Franz Wright

• Born: March 18, 1953
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: May 14, 2015
• Place of death: Waltham, Massachusetts

Other literary forms

Franz Wright has translated the poetry of Erica Pedretti, Rainer Maria Rilke, René Char, and, with his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, and the author, the poems of Valzhyna Mort. He has published essays in Field Magazine.

Achievements

Franz Wright has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Whiting Writers’ Award(1991), and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1995, Wright won the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1998, he received a grant from the Eric Mathieu King Fund. He was awarded the 1996 PEN/Voelcker Award for his book The Beforelife, which was also a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. In 2004, Wright’s collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His father, the poet James Wright, had been awarded the same prize in 1978 for Collected Poems. They are the only father and son in the history of the prize to win for the same category. Franz Wright won the Paterson Poetry Prize in 2008 for God’s Silence. His poetry and translations have appeared in Conduit, DoubleTake, Field, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Salmagundi, Slope, and many other publications. Wright has taught at Emerson College and the University of Arkansas, and in 2009, he finished a three-year appointment as the Jacob Ziskind Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University. Wright has also worked with the mentally ill and with grieving children.

Biography

Franz Wright was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1953 to James Wright and Liberty Wright. James, a war veteran and the son of a laborer, would become one of America’s most influential poets. When Franz was three months old, the Wrights left Vienna for the United States, where James continued his education at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke. The family moved again when James got a job teaching at the University of Minnesota. On weekends, they visited the poet Robert Bly on his farm.

When Franz was eight years old, his parents divorced. Franz and his three-year-old brother Marshall moved with their mother to San Francisco. The elder Wright eventually moved to New York to teach at Hunter College.

James Wright’s absence was a deep wound for Franz, made worse by the fact that he and his brother were regularly beaten by their new stepfather. Franz describes a mostly solitary existence, exploring San Francisco on foot, reading “the great books” so he could be like his dad, but also enjoying the Green Lantern. Though his loneliness was intense and he longed for his father terribly, he also came to love the solitude of those walks.

The family moved to nearby Walnut Creek, where Franz excelled in school. He had a vague intention to pursue science or music, but that changed in his fifteenth year. Early one morning, while on vacation in northern California, he woke up with a strange feeling. He went for a walk in a nearby orchard, marveling at this wonderful change in himself and the world. Suddenly words arrived, unbidden, and he sat down and wrote a seven-line poem. His joy at this was so powerful that Wright immediately dedicated his life to the pursuit of poetry. It was frightening to shoulder the burden of what seemed like fate. Somehow he knew he would not be able to have a normal life. Still, the intoxication he felt, surprised to be the bearer of something so mysterious and lovely, gave him consolation and hope.

He sent the poem to his father, who famously wrote back, “I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to Hell.” They began a correspondence. A few years later, Franz contributed to James Wright’s translation of Herman Hesse.

Franz continued to do well at school, taking courses at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating in 1971, Wright traveled for a few months in Europe, then visited his father in New York. In 1972, he started at Oberlin College in Ohio, not far from where his parents grew up. After graduating in 1977, he attended only a few months of graduate school before deciding it was not for him. There followed a period of wandering, mostly in New York and New England. True to his vision, poetry was Wright’s only vocation.

James Wright died in 1980 of cancer. The Earth Without You, Franz Wright’s first major book, was published later in the year. He was twenty-seven years old.

Wright remained steadfast in his commitment to writing. By his own account Wright couldn’t have held a “real” job for long even if he had wanted to. Like his father, he suffered from bipolar disorder and had inherited a vulnerability to alcoholism and addiction. His struggles with mental illness, alcohol, and drugs made him unreliable, at best. This was not the case when it came to poetry, however. When he needed to, Wright could get himself in shape to write. His dedication to poetry, while it presented a challenge, may well have saved his life. His friendship and correspondence with other poets also sustained him. He published many chapbooks and three additional major books during the next twenty-five years, as well as translating books by Rilke and Char.

By the mid-1990’s, however, Wright was in extremely poor health, physically and mentally. He had survived other down times, but this one was truly terrifying—for two years, he couldn’t write at all. His visits to Catholic churches, where he had always found comfort, now inspired in him the thought that maybe he could become a member—maybe he could be among those who, though they sinned, were still loved. He began his recovery, but it was not by any means a sure thing until Wright reconnected with a former student of his. Their relationship was transformative, and in 1999, Wright and the translator Elizabeth Oehlkers were married.

In 1998, Ill Lit was published by Oberlin College Press. It attracted enough attention that his next book, The Beforelife, was published by Knopf, which meant that it was widely reviewed not only in literary magazines but also in mainstream periodicals. Walking to Martha’s Vineyard followed two years later, and in 2004 won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. God’s Silence and Earlier Poems followed in quick succession. Wright became the Jakob Viskund Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University in 2006. Wheeling Motel was released in September 2009. He published two collections of poetry, Kindertotenwald: Prose Poems (2011) and F (2013) as well as a translation with his wife of Valzhyna Mort's poetry, Factory of Tears (2008), and a translation of haiku poems (2011). He died from lung cancer at age sixty-two.

It would seem that Wright’s central aim has been to write poetry that sustains hope in spite of everything that discourages hope. Perhaps that is why he is now one of the most widely read poets in America.

Analysis

Franz Wright is a poet of image and metaphor. His line breaks and spacing change his words into something like musical notation and often result in ambiguous interpretations. Each poem is vast, though most are less than a page long. His diction is a mix of rough vernacular and carefully constructed images of great beauty. The tone is intimate, often dark, though not lacking in humor or pathos. Each of his books forms a coherent whole.

Wright has been able to transform the materials of his own life to create poems that, even at their most despairing, still somehow offer warm companionship and a reassuring presence. Wright is a fellow traveler who has been in some pretty tough places and managed to find what beauty and comfort there was to find. Even a painful truth is bedrock, solid ground to stand on. With the publication of Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Wright has found a larger audience, but he is still the same Franz, in love with what words can do.

Ill Lit

Ill Lit is a summation of Wright’s work up to that point. It includes selections from four earlier books, The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes, Entry in an Unknown Hand, The Night World and the Word Night, and Rorschach Test. Some of the earlier poems have been revised, though most have not. The book also includes Wright’s translations of poems by Rilke, Char, and Charles Baudelaire, among others, and ends with twenty-one new poems. For anyone coming to Wright for the first time, this book is a good introduction to his work and its major themes. In the translations, one finds clues to the poet’s aspirations and artistic principles. Ill Lit is where Wright’s work gathers force.

The Beforelife

The title of The Beforelife refers to Wright’s transition from addiction to sobriety and all that came with it; he fell in love with and married his wife, he converted to Catholicism. Two very small poems capture something of the movement of this book; first, “The Wedding,” a poem of sheer happiness leavened with Wright’s deadpan humor; “As in heaven/ all are smiling/ at you/ even/ those/ who know you.” Near the end of the book, there is “Request,” Wright’s nod to the original wound that for so long kept him captive, “Please love me/ and I will play for you/ this poem/ upon the guitar/ I myself made/ out of cardboard and black threads/ when I was ten years old./ Love me or else.” In a few lines, with affection and humor, Wright captures the loneliness, rage, love, and longing of his child self.

Walking to Martha’s Vineyard

Wright’s shift toward a growing sense of redemption and grace does not mean the darkness of the world disappears, drowned out in a blaze of divine light. It does not mean an end to suffering, or even that minor discomforts do not still rankle. Even so, Wright finds reason to give thanks often in the pages of Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. “One Heart” ends “Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the/ sane; thank You for letting me know what this is/ like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening/ blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without/ terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly/ lost/ with this love.” Wright’s earlier poems to and about his father are aching, angry notes of separation and loss. This too has changed; now he can write, “Since you left me at eight I have always been lonely// star-far from the person right next to me, but// closer to me than my bones you// you are there” (“Flight”).

God’s Silence

At nearly 150 pages, God’s Silence is an ambitious work, and it is one of Wright’s finest books. A few critics were disappointed by the more declarative lyric often in evidence, but there is no lack in these pages of Wright’s identification with the lowest of the low, nor does happiness rob him of his ability to write lines of astonishing transcendence. His dark humor is in full force, a sort of loving truthfulness; even as he sees what’s wrong, he also sees what’s holy; “A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying/ I am Federico García Lorca/ risen from the dead—/ literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry” (“Publication Date”).

Wheeling Motel

In Wheeling Motel, Wright considers his own death. In “Hospitalization,” he revisits the agony of being desperately ill; “A voice// saying, How are you feeling.// He was so high he was dead.// I feel just like a window with light coming through it, he said.” In God’s Silence, Wright wrote poems to dead friends, and he has always addressed his dead father. Now he sees his brother as one of the walking dead, irremediably damaged. He is coming to terms with the past, preparing to meet the future, and holding his banner; “Desire/ and the body/ born of desire;/ fame and shame/ unreal./ But this: one/ strange alone/ heart’s wish/ to help all/ hearts, this/ was real.”

Bibliography

Contino, Paul J. "Theology Descending: Franz Wright and Mary Karr in Conversation." Christianity & Literature, Summer 2009, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 697–722, Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=44267682&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 27 Nov. 2017.

Fox, Margalit. "Franz Wright, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry, Dies at 62." The New York Times, 15 May 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/arts/franz-wright-pulitzer-prize-winner-for-poetry-dies-at-62.html?‗r=0. Accessed 27 Nov. 2017.

Kovacs, Liberty. Liberty’s Quest: The Compelling Story of the Wife and Mother of Two Pulitzer Prize Winners, James Wright and Franz Wright. Bandon, Oreg.: Robert D. Reed, 2008. An account by Wright’s mother of her relationship with his father and Wright.

Macklin, Elizabeth. “The Road Home: A Poet Evokes the Trip Back from a Dark Place.” Review of The Beforelife. The New York Times Book Review, February 4. 2001, p. 22. Macklin, a poet herself, presents an interesting perspective on the book that marks Wright’s transition from addiction and despair to sobriety and hope.

Parini, Jay, ed. American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies—Max Apple to Franz Wright. Supplement 17. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2008. Contains an entry on the life and works of Wright.

Roth, John K., ed. Masterplots II: Christian Literature. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2008. This comprehensive set contains an analysis of God’s Silence.

Wright, Franz. “A Conversation with Franz Wright.” Interview by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler. Image (Fall, 2006): 57. Lengthy and thorough interview (on the occasion of the publication of God’s Silence) covers Wright’s entire history as poet and human being, including his love of writing, his illness, addictions, and ultimate recovery, his marriage, his conversion to Catholicism, and the effects of success on his work.

Wright, Franz. “Homages: Emily Dickinson.” Field 55 (Fall, 1996): 32-38. Wright’s fierce and loving homage to the poet Emily Dickinson conveys Wright’s own acute awareness of what makes poetry worth reading (and writing).

Wright, Franz. Introduction to The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition—Selected Poems. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1990. Wright’s eleven-page introduction is an outstanding portrait of Rilke, and Rilke is a model for the kind of poet Wright is and aspires to be.

Wright, Franz. “One Poet’s Awakening: An Interview with Franz Wright.” Interview by Maureen Abood. U.S. Catholic 11 (November, 2004): 26-31. Wright talks at length about religious feeling, poetic inspiration, and intoxication as impulses very close to each other.