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Loneliness in the Poetry of Franz Wright

Over at Books & Culture, I take a bird’s eye look at the work of Franz Wright: I first came across Franz Wright’s work in graduate school. It was in Nick Halpern’s class on contemporary poetry, and we read Elizabeth Bishop, Denis Johnson, Jane Kenyon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carolyn Forché, and Wright, among others. We didn’t […]

Over at Books & Culture, I take a bird’s eye look at the work of Franz Wright:

I first came across Franz Wright’s work in graduate school. It was in Nick Halpern’s class on contemporary poetry, and we read Elizabeth Bishop, Denis Johnson, Jane Kenyon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carolyn Forché, and Wright, among others.

We didn’t read Wright’s latest book at the time, which would have been Il Lit(1998), but one of his most distinctive earlier collections, The Night World and Word Night (1993). The volume is vintage Wright. We have the gritty pathos, the conversational tone, the self-effacing (or self-indulging, depending on how one reads it) dark humor and the occasional aphorism. His drunk father (the poet James Wright) lurks here and there, but he does not dominate the volume. Wright’s friends and girlfriend, conversations with dead poets, break in on the lament of lost childhood that has otherwise so much preoccupied Wright. Stylistically, this is the Wright of big white spaces and abbreviated phrases heavy with suffering. At times, it’s almost as if the poet can barely write. “Mood-altering cloud of late autumn,” he writes in “The World”:

Gray deserted street

Place settings for one—dear visible things …

The insane are right, but they’re still the insane.

While there is time let me a little belong.A central characteristic of Wright’s earlier work is the tension between confession and construction. The narrative flow of his poems is often coupled with a constrained word choice, enjambment and large spaces between lines or stanzas, sudden shifts in diction, and absurd or pathetic imagery. Similar to other “confessional” poets, Wright views the poet as a “surgeon,” as he puts it in “To the Poet,” who must cut up his life to save it. Drawing from René Char’s practice of “enlèvement-embellissement” [“removing-embellishing/beautifying], Wright cuts words, adds spaces, shifts diction, surprises with absurd, pathetic, or startlingly beautiful images or metaphors to build something beautiful out of his suffering—to create poems that have, as he puts it, a “mysterious commonplace.” For the earlier Wright the salvation that poetry offered was at best temporary. It created a momentary community, perhaps, and provided relief from loneliness but it was always unable to overcome that loneliness.

A lot has changed in twenty years, and a lot hasn’t.

Read the rest if you’re interested.

Wright is one of those poets that people either love or hate. He has flown off the handle a couple of times. He threatened to give William Logan “the crippling beating you so clearly masochistically desire” after Logan negatively reviewed his work in The New Criterion. More recently, he let fly at MFAs and the state of contemporary poetry on Facebook.

But you know what, I love Wright for his intemperate honesty. Better a curmudgeon who loves poetry than a mildly respected coiner of politically correct phrases or a faux avant-garde agitator. And he’s a fine poet–imperfect and uneven, yes, but on the whole, very much worth reading.

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