Entries of the Cell by Franz Wright

by Franz Wright

Poetry. ENTRIES OF THE CELL is some of Franz Wright's best writing in years. "The cell will teach you all things" is a saying of some early Christians who, in the third century, bewildered to find that no matter what they did and no matter how powerful their faith, the new world they dreamed of far too closely resembled the irreparably corrupt old world. Their remedy to this dilemma was to withdraw from the cities of their time into the desolate solitude in which they found God's presence perpetually closer and more available to them. The saying has been adopted by the Society of the Brotherhood of St. John the Evangelist where, at their Cambridge branch, T. S. Eliot attended services while teaching at Harvard in the thirties. Dedicated to Franz Wright's friend Palestinian poet Fady Joudah—good husband, dad, emergency room MD in Houston and American translator of Mahmoud Darwish—the book is a single poem. Its title is meant to suggest all kinds of cells—body, jail, but primarily the cell in the sense of the small functional bare room in which a monk prays, studies and sleeps.

Paperback

First published December 21, 2010

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

[Anna Mosca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing!! It requires you find us rhythm then it blows you away. How I wish Franz (not too strage of a name for a European as I am but I see your point F) was still with us. May my appreciation reach his family and loved ones then for the call he heed to with the pain it came with. Grateful.