Franz Wright’s poetry distills suffering, doubt, and desire into a stripped-down style that is both austere and hopeful. But a patient reading of his work reveals that Wright’s frank confessions of need and failure are anything but “confessional.” Rather, his short lines and plain diction set his own precarious consciousness against the larger canvas of a transcendent order. As with many of the best miniaturists, Wright achieves a paradoxical impression of monumentality—like a Vermeer painting that is quite small on the museum wall but feels as if it should be much larger. To say that he’s been to the school of hard knocks would be an understatement—he’s got a Ph.D. from that particular institution. But he has emerged from the worst of it with a tone that is close to that of the penitential Psalms—as in the phrase from Psalm 51 that suddenly breaks into his poem “Reunion”: “My sin is always before me.” Later in that poem he remarks: “what lies / before me is my past.” Perhaps it is because he has been given the grace of survival—of a recovery guided by an uncertain but sincere faith—that he can perceive “appalling and incomprehensible mercy” at the heart of things. There have been cynics who seemingly cannot abide Wright’s sincerity, but many, many more have felt themselves moved by his honest rendering of the soul’s regrets and fragile hopes. His “confessions” are closer to Augustine than to Ginsberg, addressed as they are to a presence whose love is appalling and indefatigable.
Some of Wright’s work is featured in Image issue 51 and issue 60. Read an essay by Wright here and an interview with him here.
Biography
Franz Wright was born in Vienna, and at three months of age crossed the Atlantic and discovered America. He grew up, in a manner of speaking, in Seattle, Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Bay Area. After high school he spent half a year traveling all over Europe, then in January of 1972 entered Oberlin College, graduating in the spring of 1977. He gave a graduate school writing program a try, but left after a few months, deciding such programs were not for him, or for any other serious writers for that matter (though this statement implies no judgment one way or the other upon those who happen to find such such programs useful, for example as a way of getting a job teaching in other graduate writing programs.) After spending thirty years attempting to learn how to write poetry and struggling meanwhile, and rather unsuccessfully, to survive in the world as a respectable member of society, he received–for reasons which still utterly mystify him–the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He is currently finished up a three year appointment as poet-in-residence at Brandeis University, and does not have the faintest clue what he is going to do next.
Current Projects
August 2009
Last spring Franz Wright completed his most recent full length collection of poetry Wheeling Motel, which will be published by Knopf on September 15, 2009. He is currently on the verge of completing a new collection–in a sense. He will no doubt be working on it for another couple years.