F: Poems

by Franz Wright

In these riveting poems, Wright declares, “I’ve said all that / I had to say. / In writing. / I signed my name. / It’s death’s move.” As he considers his mortality, the poet finds a new elation and clarity on the page, handing over for our examination the flawed yet kneeling-in-gratitude self he has become. F stands both for Franz, the poet-speaker who represents all of us on our baffling lifelong journeys, and for the alphabet, the utility and sometimes brutality of our symbols. (It may be, he jokes grimly, his “grade in life.”) From “Entries of the Cell,” the long central poem that details the loneliness of the single soul, to short narrative prose poems and traditional lyrics, Wright revels in the compensatory power of language, observing the daytime headlights following a hearse, or the wind, “blessing one by one the unlighted buds of the backbent peach tree’s unnoted return.” He is at his best in this beautiful and startling collection.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

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

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few years back, I read a volley of really nasty and petty emails Franz Wright wrote to editors who turned down his submissions and to William Logan for giving him a bad review (in that letter he actually threatened physical violence against Logan!) Wright has always cultivated a particularly surly "bad boy" image for himself that, combined with the inevitable comparison with his father (a poet I truly admire), made him less than attractive to pick up and read. The letters really turned me off -- he seemed more interested in some idea of entitled Lord of Parnassus than writing actual poems, and so I was more than happy to leave him to his bitter self-delusion. But then I read in a couple of places that he wrote a long poem, "Entries of the Cell," that really deserved a reading and so I thought I'd give him another chance. That poem is not bad but not quite as good as I was hoping it would be. The idea of various "cells" as the structuring metaphor for a long poem does have real potential, and Wright does shift from contemplating bodily cells to monastic cells to prison cells in a telescopic way that does have its exhilarating moments. The problem I have with Wright is that he so often returns to biographical details that he has been nursing a lifetime of hurt and resentments towards that they torpedo the poem in the end. Like so many confessional poems, his writing sacrifices the poetic to excise/exercise the confessional. There is such an unremitting despair and foreboding that Wright seems to be immersed in that he needs to urgently and rawly state and so he doesn't seem to have time to shape the overall poem past what Logan snidely (but accurately, in my opinion) called "Hallmark greetings from the damned." Having said that, when Wright does get out of the picture and not give in to his dominant solipsistic tendencies, he is able to evoke a very compelling and surprisingly compassionate scene for addressing the very real experience of suffering -- he has a handful of prose poems in the final section of the book ("Rose Opening," "Dawn Moon Over Calvary," "Peach Tree," and "Three Basho Haibun") that achieve this welcome reprieve from his otherwise sour and cantankerous disposition. I also think that he, like Robert Hass in his collection Human Wishes, is thinking about the nature of lyrical poetry, narrative, the prose poem, and expediency that I found engaging. After finishing the collection, I looked at the dust jacket photo of the poet with his contemptuous expression seemingly pickled into an eternal scowl of disgust at the reader and the world and felt that maybe it was a defensive act; that, actually, Wright has some of his father's tender qualities as well. I won't be running out to read Franz Wright in any depth, but some of his poetry is decidedly better than the silly mean-spirited emails and letters that soured me to him in the first place. I think that counts for something.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

crushingly beautiful and sad. i deliberatly took the fine for a delay in returning the copy of this book to the library.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

While a few poems, most notably the long "Entries of the Cell," go off the rails for me as a reader, the majority resonates with his ardor and intelligence and illness to an increasing amount. After listening to the Podcast about his letters, I found particular attachment to these poems. I also love reading people with different beliefs—he was quite Catholic and I'm mostly a lazy Buddhist at this point in my life—only to find so common feeling. His translations of Basho caught the spirit well and his depictions of his own mental illness compelled great empathy.

[Laila · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite thing about Wright's poems will always be his brilliant ability to capture the human condition in words.

[Dan Sendker · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last collection of poetry by Franz Wright. It has traces of "Kindertotenwald," "Wheeling Motel," and even "The Night World and the Word Night," plus the usual tributes to his father James Wright, Basho, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has to know he's dying in these poems. While this is far from his best work, there is a sense of finality and culmination that makes it a fitting end to a tortured, grace-filled life. He will always be my favorite poet.

[Moon Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so glad I found this.
Scratch that, it found me.
Stark and heartbreaking poetry prose that’s gritty and gets under your skin.
Poems for the weird days.

‘One day I am going to start to cry and never stop until I die. So what.’

‘I have no more idea what I look like than you do, I’m happy to say; all of that is over, that business with the mirror. One winter afternoon I noticed it had stopped. I couldn’t anymore, and that was all, wish I’d thought of it sooner.’

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

wright is at his best when you can feels him biting his tongue. his rage and imagery are beat captured in beautifully short and sparse poems. unfortunately i had to sift thru a few too many lengthy and uninteresting prose poems that read like reheated leftovers of the prose poem of the eighties.

[فاروق · Rating 4 out of 5]

his last collection, two years before his death, and you could feel mortality seeping into every word. many more prose poems than his others I’ve read. very beautiful and heavy

[Mathilda]

“This blue world.

Unattainable—stranger than dying,

by what, what unmerited blessing, were we allowed to come here and to see it, as in a dream, or with eyes of flesh, what difference?”

[Carmela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm swinging back and forth on giving this four stars. On the one hand, there were a lot of snippets throughout the collection that made me stop and say, oh my god, hey, and on the other, I had to do a lot of skimming near the end because it was just too obscure, and wasn't grasping my attention at all. The first half of the book or so was wonderful (aside from a few slurs, nothing made me too uncomfortable), but the prose near the end was just...meh. Like, buddy, stop talking.

A couple of selections that caught my eye:

1). "This blue world.
Unattainable - stranger than dying.
by what, what unmerited blessing, were we allowed to come here
and to see it, as in a dream, or with eyes of flesh, what difference?

Death row born and bred, and yet


This blue world,
my stranger..."

2). "The investigations were always being led by those who'd most brilliantly and deniably benefited from the crime."
(If I'm being honest with myself, this one just made me think of the X-Files. Fox Mulder, anyone?)

3). "One day the accumulated force of its current and all the tensions coiled within it will burst, flood, and sweep from the planet, the final sinister utopia. Narcissus, goldenly unbuttoning themselves in the field's heart. The king of the alders is dying."

4). "But I've said all that I had to say. In writing. I signed my name, it's death's move."

5). "There are two infinities. Can't you see them?
Don't ask me how it works - one of star-sown space, and one of the words for it - ...
I only know it was like living twice."

[Momo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franz Wright's most recent book is a raw, clear-eyed, yet beautifully rendered, collection that continues exploring many of this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's long-time themes: Life-death, struggle-happiness, depression-exhilaration, why-acceptance. These poems are often difficult to enjoy, but, then, I always come back to Wright's work not to be entertained and to be amused, though I sometimes am in unexpected and lovely ways, but to understand more deeply what it is to be human, in all of its difficult, yet wondrous, ways.

[Anna Mosca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am very fond of Franz Wright poetry and I took my time reading this book, very different from the others, and I moved it with me from one house to the other, from one room to the other, from the house to the garden. I knew the pace set for me was slow, careful and delicate. I put some wonderful red leaves inside, dry and so frail, to remind me to use care. In reading. To gently go over twice, thrice, on the obscure poems with my eyes. When the poem would not open up to me, in spite of my patience, of my desire to be there with, there was nonetheless the sense of having been transported somewhere other than the usual. I was in the suspension because I waited and that suspension at times was all that fed me, deeply down. Eventually the light came but I had been places, other than my usual ones.
Franz Wright poetry has this effect on me, to take me places, places still shut down maybe. While I wait for the door to open I see myself.

[Laura Tyrone · Rating 4 out of 5]

I waivered between three and four stars because there are passages that are incredible and will stay with me for a long time, but also passages that did nothing but muddle the gaps between stronger snippets (I say this with full awareness that I don’t know enough about poetry beyond separating what I like from what I don’t like to make a real analysis 😬).

As soon as I finished, though, I started flipping back to my favorites and rereading. Haunting, heartbreaking, and unsettling in a (mostly) good way.

[Crystal M · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too dense and negative for my taste. Did not finish. I ld read it before 6 years ago and didn’t enjoy it, but even after half a decade of added maturity, still not a fan. There are redeeming poems in here, but I had to slog through the collection to find them.
RIP, Franz, but it’s gonna be a no from me dawg.

[Laura Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorites: “Through,” “The Composer,” “Stay,” “Postcard 2,” “Lamp,” “Crumpled-up Note Blowing Away,” “Entries of the Cell,” “To,” “Peach Tree,” “Rain in Waltham,” “Nativity.”

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

there were a few poems i liked but as a whole I was not very connected to his style

[Giuliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Franz Wright's poetry comes alive and allows the reader to do the same. I might prefer Walking to Martha's Vineyard to F: Poems but both are truly filled with miracles.

[Isidora · Rating 5 out of 5]

💛

[tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

he's honestly for the girlies: "One day I am going to start to cry and never stop until I die. So what."

[Michael Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wright's meditations on mortality, love, and the processes of death are powerful in both their raw honesty and artful rendering. This is his best book since Walking to Martha's Vineyard. Nearly every poem is riveting from the lyrics to prose poems to the brilliant middle poem, "Entries of the Cell." It is reminiscent of the best work of Baudelaire, whom Wright was fond of, but covers so much more ground. I would rank it up there with Ginsberg's "Howl" and Williams' "Paterson" in terms of power and energy.

Wright wrote much of F while in an ICU, suffering from the cancer which would eventually take his life. But the book is no maudlin, morose bundle of tears. As a metaphor, it reminds of the Intensive Care Unit we are all playing a role in.

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franz Wright is a sad poet, man. Well, was.

In F, his poetry remains the same as it largely has been. He whines. He whines a lot. He whines about life, love, lack of love, lack of life, where life has taken him, what he hasn't gotten from life, and really I should hate this book and his poetry in general but damn it if Wright doesn't make whining seem beautiful.

His whining isn't like most contemporary poetry that you see on Instagram or shitty popular books and blogs. No. There's beauty in it because he was a true poet. He measured his words and arranged them just right so there was great music in what he was writing and great, but sorrowful, knowledge in what he was saying.

I've read a lot of his books and F ranks among his best.

[Brad East · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this collection in a single sitting, a bittersweet experience knowing it's Wright's last. I wasn't a fan of his late turn to prose poems, but the broken beauty of his poetry is incomparably affecting. He will be missed.

[Lynn Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Billy Collins meets Rilke and O'Hara

[John Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

[Jacob]

"You look like you could go on doing that forever."