Franz Wright

Franz Wright 1953-2015). Photo by Garin Horner. Courtesy One Pause Poetry.

Franz Wright (March 18, 1953 - May 15, 2015) was an American poet. He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category.

Life

Wright was born in Vienna, Austria. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1977.

Wright stepped down as the Jacob Ziskind Visiting poet in residence at Brandeis University in May 2009.

Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009), had selections put to music for the record "Readings from Wheeling Motel". Wright wrote the lyrics to and performs on the Clem Snide song "Encounter at 3AM" on the album Hungry Bird (released in February 2009).

His 2011 book, Kindertotenwald, is a collection of 65 prose poems concluding with a longish lyric poem to his wife.

Wright has been anthologised in the The Best American Poetry 2008, Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image, and American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets

In 1999 he married translator Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.

Wright died of cancer at his home in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Writing

Writing in the New York Review of Books Helen Vendler said "Wright's scale of experience, like Berryman's, runs from the homicidal to the ecstatic ... His best forms of or originality: deftness in patterning, startling metaphors, starkness of speech, compression of both pain and joy, and a stoic self-possession with the agonies and penalties of existence."

Novelist Denis Johnson has said Wright's poems "are like tiny jewels shaped by blunt, ruined fingers -- miraculous gifts."Template:Cn

The Boston Review has called Wright's poetry "among the most honest, haunting, and human being written today.

Critic Ernest Hilbert wrote for Random House's magazine Bold Type that "Wright oscillates between direct and evasive dictions, between the barroom floor and the arts club podium, from aphoristic aside to icily poetic abstraction."

Walking to Martha's Vineyard (2003) in particular, was well-received. According to Publishers Weekly, the collection features "[h]eartfelt but often cryptic poems...fans will find Wright's self-diagnostics moving throughout." The New York Times noted that Wright promises, and can deliver, great depths of feeling, while observing that Wright depends very much on our sense of his tone, and on our belief not just that he means what he says but that he has said something new...[on this score] Walking to Martha's Vineyard sometimes succeeds."

Poet Jordan Davis, writing for The Constant Critic, suggested that Wright's collection was so accomplished it would have to be kept "out of the reach of impulse kleptomaniacs." Added Davis, "deader than deadpan, any particular Wright poem may not seem like much, until, that is, you read a few of them. Once the context kicks in, you may find yourself trying to track down every word he’s written" .

Some critics were less welcoming. According to New Criterion critic William Logan, with whom Wright would later publicly feud, "[t]his poet is surprisingly vague about the specifics of his torment (most of his poems are shouts and curses in the dark). He was cruelly affected by the divorce of his parents, though perhaps after forty years there should be a statute of limitation... 'The Only Animal,' the most accomplished poem in the book, collapses into the same kitschy sanctimoniousness that puts nodding Jesus dolls on car dashboards." "Wright offers the crude, unprocessed sewage of suffering", he comments. "He has drunk harder and drugged harder than any dozen poets in our health-conscious age, and paid the penalty in hospitals and mental wards."

The critical reception of Wright's 2011 collection, Kindertotenwald (Knopf), was positive on the whole. Writing in the Washington Independent Book Review, Grace Cavalieri speaks of the book as a departure Wright's best known poems. "The prose poems are intriguing thought patterns that show poetry as mental process... This is original material, and if a great poet cannot continue to be original... In this text there is a joyfulness that energizes and makes us feel the writing as a purposeful surge. It is a life force. This is a good indicator of literary art... Memory and the past,mortality, longing, childhood, time, space, geography and loneliness, are all the poet's playthings. In these conversations with himself, Franz Wright shows how the mind works with his feelings and his brains agility in its struggle with the heart."

Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller says that Kindertotenwald is "ultimately about joy and grace and the possibility of redemption, about coming out whole on the other side of emotional catastrophe." "This collection, like all of Wright's book, combines familiar, colloquial phrases--the daily lingo you hear everywhere--with the sudden sharpness of a phrase you've never heard anywhere, but that sounds just as familiar, just as inevitable. These pieces are written in closely packed prose, like miniature short stories, but they have a fierce lilting beauty that marks them as poetry. Reading 'Kindertotenwald' is like walking through a plate-glass window on purpose. There is--predictably--pain, but once you've made it a few steps past the threshold, you realize it wasn't glass after all, only air, and that the shattering sound you heard was your own heart breaking. Healing, though, is possible. 'Soon, soon,' the poet writes in 'Nude With Handgun and Rosary,' 'between one instant and the next, you will be well."

Recognition

• 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Walking to Martha's Vineyard
• Whiting Fellowship
• National Endowment for the Arts grant
• PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
• 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship

Publications

Poetry

• Tapping the White Cane of Solitude. 1976.
• The Earth Without You: Poems. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1980. ISBN 9780914946236
• 8 Poems. Hollow Wind Press, 1981.
• The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes. Roslindale, MA: Pym-Randall Press, 1982. ISBN 9780913219355
• Going North in Winter. Windsor, VT: Gray House Press, 1986.
• Entry in an Unknown Hand. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989. ISBN 9780887480782
• The Night World and the Word Night: Poems. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993. ISBN 9780887481543
• Rorschach test. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995. ISBN 9780887482090
• Ill Lit: Selected & new poems. Oberlin OH: Oberlin College Press, 1998. ISBN 9780932440839
• The Beforelife: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2001. ISBN 9780375411540
• Walking to Martha's Vineyard: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2003.
• God's Silence: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2006. ISBN 9781400043514 w
• Earlier Poems. New York: Knopf, 2007. ISBN 9780307265661
• Leave Me Hidden (chapbook). Grosse Pointe, MI: Marick Press, 2009.
• Wheeling Motel: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2009. ISBN 9780307265685
• Kindertotenwald: Prose poems. New York: Knopf, 2011. ISBN 9780307272805
• F: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2013. ISBN 9780307701589

Translated

• Rene Char, No Siege is Absolute: Versions. Providence, RI: Lost Roads, 1984.
• Rainer Maria Rilke, The Unknown Rilke: Selected poems. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 1990. ISBN 9780932440563
  • expanded edition, 1991.
• Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears (translated with Valzhyna Mort & Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright). Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Franz Wright reads "Woman Falling"

Franz Wright reading five poems at the Dodge Poetry Festival 9 26 08

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Audio /video

• Walking to Martha's Vineyard: Poems. Princeton, NJ: Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, 2004.
• Franz Wright poetry reading, Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard College Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 2005.

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Franz Wright profile & poem ("Wheeling Motel") at the Academy of American Poets
• Franz Wright 1953-2015 at the Poetry Foundation
• "Publication Date" at Poetry 180
• Franz Wright in iO: A Journal of New Poetry

Audio / video

• Franz Wright at YouTube
• April 2004 National Public Radio interview, including readings

Books

• Franz Wright at Amazon.com

About

• 2001 print interview with The Borzoi Reader
• Ernest Hilbert interview with Franz Wright
• Ernest Hilbert review of The Beforelife