It’s true that from the time UD discovered the poet Franz Wright (who has died), she has failed to understand his renown. The son of James Wright, who wrote the much-anthologized “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” Franz Wright always seemed to UD like a hapless royal born to a crown he doesn’t want and doesn’t fit — an Edward VIII needing a Wallis Simpson to take him away from it all.
Franz Wright never abdicated poetry, and his misery in that rarified life shows in every line. William Logan’s takedown of Wright’s work is brutal (Wright dropped a line to Logan in response to it: “I do not wish to kill you or hurt you, and so I beg you to get away from me, without delay, if you realize we are in the same room somewhere.”), but comes pretty close to UD’s own sense of the writing. In just the first paragraph of an essay about Wright, Logan manages to work in the following adjectives:
self-pitying
mawkish
rancid
repetitive
self-obsessed
All of which seem apt. To them UD would add unpoetic, in the sense that Wright’s language never astonishes or delights. Most of his poems are truncated lines of prose, bleats of anger and sadness. Sometimes a line will shine out with a sort of Joe Orton quality of rage glossed to the point of hilarity –
sorry, I have been given the job
of vacuuming the desert forever.
And like Joe Orton, you get the feeling that above all it was his peculiar quality of masculinity, rather than a painful family inheritance, that did the guy in. That note to Logan, and Wright’s repeated rageful variants in his poetry on all I tried to overcome but could not, convey his hair-trigger frustration with the human condition. He was the perfect opposite of a Buddhist.
On those occasions when Wright does calm himself, the result is rather a nice poem, like this one:
Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse
And not to feel bad about dying.
Not to take it so personally—
it is only
the force we exert all our lives
to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,
as the horror of being excluded— . . .
something like that, the Canadian wind
coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow
appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.
**********************
First the blunt admission that behind all of it – behind most of it – is his rage at having to die, “the horror of being excluded.” The “And” with which the poem begins signals that this insight about death comes at the end of a long familiar stream of consciousness on the subject: Having isolated himself in a farmhouse and started meditating, he winds up where he always does when he gets serious — the relentless endpoint of death, and the equally relentless effort to transcend it, to come to terms with it, to reconcile oneself to it. When you actually look at death, you see not death but our long repression of it, the “force we exert all our lives” to deny it (in Wright’s case, this meant a whole hell of a lot of drinking and drugging). After the word “excluded” comes both a dash and an ellipsis as the poet sort of gets to the end of what he can do with the wholly unmanageable subject his meditative mood has conjured.
The pause also introduces the second half of this classic little lyric, with its near 50/50 mix of metaphysics and nature, idea and metaphor. Thoughts impossible to clarify dissolve into the view out of his window; mentally overwhelmed, the poet moves his perception to the world outside:
the Canadian wind
coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow
appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.
Or, as Philip Larkin puts it, when the reality of your own extinction hits you, and hits you hard,
The mind blanks at the glare…
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Vast horizontal snow, white bees, blanked mind, clayey skies — choose your sudden bitter cold appalled visitation image. Choose “The Dews drew quivering and chill.” Etc.