lake. If a beach cannot be seen beyond a “reef” of trees, it is probably due to the density of the trees or the elevated perspective of the house. By all indications, this house is located on exclusive real estate with an ocean view, designed and situated to secure a considerable amount of privacy. We therefore imagine the owner or owners to be wealthy and their guests those privileged to be invited to the house, where privacy is partially surrendered in the interests of friendship and community.

Wright lived in Barrington, R.I., one of the wealthiest areas in the United States. The town sits near Narragansett Bay at the southern end of which is the island of Jamestown, a rich enclave with some of the most coveted real estate in the world. To the east of Jamestown is Newport, where the mansions of the Gilded Age are now museums that memorialize the sumptuous wealth and unparalleled lifestyles of their former inhabitants. We can speculate that Wright might have been thinking about one of these as the model for the home of privacy, a kind of Valhalla of privacy.  At the same time, we may also consider whether, among the advantages of the wealthy, is the ability to control one’s privacy.

Privacy has various touchstones in this poem. The flight of the animals from the “safety of the trees” amounts to a forfeiture of privacy that endangers them. The light sensors enable the owners to assert control over their property by exposing the presence of guests or intruders. The aquarium, by contrast, offers no privacy to the fish, who is/are powerless to move out of the sunlight without human assistance. The fact that algae has been allowed to form in the tank reveals the owner’s neglect, a blemish that may have other implications. A “reef of trees” — which have taken on the characteristics of their oceanic counterparts — appears to hide a beach, if it exists, and thereby protects it from the scrutiny of others, as one would expect of a private beach. But a missing beach might be one that has succumbed to erosion. The “barely breathing” bay may be a descriptive metaphor for its calm (because of a lack of wind), but it also may indicate an ecological loss of privacy, the bay suffocating from overdevelopment, a glut of boaters, or an invasive algae bloom. If launched on a body of water a small boat can provide some sense of privacy, albeit limited, but not so if dry-docked in a house.

Though the poem suggests a troubling, if nascent loss of privacy in some or all of these scenes, the narrator’s journalistic account objectifies all equally, providing little, if any, cohesive textual guidance. Wright does this in the first instance by using simple declarative sentences and sterile, albeit precise, terminology, e.g., “light sensors”, “respond”, “retard”, “algae”, “radius” and “elucidation”.  The introductory stanzas, therefore, strike the reader as factually and emotionally flat even as their presence in a poem suggests that they are freighted with ulteriority that might conceivably imply more than their face value. But when matter-of-fact reportage suddenly gives way to the extraordinary lyricism of lines 8-11, our engagement with the poem is elevated:

Stiller than water she lies
As in a glass dress

As if all life might come to an end
within the radius of her bed

Here Wright dramatically departs from the mundane declarative sentences of the preceding lines and harkens to the lyric poetry of earlier centuries by grammatically inverting the first line and adding two poignant similes. “As” and “As if” introduce figurative devices (symbol, metaphor, and simile) that also extend the poem into the surreal tangents of the imagination. Although the “glass dress” would be a troubling conceit if it involved a real woman or girl, the lyrical and figurative aspects of the passage control what might be a prurient image (e.g., Ingres’ La Dormeuse) and instead fill it with pathos. The tonal disparity between contemporary reportage on one hand, and antique lyricism and allegory on the other, however, suggests the presence of irony.  If this were a fairly tale, it would be Sleeping Beauty waiting for Prince Phillip’s kiss of true love to break the spell. When privacy wears a glass dress, however, nothing is secret or private; and when represented “as if all life might come to its end / within the radius of her bed,” we do not sense it is a mortal death, but the symbolic demise of privacy in our lives. Yet the last simile is disturbing, nevertheless, signifying that privacy’s repose is toxic if one comes too close to it. Because of the allusive irony of this passage the entire poem takes on an allegorical caste with each scene bearing a symbolic association.

Wright gives us no explicit justification for her tableau. It assumes we have knowledge of the times in which the poem was written, which are worth discussing for a moment. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the federal government enacted The USA Patriot Act on October 26, 2001 (a year before the publication of “Privacy”) and appropriated unprecedented authority to investigate and prosecute American citizens and foreigners for supporting and committing acts of terrorism. To that end, the Patriot Act, among other things, permitted wholesale surveillance of all domestic and international communications. Notwithstanding court challenges and legislative attempts to repeal its most invasive sections, the Patriot Act has been renewed several times and many of its original provisions are still in effect.

The diminishment of traditional privacy rights, however, is not solely the result of new age terrorism, but may also be attributable to the pervasive commercial exploits of powerful corporations who chiefly use the internet as a merchandising platform. Based upon the personal information that internet users disclose to Google (formed in 1998) and other internet service providers (like Facebook, whose formation post-dates Wright’s poem), those companies are able to offer valuable advertising opportunities to vendors and marketing companies who direct strategically-placed advertising to these same users. No one’s tastes or desires, whether in restaurants, entertainment, clothing, sports, or travel, are secret anymore. To the same effect, during the 2016 presidential election the Trump campaign used Google to construct profiles from the internet activities of voters and then sent them targeted advertising that denigrated Hillary Clinton and promoted Donald Trump. The CIA reported that Russian computer hackers were able to gain access to the Democratic campaign’s server and publish embarrassing information that also compromised the Clinton campaign.

Now, on account of the national emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, privacy rights have been subordinated to the exigent demands of public health policy. Many countries are using cell phone and credit card records to track the course of infection through the movements of its human hosts. Such legitimate activities, however, may open the door to more intrusive behavior. Privacy watchdogs are scrutinizing the security policies of Apple and Google as they work with state and federal governments to do patient screening that “involves collection of data on their symptoms, recent travel, location, age, and underlying health conditions”.[ii]  When the HIPAA law was passed in 1996, it was intended to secure the confidentiality of patient records for exclusive use by doctors, hospitals and insurance companies. As such, the presence of the internet companies in the stream of all communications threatens that confidentiality.

The delicate balance between our privacy rights on one hand and our national security and public health on the other mirrors the tension between the alternative visions of privacy in Wright’s tableau. Yet, though each qualified deprivation of privacy may have its beneficial effects, the cumulative erosion of our privacy threatens to obstruct the exercise of the fundamental rights guaranteed by our founding fathers. After the 2016 presidential election, to take one egregious example, much more must be done to guarantee that our electoral process, the very foundation of our democracy, is not corrupted by foreign actors or digital saboteurs.

In Wright’s “Privacy” context diminishes the significance of privacy’s undoing, so that it barely outweighs the concerns that attend the animals, the light sensors, the fish tank, the bay or the small boat, even if they are all related. By objectifying its subject matter and withholding moral judgment, the poem, at least on its face, fosters only an evanescent attachment to its observations which, though they be curios, collectively impress us no more than the local news, with the last item being the most enduring. It is no wonder that our takeaway from the poem has nothing to do with the recumbent image of privacy in a glass dress, but the mystery of the small boat.

The poem’s overarching theme asks whether the present state of affairs has led us to devalue life itself. When thousands of souls are lost every day of the pandemic, the overwhelming statistical record of death strips our ability to emotionally translate its impact, especially when it is too easy to look away and occupy ourselves with other distractions. In this tragedy, will we still be vigilant enough to safeguard the unedited enjoyment of our lives? Let us pray this all ends soon.

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[i] The poetry of C.D. Wright (1949-2016) is an American treasure. Between 1977 and 2016, Wright composed twelve books of poetry, the originality and brilliance of which places her in the top echelon of American poets. A brief biography of Wright appears at the Poetry Foundation website, and a tribute by the novelist and poet Ben Lerner was published in the New Yorker shortly after her sudden death in 2016. “Privacy” was published in Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002).

[ii] Casey Ross, “After 9/11, we gave up privacy for security. Will we make the same trade-off after Covid-19?” in STAT Health Tech (April 8, 2020),  https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/coronavirus-will-we-give-up-privacy-for-security/

© 2020 Steven M. Critelli All rights reserved.