Franz Wright Raised Up

By Mary Karr
Sunday, March 23, 2008

Back when Franz Wright and I were in our 20s, teaching English in the academic ghetto around Boston, we both drank a lot and were known as serotonin-deprived individuals. For a while, Wright's phone message was, "At the sound of the gunshot, leave a message," which effectively terrified the casual caller into hanging up.

The poems he wrote then were darkly hilarious in their paranoia. Around the time Wright began reading (among others) the dark poems of Holocaust survivor-turned-suicide Paul Celan, he penned "Alcohol," in which liquor talks to its devotee -- "You do look a little ill./But we can do something about that, now./Can't we./The fact is you're a shocking wreck."

In "Entry in an Unknown Hand," the staccato rhythm of the prose stanzas mirrors the mindset of a self-anesthetized guy lifting his head to make self-consciously pained statements in mock-oracular tone:

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.

By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this

room. I am not asked to explain my presence

anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and

are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking

certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank --

you'd think my name meant nothing to them. Non-

chalantly they hand me the sum I've requested . . .

It's partially the bleakness of Wright's early work that makes his conversion to Catholicism so moving. "Year One," in his Pulitzer-winning collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard, ends with this sparely carved testament of his new faith: "Proof/of Your existence? There is nothing/but."

For most of my life, I was an atheist who found a eucharistic connection to others only through poetry. Reading a poem aloud, I took another person's passion into my body and was transformed by it. This Easter, regardless of your faith or its lack, I wish you the communion that Wright's "The First Supper" promises. It addresses God, but the poem could be spoken to poetry itself:

Death, heaven, bread, breath and the sea

Here

to scare me

But I too will be fed by

the other food

that I know nothing

of, the breath

the death

the sea of

it

Day

when the almond does not

blossom and the grasshopper drags itself along

But if You can make a star from nothing You can raise me up

(Franz Wright's poems "Alcohol" and "Entry in an Unknown Hand" appear in "Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems." Copyright 1998 by Oberlin College. His poems "Year One" and "The First Supper" are from his collection "Walking to Martha's Vineyard." Knopf. Copyright 2003 by Franz Wright.)