PodcastDirectory | Episode: The Poetry of Franz Wright and Fanny Howe Podcast

The Poetry of Franz Wright and Fanny Howe Episode | Open Source Radio

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The Poetry of Franz Wright and Fanny Howe

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DATE : Thu, 20 Jul 2006 19:00:00 +0500
Entered in Database : 2006-07-20 14:00:00
length : 24956889
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In the last six years I got very very interested in being around people in different forms of affliction... I use the term affliction in the sense of genuinely broken people who may not make it back. I like to be around people who are struggling with addiction and struggling with mental illness. I volunteered for a number of years in a place called the Center for Grieving Children... I'm happy among them, I like being around people who are struggling with crushing, difficult things. I'm much happier, it makes me feel more normal. That's much more interesting, really, than writing.
Franz Wright

Franz Wright's poems read like one man's chronicle of spirit -- as told by the spirit more than the man. He has said they they often seem nearly to write themselves, in a sort of rapture. Both prayerful and witty, they tell stories of recovery to the point of something like ecstasy.

The uninterruptible voice, the silence I now call my only friend Who says right about now you might want to stop playing mad chemist with your brain: return to Me and I will return
from "The Next Home" in God's Silence, Knopf, 2006

The humiliation I go through when I think of my past can only be described as grace. We are created by being destroyed.
from "Letter, January 1998" in Walking to Martha's Vineyard, Knopf, 2003

this morning I stood once again in this world, the garden ark and vacant tomb of what I can't imagine, between twin eternities, some sort of wings, more or less equidistantly exiled from both, hovering in the dreaming called being awake, where You gave me in secret one thing to perceive, the tall blue starry strangeness of being here at all. You gave us each in secret something to perceive.
from "The Only Animal" in Walking to Martha's Vineyard, Knopf, 2003

Franz Wright [Courtesy of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright / Random House]

Franz Wright (born 1953) and his father James Wright (1927 - 1980) both won Pulitzer Prizes for poetry -- the lyrical experimentalist James in 1972, Franz in 2004. The only father-son Pulitzer pair in the same field, they could be imagined as the big-league poetry version of baseball's Ken Griffeys (Jr. and Sr.), though with dark twists. Franz has recalled that as a teenager when he sent his first efforts to his estranged dad, his famous father wrote him a letter that began: "I'll be damned. You're a poet. Welcome to hell." In fact Franz Wright's sustained surge of poems in the last decade have mapped his own route out of hell -- out of the severe depression and alcoholism that afflicted his father before him. Along the way he found his way into Catholicism, Alcoholics Anonymous and a sustaining marriage. His poems make many references to daily mass, and regular recovery meetings. Often he addresses God directly as: You.

It is late afternoon and I have just returned from the longer version of my walk nobody knows about. For the first time in nearly a month, and everything changed. It is the end of March, once more I have lived. This morning a young woman described what it's like shooting coke with a baby in your arms. The astonishing windy and altering light and clouds and water were, at certain moments, You. ... Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the sane; thank You for letting me know what this is like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly lost with this love
from "One Heart" in Walking to Martha's Vineyard, Knopf, 2003

Fanny Howe will join this conversation -- another light-in-the-darkness poet of searching religious mysticism that seems so powerfully out-of-step with what we think of as our dominant secular culture. An eminence in her own right, Fanny Howe is a special favorite of Franz Wright, who copied out her poem, "Conclusively," in an email -- "one of Fanny Howe's poems in which I stand in hopeless awe."

CONCLUSIVELY The night was almost too long to bear Then there was evidence of mercy--a passing car-- milky air--and I could see dry walls & gravel on the way to a highway Atlantic for its grays Loss the the fulfillment of the Law Space collected on a long line I was eliminated as a locus of mothering-- a she--physical but imaginary as a restless daughter Why this body and not another The one who came to destroy the works of women--their offspring-- knew how many people were resisting incarnation He counted on them by accommodating them Guilt relieving guilt is the get of killers whose mouths shine I can't say enough about this--red because sore & polished because wet One died to become the spirit-guide Before that time there were second persons in everything Then saints, then no one to guide anyone to heaven Cosmic expansion has gone in its prefered direction I can hear the hour, this never happened to me before One day I will shake the blue sky from my hair and slip back to consciousness-- the thing that is always aware with or without a living creature to share its pleasures Tonight I request the precious gift of final perseverance shored up in my sheets not far from a predawn holocaust of traveling children
from Fanny Howe: Selected Poems, UC Press, 2000

Franz Wright

Poet, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book Walking to Martha's Vineyard

Fanny Howe

Poet, novelist and short story writer

Alice Quinn

Poetry Editor, The New Yorker