Kindertotenwald: Prose Poems

by Franz Wright

A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet.

In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. “Take everything,” Wright suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.” With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, Kindertotenwald pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Hardcover

First published September 6, 2011

About the author

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.

Reviews

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Bees of Eleusis

Unless a grain of wheat goes into the ground and dies,
it remains nothing but a grain of wheat ...
JOHN 12:24

The ingredients gathered, a few small red tufts of the dream spoor per sheaf of Demeter's blonde wheat, reaped in mourning, in silence, ground up with the pollen and mixed into white wine and
honey. These stored forms of light taken under the ground. Taken by mouth. First those who by birth hold in secret the word; then placed on the tongues of the new ones, into whose ears it is meant to be whispered. Word murdered, forgotten so long ago, placed as a kiss on the lips of the soon to be no longer breathing who mean to enter death with open eyes, with mouth saying death, what death? We have no word for it in our country where the bride of a brighter oblivion reigns. Not the purple-haired god but the child queen, the raped girl, come back from the dead hand in hand with the child she conceived there, returned in a resurrected virginity, wind through green wheat. Present-day site of a minor refinery of Christ. Although by the tenth generation already the children of light ("in their dark garments") had trampled and smashed and generally raped the two thousand years of this precinct and its holy meal, intolerable mirror. Men who'd designed and bowed down to a law derived from the sayings of one who appeared here to say that the law is abolished, it is too late, all that is over with. Men who bungled their way through the next eighteen centuries before finally descending into the earth themselves, and what they found there they used, and we thank you for destroying the destroyers of the world. And here at the end this is as good as any other entrance to the underplace, journey of the fallen leaf back to the branch, to the bees of Eleusis among olive blossoms, untroubled among crimson wildflowers. Four thousand years later: same flowers, same bees.

*

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will admit that I had to gulp down a flip-page mentality and start over, for I initially got lured into a bit of a quickened pace when I started these prose pieces and didn't give them the kind of breath I would have given to something with a less justified right margin. But once I gave Wright the proper focus, he paid me back for my efforts. Suffice to say that Wright is probably one of the most raw purveyors of emotion writing today. While Stephen Dobyns has criticized a lot of contemporary poetry as being overly earnest and seeking praise for its intention (in other words, its application to fame or notoriety), Wright seems a glorious exception. When I say raw, I mean it in the broadest sense--Wright offers disturbing and dark imagery to be sure, like the palpable stench of the interior of a mental ward, but also humor that is like hearing Grendel belt out a guffaw. There is something James Tate-like about some of these forms, where poems create and pursue their own logic, but while Tate does so more intellectually, Wright spirals down into the visceral. I always find it a pleasure to read writers for whom their work is nothing short of the very cause of their continued existence, and Wright fits the bill quite nicely, thank you.

[Dan Sendker · Rating 4 out of 5]

By its very nature, this is a really dense read. It might turn off readers who enjoy lighter, sparser poems. But Franz's prose poetry is as powerful as his regular ones, and it's clear he enjoys this form.

[Maren]

So lovely but very dense. Took me a second to adjust to the style, but once I did I loved it

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

after a 2nd read all I can say is wow!

[Ulyses Razo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arguably the best of Franz Wright's collections imo

[Booher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book of poetry I have ever read and Franz Wright is my favorite poet. Which is easy, because I generally don't like poetry.

You have to hear his voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuF7N...

My experience of his poetry is greatly affected by the way that I first learned about him: a podcast episode called Two Years with Franz. Franz died of cancer, and it took years. Towards the end he could not hold a pen, so he dictated his thoughts and his poetry to a recording device. This amounted to two years of recordings of him contemplating death, preparing his wife for it, and speaking poetry.

He seemed like a person who never took the easy way out, and that's how I read him.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite as impactful as his other works but still dang good. I thought I might enjoy prose poems more but I found myself missing the challenge and nuance that comes from line breaks and varied spacing.

[Kellan Oliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreakingly beautiful. As much as it is nostalgic, he is looking forward to the hour of his death. I love everything he ever wrote.

[jess sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If he could only overcome the fear, like a deafening dial tone in his right ear where he lies alone dressed in night listening, listening." from the poem "Mrs. Alone"

Having loved the often spare nature of Wright's poems over the years, I was intrigued by this new collection of prose poems, many of them considerable in length. I was afraid perhaps of there being too much, of what exactly I'd be hard-pressed to articulate. There is quite a lot here, but not one word of it free of Wright's veteran and nuanced touch orchestrating toward a compelling whole that continues to feel lean, even surgical, and always biting. The entire book feels to me...not restive exactly, as the trademark anger and anxieties and lashings are all present, but more emphatically reflective and considering. There is a funereal air about this book, with many continuing returns to rich concerns and anti-concerns about mortality, the past--it feels as if Wright has come around some kind of final bend, or crested a last hill and is pausing in his book to look both ahead and behind him.

I say the book is not restive despite this almost pastoral metaphor I've drawn up, because the darkness and emotion are as brutally unrelenting here as in anything Wright has done before. While some of the poems have the air, expansive feel of a long sigh let out between bursts in an argument, most of them well up over and over, billowing upward and outward like mushroom clouds, seeming to encompass every person who has ever lived until dissipating, leaving the poet alone under his own merciless gaze. The images and language pile up more and more without any shelter in enjambment or stanza break, trapping the reader into dealing with them in a manner that feels appropriate in a book that deals so often with both emotional and physical flavors of imprisonment.

Wright's speaker screams at the sky and himself and at anyone that is close enough to hear, realizing over and over the futility and absurd sadness of life, of looking around at perhaps this final hill and realizing one has gone nowhere, with a furtive and honestly-wrought recurrence of faith suggesting perhaps that only in looking upward is there anything to see. For all his work in anger and addiction and loneliness and desperation, one is always in danger of missing the genuine and unsentimental yearning for and solace in love that undercuts every poem, in whatever small places the speaker struggles to find it.

Art forever remains such a place for Wright, whose poems carry a charged, seemingly inherent sense of defiance to the senseless tedium and loss of life; the poems so often drawing up the landscape for consideration and then standing as their own testament to what Wright has done after considering its gray robbery of nearly everything.

"It is all forever written down on a page in your keeping, the palm of my hand: outworld the world time, outheartlesss the heartless, so much meaningless fear, filling the sky, why, why this insane waste of time, the whole world one Gethesmane", from the poem "Our Mother"

The continual piling of these stark and almost overly-layered poems seems Wright's way of fulfilling the instruction of the above lines, letting his pieces play the world's games back at them tenfold while laughing all the way. His talent for an acidic, black wit shine in numerous one-liners and pristine, complex metaphors that manage to dance and swing like a prizefighter simultaneously. Take the blows, be dazed, spit out some blood and teeth--as Wright knows, we're all losing and losing quickly, and this is another book that will offer him a stretch toward lasting a while longer.

"Like you and I, they did as they were told. To things already here, we were called forth and asked to join them, asked to live. Not forever, not even very long. But we are called forth, we are brought here, and we are not brought here to die...

...This world was here before me, is now here, and will be when I am not. There is no sadness in my face, not my true face. My blanket is green, with here and there patches of brown showing through. So the grave has come into the bedroom. I am sitting up in my grave, I knew it. It comes right up to my wasit; but it is not covering my face. It is still very far from covering my face," from the poem "The Window"

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t get a sense of Wright the word-charger, Wright the performer, Wright the deliberate wielder. I first went looking for techniques, and was let down (I’m sure I could have looked harder). When I say “let down,” I mean lowered, dropped off, “as into an abyss.” While listening to Rückert and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. In a dark forest. Late at night. With no maps. This poetry is the stuff of death, bad dreams, youth curdling with macabre adjectives – or all three together. This book would translate into a great death metal graphic novel – but large print edition only.

[Larry Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a striking collection of prose poems in one form or another, loose but rightly done pieces. Though some read more like prose, others really sing with rhythmic wording and subconscious suggestion. They are deeply encoded and often brutally personal as the author struggles with his sense of self as person and poet, and we search for meaning and form here. If you're fond of the prose poem or of Franz Wright's work...it's a good book.

[Thaisa Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prose poems. Startling images, economical & beautiful language. Franz Wright doesn't always use the second person, yet throughout these have the urgency of a an urgent letter--sometimes to the writer, sometimes to someone in particular, sometimes to the reader--that trusted stranger in the dark. Franz Wright is not always easy to read. But he is worth it. Highly recommended for serious readers of poetry and prose poetry.

[Michael Morris]

Wright's prose poems amaze and delight. Whether railing against unseen forces or matter-of-factually addressing traumas and their consequences, the various speakers here give a picture of the chaotic universe from the perspective of one half mad with pain, half mad from ecstatic vision. A handful of pieces were a bit opaque, but even there the scenes and poetry are so honest, raw, and masterfully rendered, that even the difficult passages are worth re-reading.

[Brad East · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one grew on me. (I stopped and started it more than once over a couple years, so that length of time gives you the opportunity for reassessment.) Wright can be so strange and baffling sometimes, and formally his prose poems are not my cup of tea. But the unordinary beauty, graphic grappling with evil and ugliness, and light amid darkness—features that mark all of his work—are present also here in this new form. He will be missed.

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading Wright's book of poems Walking to Martha's Vineyard I was desperate to read more of his stuff. Sadly, Kindertotenwald was not it.

Now, this isn't because the book is bad. I'm just not a fan of prose poetry. Call me a traditionalist, I do not care. If you're into prose poems, give this a chance.

[Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not sure prose poetry is my kind of thing (or at least this collection)

[Givan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional