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Entry in an Unknown Hand
A collection of poetry by Franz Wright.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
60 people want to read
About the author
Franz Wright
48 books117 followersBorn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 27, 2025
Franz Wright was a mess, abused by his father and his stepfather and he writes often of that and addiction, There is a journey, though, in this book of sometimes odd poems.
It starts with this poem:
Untitled
Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still your strange elderly child.
And it ends with this little couplet at the end of a longer poem
It's all right to pronounce a few words
when you're by yourself, and feel a little joy.
It starts with this poem:
Untitled
Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still your strange elderly child.
And it ends with this little couplet at the end of a longer poem
It's all right to pronounce a few words
when you're by yourself, and feel a little joy.
January 20, 2022
Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still you strange elderly child.
* * *
All day I slept
and woke and slept
again, the square
of winter sky lighting
the room,
which had grown
octaves
grayer.
What to do, if the words disappear as you write -
what to do
if they remain,
and you disappear.
* * *
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,
but I know them. It's like this everywhere -
they think they are going to surprise me: I,
who do nothing but wait.
Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up -
very clever.
They think that they can scare me.
I am always scared.
And how much courage it requires to get up in the
morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates
you!
At no point in the day may I fell to my knees and
refuse to go on, it's not done.
I go on
dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,
accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white
laughter and applause,
past a million unlighted windows, peered out at
by the retired and their aged attack dogs -
toward my place,
the one at the end of the counter,
the scalpel on the napkin.
* * *
On the sill
the brown-out candle
burning
in the past.
Frozen clouds
passing over
the border
north. Listen
to the end,
listen with me.
* * *
Who can say, when I go to a window,
that someone near death doesn't
turn his eyes in my direction
and stare and, dying, feed on me.
That in this very building the forsaken
face isn't lifted, that needs me now
*
That smile, for a long time
I couldn't describe it -
the velvet depression
left by a jewel . . .
*
A child's soul like a leaf light still shines through
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still you strange elderly child.
- Untitled
* * *
All day I slept
and woke and slept
again, the square
of winter sky lighting
the room,
which had grown
octaves
grayer.
What to do, if the words disappear as you write -
what to do
if they remain,
and you disappear.
- Quandry, for Keith Hollaman
* * *
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,
but I know them. It's like this everywhere -
they think they are going to surprise me: I,
who do nothing but wait.
Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up -
very clever.
They think that they can scare me.
I am always scared.
And how much courage it requires to get up in the
morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates
you!
At no point in the day may I fell to my knees and
refuse to go on, it's not done.
I go on
dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,
accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white
laughter and applause,
past a million unlighted windows, peered out at
by the retired and their aged attack dogs -
toward my place,
the one at the end of the counter,
the scalpel on the napkin.
- Entry in an Unknown Hand
* * *
On the sill
the brown-out candle
burning
in the past.
Frozen clouds
passing over
the border
north. Listen
to the end,
listen with me.
- Duration
* * *
Who can say, when I go to a window,
that someone near death doesn't
turn his eyes in my direction
and stare and, dying, feed on me.
That in this very building the forsaken
face isn't lifted, that needs me now
*
That smile, for a long time
I couldn't describe it -
the velvet depression
left by a jewel . . .
*
A child's soul like a leaf light still shines through
- Three Discarded Fragments from the notebooks of Rilke
December 23, 2023
Franz Wright's style is starting to crystallize more in this collection. These poems seem to be from a particularly troubled time in his life.
January 1, 2016
I will not say the poetry is "bad," "weak," or "forgettable." Rather, there were some good lines among a garble of unrelated ones, poems that ended abruptly, forced enjambments, histrionic endings. I read poem after poem searching for the magnitude I encountered in the poet of Walking to Martha's Vineyard, and I did not find it in this collection.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews