The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes

by Franz Wright

Genres: Poetry

54 pages

First published January 1, 1982

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

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toward the end of November
I dreamed that it snowed here

I dreamed that I rose from
the couch
where I had been napping
for weeks
with the lights on

I went to the window

*

As a child
in Minneapolis
I was warned at school
not to eat the snow

As a child
I was drilled
to get my ass up
and my head down
under the desk
where it would be safe
when the glass shattered

*

It says in the newspaper
airports are snowbound
all over the country

A girl in Nebraska is found
in a field
frozen to death in her nightgown
It will be 80 degrees

*

And I
will close my eyes now
and lean back in this chair
and watch the snow
blowing in from the north
over the freeway
over the emptied suburbs
over the gray waves
over the graves of the skyline
over the university
over the Mercedes-filled parking lots of the pale physicists

far from you

- Dream of Snow: Los Angeles

* * *

To quiet you the poet
Places to his lips
A finger
Whose nail is torn off

*

Often I speak
Only to you
So the earth
Will forget me

*

The peace of dusk
Moves over each stone
Dropping
The anchor of grief

*

With complete sobriety I remain
The mother
Of distant cradles

*

Lightning and blood
I learned
Are one

*

I
Who never walk
But swim and soar
Inside you

*

My future life
Is your face when you sleep

- From René Char

* * *

It is still more light
than glass.

*

Though it leans halfway
into the invisible
it has a seam,

like a dress;
it sings
when you blow into its lips.

*

Since it is so empty and clear
it fills up the imagination,
makes me want to bring some well water
in a sieve
after setting fire to the barn
with a magnifying glass in the moon.

- Old Bottle Found in the Cellar of an Abandoned Farmhouse

* * *

You're thinking of the pilot
in his glass cockpit
40,000 feet above the street
you live on
unseen
except for the white line
traced halfway across the darkening sky
all at once it dawns on you
the telephone is ringing
for the first time in weeks
and with equal suddenness
it ceases
as your hand goes to life the receiver
in the next room
so that when you return to your window
the sky has grown empty the first star

- The Solitude

[Dan Sendker · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the earliest books by my favorite poet. It's surprising how much of his voice was already there back in the early 1980s. It was also surprising to see prose poems, a form that he used a *lot* in the last few years of his life.

Quite a few of these poems were about or addressed to his younger brother Marshall. I wish I knew more about his life.