God's Silence by Franz Wright

First published: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006

Genre(s): Poetry

Subgenre(s): Hermeneutics; lyric poetry; meditation and contemplation; theology

Core issue(s): Compassion; despair; faith; forgiveness; Incarnation; loneliness; problem of evil; redemption; suffering; trust in God; union with God

Overview

Like much of his other work, Franz Wright’s thirteenth collection of poetry, God’s Silence, illuminates the interior life of an individual as concerned with his ontological significance as he is with cosmological beauty and brutality. The poetry is most often stark and ravenous, with a melancholy rhythm, though it also flashes sporadically with joyous praise and rapturous gratitude. Regardless of tone, the poems seem teleologically wrought from the material essence of the Earth, creating a poetry so seemingly sacred at times that it is barely utterable. Wright works in a predominantly jagged, staggering lineation, which creates for the reader a sense of the strain and severity of Wright’s efforts to explore suffering as a means to redemption in the fullest Catholic sense of the word.

Born in 1953, Wright was raised with neither formal religious training nor a formal religious affiliation. Although he attended Greek Orthodox services with his mother, who was Greek, he also studied and practiced Zen Buddhism as a teenager in Berkeley, California, under a Korean Zen master. At Oberlin College in Ohio, he became fascinated with the nineteenth century German Protestant theologians, whom he studied under the tutelage of Thomas Frank. Still, Wright remained unaffiliated with any church or its doctrines. Regardless, his spiritual development continued to mature over the following decades, particularly through his intellectual enthusiasm for early Christianity. All of this culminated on September 13, 1999, in an indescribable event, which led him to seek formal initiation into the Catholic Church.

Wright was baptized during the celebration of Pentecost in 2000, and his subsequent books of poetry, The Beforelife (2001) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2003), mark the changes to his private spirituality through his acceptance of Catholic eschatology, ritual, and life. God’s Silence continues that trajectory of self-discovery by offering a riveting arrangement of ninety-two poems concerning faith, suffering, forgiveness, and redemption.

The book’s title is a cliché often invoked to dispute the existence of God: If he exists, then why is he silent in times of war, for example? Likewise, why is he silent in times of famine, tsunamis, clinical depression, and other external and internal crises? According to such logic, the existence of suffering is the proof of God’s nonexistence—or, worse, proof that God must be sadistic, spiteful, and cavalier with human beings. This is precisely the type of thinking that God’s Silence redresses by reinterpreting that silence from within. Poem by poem, Wright plunges headlong into various forms and degrees of suffering so as to explore their epistemological impact upon individual spiritual existence.

For Catholics like Wright, suffering is a fundamental, hereditary consequence of the Original Sin. It is the genesis of their faith and their means to redemption. Thus, the title of the collection becomes a metonym for God’s compassion toward humankind: His permission of suffering creates the opportunity for individual redemption. This idea permeates the four sections of God’s Silence, whether in the overtly religious poems such as “Hell,” “Rosary,” and “Doctrine” or in the poems with seemingly secular subjects, such as “Nebraska Blizzard,” “For Frank Stanford,” and “Elegy: The Boy.”

Furthermore, in poems like “Progress” and “Alone and Talking Funny,” Wright argues that God is omnipresent and ever available to human beings, and in this way the poetry reads like the proclamations of Matthew 28:20 or Genesis 28:15, for example. In other words, Wright’s poems, however idiosyncratically subjective, conflate with Christian doctrine even as they struggle to understand it. Hence, when Wright begs for God’s mercy for himself and all of humanity in poems like “Petition,” such requests are by no means specious poetic gestures. Instead, those supplications are dire and sincere, granting the poems a spectacular emotional immediacy and depth.

Similarly moving is Wright’s ability to find peace and comfort in the world through an unshakable belief in God’s beneficence, regardless of the many instances of worldly suffering. For example, in the poem “A Word for Joy,” Wright admits unabashedly that he is terrified of God, but he nonetheless persists in believing in the beauty of his life, even with its inexplicable allotments of agony, madness, and death. This absolute faith in God is perhaps portrayed most beautifully in the two-part poem “Why Is the Winter Light,” where the first half comprises impenetrable questions about existence and the second half responds not with answers but with the speaker begging God to fill him with holiness.

Like suffering, redemption, and forgiveness, another dominant religious theme of the book derives from ideas of incarnation as the chance to praise God’s grandeur. This is as clear in poems like “Kindness” and “The Beloved Illusory” as it is in 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, where life in the flesh is explained as a separation from God, but one that can and should be used to extol him until one’s return to him in death. Thus in poems like “Beginning Again,” “Parting Word,” “The Lesson,” and “The Reader,” Wright details versions of the reintegration of the individuated, living self into the unified splendor of the entirety of God.

Consequently, the fear of death falls away as death becomes nothing but the return of the soul to God. Wright extols this in poems like “A Happy Thought,” “Language My Country,” and “Delirium.” Of those three examples, perhaps “Delirium” is the most poignant. It depicts Wright’s death as his diffusion into the consciousnesses of others through shared memories of music, feelings, and places. Moreover, by the poem’s logic those particular memories ultimately, implicitly contribute to the constitution of a universal, timeless memory, thereby uniting all human beings through an intricate nexus of experience.

Christian Themes

God’s Silence challenges and reaffirms the Christian epistemology of suffering until that “silence” ultimately booms with God’s authority, mercy, and beauty. That work begins with the book’s first poem, “East Boston, 1996,” an unforgettable, evocative six-page, two-part narrative poem about the profuse and pervasive suffering of its speaker. Specifically, the speaker depicts his isolation, despair, and sickness across a span of thirty-five relentless years, until he finally realizes his heart to be the greatest of divine gifts because it can suffer. The speaker comes to understand that his ability to suffer is what allows him to receive God’s love and forgiveness, and he thereupon embraces that suffering and its battering of his wearied but indomitable heart.

Throughout the rest of the book, Wright then labors to explore his faith in suffering, however traumatic such work might be for him as a poet. Therein the key Christian notions of sacrifice and penance arise through metacritical considerations of God’s Silence as the book’s poems represent self-abandonment in pursuit of spiritual truth and in service to God. A pertinent analog from the Bible would be a passage like Mark 14:24, where Jesus espouses that he will shed his blood for the benefit of humankind. Wright’s commitment to that idea—his willingness to endure torment for salvation—seemingly grants him the strength and courage to immerse himself in life’s suffering for these poems, whether they comprise excruciating personal memories or courageous, terrified wondering. Furthermore, that spiritual selflessness emanates from the poetry with sonic force until it suffuses the mind of the reader.

No poem is a more compelling example of this than “The Hawk,” a two-page, first-person narrative containing the complete spectrum of Catholic concerns in God’s Silence. Besides exemplifying Wright’s understanding of such fundamental concepts as agape, temptation, suffering, sacrifice, and redemption, “The Hawk” is an intimate exhortation of the reader to realize himself an emissary of God’s will. The poem defines that will as love and charges the reader with propagating it on earth, which is yet another fundamental Christian concept in this religiously vigorous book.

Sources for Further Study

Hammer, Langdon. “To Live Is to Do Evil: Franz Wright’s Poems Pursue a State of Revelation.” The New York Times Book Review, May 14, 2006, 38. A detailed review of God’s Silence, describing how the poet’s “I” addresses “a (frequently) capitalized ’You,’ his name for God.”

Kriesel, Michael. Review of God’s Silence. Library Journal 131, no. 6 (April 1, 2006): 98. The reviewer notes that Wright succeeds in “conveying the ineffable convincingly” and calls for the collection’s becoming “required reading in our high schools.”

St. John, Janet. Review of God’s Silence. Booklist, April 1, 2006, 14. Considers the collection “thought-provoking, original, and refreshingly inspired.”

Wright, Franz. The Beforelife. New York: Random House, 2001. Wright’s first full-length collection of poetry after his commitment to Catholicism; the primary religious subject is the eschatology of the afterlife. A 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Wright, Franz. Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1998. A broad sampling of Wright’s work from 1982 to 1998, useful for retroactively tracing the poet’s spiritual and religious development.

Wright, Franz. Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. New York: Random House, 2003. A lucid and breathtaking exploration of Wright’s journey toward the discovery of God; winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.