Rorschach Test

by Franz Wright

Wright, Franz

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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

[Maria]

At last you get up:
and suddenly notice you're holding
your body without the heart
to curse its lonely life, it's suffering
from cold and from the winter
light that fills the room
like fear. And all at once you hug it tight,
the way you might hug
somebody you hate,
if he came to you in tears.

- from Beginning of November

He just can't cry --
it is terrible to cry

when you're by yourself, because
what then?

Nothing is solved,
nobody comes;
even solitary children understand. This
apparent respite, this apparent quenching

of the need to be befriended
might (much like love in later years) leave you

lonelier than when you were merely alone.

- from The Weeping

This is the abomination of the secret
envy the sane feel for the mad with their constantly
menaced
yet suicidal willingness
to tell the truth with a clear conscience;
envy of the torturer
who will be going home soon, disgusted
and tired from his legal day's work
to supper and family...

- from The Lord's Prayer

Because I live inside the dream
the one I dreamed inside the life
they forced on me

so long ago

Like a supper that's sadistically
prepared from each and every food
a child is known to gag on

day after month after year

- from Black Box

Expect, in addition
to moments of anguish,
the ever-astonishing realization
of just how generic one's most deeply personal
torments really are.

[...]

Human beings routinely survive
without love --
but you cannot survive without loving
someone or something
more than yourself.

- from Observations

I give up. I am tired,
I can't mourn anymore
the loss of what I never asked for
and never understood.

- from The Disappearing

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Undressing, after working all night,
the last thing I see is the room

in the house next door.
At four in the morning, a dark room

filled with that flickering
blue

so familiar, almost maternal
if you were born

in my generation:
this light

so intimate, reassuring you
that the world is still there

filled with friendly and beautiful people, people
who would like to give you helpful products -

adoring families -
funny Nazis . . .

Undressing, the
last thing I will see.

- Late Late Show

* * *

It is the little girl
guiding the minotaur
with her free hand -
that devourer

and all the terror he's accustomed to
effortlessly emanating,
his ability to paralyze
merely by becoming present,

entranced somehow, and transformed
into a bewildered
and who knows, grateful
gentleness . . .

and with the other hand
lifting her lamp.

- Depiction of Childhood

* * *

Dream clock - next port of entry - . . .

By diurnal moonlight, by dream clock, by star-blueprint
it approaches

*

Over here they are sharpening
the seeing-eye
knife,
etc.

*
Her hand on my

shoulder
without a name

*

Tempus fuckit

*

Funny, I sometimes feel like a motherless child (trad.)
too, unknown
black voice

*

Friends never met

*

Put in the dark
to hear no lark

*

Heart with a miner's face

*

Poem, my afterlife

Blue underwater statuary

And when the sky gives up its dead . . .

*

Thank you, I've just received yours

Unless all these years
I've been misunderstanding

the verses. In any event

I'll scratch your back,
you knife mine

*

And when the sky gives up its dead

And the dead rise blind and groping
around for scattered bones, the skulls
they don like helmets
before setting out, bumping into another sadly
as they hoarsely cry
the full name
of some only friend

- Planes

* * *

The unanswering cold, like a stepfather
to a silent child

And the light
if that's what it is

The steplight

No -

the light that's always leaving

- Untitled

* * *

A metaphor
one in which
the body stands
for the soul
who's busy
elsewhere
no doubt floating
facedown
down
a black reverie

- Mental Illness

[Dan Sendker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franz Wright was clearly in a dark place when he wrote this, his longest book of poetry at the time of its publication.