Post by 14elesvi on May 30, 2013 21:49:52 GMT -5
Vikranth Eleswarapu
Franz Wright
Born in Vienna and raised in the Northwest, Franz Wright was launched into a tumultuous world of darkness and struggle. Addiction to drugs, depression, mental illness-these demons haunted him even as he found solace in poetry and later, God’s grace. This and his wife, who refused to leave him even in his darkest hours, saved Wright from the depths of his despair. Today, he stands before us, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, having overcome almost insurmountable obstacles.
Franz Wright, as a boy, wandered the streets of San Francisco and liked nothing better than to bury himself in the “parallel world of reading.” Homer’s Iliad would be his favorite book. His other love, music, surrounded Franz. He loved everything from the classical pieces of Mozart to the rebellious notes of the Beatles. What finally let him escape the loneliness and isolation were his loyal wife, Elizabeth Oehlksers Wright, and his Roman Catholic faith.
Wright’s poetry was highly influenced by his father, also a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Both share the unique privilege of being the only father and son to have done so. James Wright’s response to his son’s decision to become a poet was “Welcome to hell”. This started off his career at the age of fifteen when he first began to publish poems with themes of despair, darkness and mortality; his dark wit and pain came spilling forth.
Wright has since grown as a poet and now writes of a scarred, but hopeful life. This is conveyed in his 15-plus works, including God’s Silence and Earlier Poems, Wheeling Motel, and The Beforelife, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize award, shows his love for life and his faith in renewal and regeneration. The sense of being lost and seeking out God is familiar to all of us, evoking a sublime image of pathos with “Don’t cry, the world has abandoned us” and “You said, though your own heart condemns you, I do not condemn you.”
Franz Wright’s transition of darkness to light holds a powerful lesson for our world.
In his prayer-like poems, he celebrates this universe and voices his hope for “the only animal that commits suicide.” As one critic praised him that he has the “gift of lucidity from the depths of a blasted life”.
Wright, considered one of the finest poets of his generation, has said, “Think of it: a writer actually possesses the power to alter his past, to change what was once experienced as defeat into victory…depending upon what he does with that past, what he makes out of it.”
His poems, called haunting, intriguing, edgy, and even sometimes funny, have the power to change the past and, most importantly, people. Poetry was the first step in his healing and now he has reconciled with the past and has accepted what may come.
Franz Wright has said that, “There is a power that wants me to live, I don’t know why.”
As critic, William Kennedy, says,
“I know why. It is to write the extraordinary poetry he has created from his drug addiction….to regeneration and to the grace he finds in a silent god.”
I agree. This is a poet who has locked eyes with the darkest terrors of our world, and has come out stronger for it.
Please join me in welcoming Poet Franz Wright.