Franz Wright
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 newest collections, God’s Silence, and Earlier Poems were published by Knopf in, 2006 & 2007. 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 15, 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.
“If only I could tell someone.The humiliation I go throughwhen I think of my pastcan only be described as grace.We are created by being destroyed.”
“Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?”
“So we sit there together the mountain and me, Li Po said, until only the mountain remains.”
“And let me ask you this: the dead, where aren't they?”
“The long silences need to be loved, perhaps more than the words which arrive to describe them in time.”
“This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.”
“Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--”
“What I would say is this: writing poems doesn't make you a poet. … It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet. … . It's a craft. It's an art. It's a skill. It is not therapy, and it is not compensation for terrible things in one's life. It is a thing in itself. You devote yourself to being an instrument of it, or you wander forever in the belief that it is a form of "self-expression." … And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is. Someone who puts this thing first. ”
“I basked in you;I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.Besides, in my opinion you aren't dead.(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)”
“We are created by being destroyed.”
“no one is a stranger, this whole world is your home”
“I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear.”
“EPITAPHNow I'm not the brightestknife in the drawer, butI know a couple thingsabout this life: povertysilence, impermanencediscipline and mysteryThe world is not illusory, we areFrom crimson thread to toe tagIf you are not disturbedthere is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorryAnd I know who I amI'll be a voicecoming from nowhere,inside--be glad for me.”
“...thisfinal and longlonged-for job:to be unhappywithout doing evil.”
“The road to Emmaus is this world.”
“But if they were condmened to suffer this unending torment, sooner or later wouldn't they become the holy?”
“literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.”