Franz Wright
Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
“The poems [of Franz Wright] draw the reader along as if onto sacred ground, as if entering little roofless chapels where there is plenty of light and air and space for reflection. We encounter sack-clothe and the ashes of a sometimes regretted past but hope shimmers in these poems like the space where the stained glass window would be if this were a perfect world.” — Gerard Hanberry, Cuirt International Festival of Literature
“Wright is a poet apart in his gifts and his courage.” —Carolyn Forché
Born in Vienna, Franz Wright is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf 2003) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His collections, God’s Silence and Earlier Poems were published by Knopf in 2006 & 2007, and his newest book, Wheeling Motel, was recently released, also from Knopf. Wright’s other books include The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). Mr. Wright has also translated poems by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wright has taught in many colleges and universities, including Emerson College and the University of Arkansas. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington, Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children.
Franz Wright, son of the poet James Wright, began writing when he was very young. At fifteen, he sent one of his poems to his absentee father, who wrote back, “You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.” James and Franz Wright are the only father and son to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In a short essay on writing, Franz writes, “Think of it: a writer actually possesses the power to alter his past, to change what was once experienced as defeat into victory and what was once experienced as speechless anguish into a stroke of great good fortune or even something approaching blessedness, depending upon what he does with that past, what he makes out of it.” Charles Simic has characterized Wright as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception.
“Franz Wright brings the attentiveness and clarity we usually associate with Asian or imagist poetry and turns them unflinchingly toward the inner landscapes of the mind, heart, and soul, rendering self-destructive despair and life-transforming revelation with equal care.” —Dodge Poetry Festival
About WHEELING MOTEL (2009)
From the indomitable Franz Wright, a luminous book of reconciliation with the past and acceptance of what may come in the future. From his earliest years, he writes in "Will," he had "the gift of impermanence / so I would be ready, / accompanied / by a rage to prove them wrong . . . that I too was worthy of love." This rage comes coupled with the poet's own brand of love, what he calls "one / strange alone / heart's wish / to help all / hearts." Poetry is indeed Wright's help, and he delivers it to us with a wry sense of the daily in America: in his wonderfully local relationship to God (whom he encounters along with a catfish in the emerald shallows of Walden pond); in the little West Virginia motel of the title poem, on the banks of the great Ohio River, where Tammy Wynette's on the marquee and he is visited by the figure of Walt Whitman, "examining the tear on a dead face." Here, in Wheeling Motel, Wright's poetry continues to surprise us with its frank appraisal of our soul, and with his own combustible loneliness and unstoppable joy.
About EARLIER POEMS (2007)
In this dazzling collection of Wright’s first four books, we go back to his origins and meet a much younger poet, pained and prescient: he is the boy secretly sipping from his father’s bourbon and sealing his fate; he is the “Boy Leaving Home,” who is happy to find “the little Olivetti / like a miniature suitcase / placed beside him on the frozen ground.” We also get a rare glimpse of the poet in love as a young man, as he begins to grapple with the inevitably fleeting aspect of anything that is beautiful, and to examine where it goes. In Wright’s case, that doomed beauty is masterfully transformed into poetry. Earlier Poems is a rich study in one poet’s development—not simply Wright’s journey from dark to light, but a revelation of the ways in which the darkness contained glimmers of what was to come. Even in the midst of desolation he wrote ravishing, hopeful poems that point to the generous, often joyful sensibility of the mature poet we know today and the strong sense of vocation that has made his work so powerful through the years.
