Wheeling Motel

by Franz Wright

In his tenth collection of poetry, Franz Wright gives us an exquisite book of reconciliation with the past and acceptance of what may come in the future. From his earliest years, he writes in “Will,” he had “the gift of impermanence / so I would be ready, / accompanied / by a rage to prove them wrong / . . . and that I too was worthy of love.” This rage comes coupled with the poet’s own brand of love, what he calls “one / strange alone / heart’s wish / to help all / hearts.” Poetry is indeed Wright’s help, and he delivers it to us with a wry sense of the daily in in his wonderfully local relationship to God (whom he encounters along with a catfish in the emerald shallows of Walden Pond); in the little West Virginia motel of the title poem, on the banks of the great Ohio River, where “Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee” and he is visited by the figure of Walt Whitman, “examining the tear on a dead face.”Here, in Wheeling Motel, Wright’s poetry continues to surprise us with its frank appraisal of our soul, and with his own combustible loneliness and unstoppable joy.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

113 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 15, 2009

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

[فاروق · Rating 5 out of 5]

today I finished both the bar exam and this wonderful collection of poems by Franz Wright. praises up

[John Matt]

Franz Wright's latest collection of poems, "Wheeling Motel", shows the poet on a more reflective quest concerning his past; the Catholic faith is a sort of cradle for these broken diamonds of poems and reveries about both Wright's own past and some of his original poetic inspirations. Out of the millions of poems written about poor Charles Baudelaire, about whom W.H. Auden once wrote, "a strong man, yet weaker than any woman who has ever walked the earth", I think Wright transcends most of them with his calm yet firm judgment of the poet and his quest to probe the malevolent side of existence: "Evil isn't hard to comprehend/it is nothing/but unhappiness/in its most successful disguise/Evil is hated and feared at least/It is possessed/Unlike mere misery, of a dark glamour nobody pities." These two stanzas speak worlds not only about the legendary Dandy and lyric poet, but is a quietly epic commentary on the nature of evil as a whole.

His tenderness and quest for an answer for a metaphysical question regarding the doomed, addicted, and mentally ill in particular continues on a more serene note. His "No Answer No Why" stares these phenomena full in the face without blinking, also grouping ourselves within this tribe who differ perhaps only slightly from us. "Everyone who wakes up insane/with window and mirror wintry portrait of nowhere/Everyone Lord who wakes up in a cell/Everyone Lord who wakes up in the cancer bed/Everyone walking the streets with no home and intense frowning features of feigned occupation, feigned destination.." Isaiah's "plea for the widow" is here in abundance.

I think it should be stressed that Franz Wright is not a nay-sayer, for all his reflection upon the extremes of misery in human life--there are moments of hilarious dark humor in this collection which betray an artist who knows better than to take himself all that seriously. His mockery of the simplicity of the mental health system, which often reduces the wealth of the human psyche to a few simple questions and answers, can be seen in "Intake Interview", a farcical poetical detournment of the questions asked when one is admitted to a mental hospital. His struggle with and yet firm resolution to Christ's presence in the world and in the human heart is best embodied in "The Pew", I believe, one of the best poems about faith I have ever had the fortune to read.

These poems reflect like a miniaturist mirror, a la James Tate combined with the dark aestheticism of Gunter Eich, of a poet with an agonizingly exquisite sensibility trying to reconcile a chaotic past and a present into which the divine has peered. The most worthwhile poetry collection of 2009.

Wright can be heard reading 20 of these pieces with beautiful ambient background music on the CD "Wheeling Motel", also available from Amazon.com.

[Zara Raab · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novelist Denis Johnson said of an earlier collection Franz Wright’s poems, "They're like tiny jewels shaped by blunt, ruined fingers--miraculous gifts." I think of them as thimbles of raw carrot juice, intense and flavorful––experiences served up to us straight, pulled from the dream worlds of sleep or altered states, and grated to juice, like the bright orange carrot juice behind the glass refrigerated case in my favorite organic yoghurt store on Fillmore Avenue in San Francisco. Wright’s poems are a quick drink with a short shelf life. Yet they retain an undisputed place in our vast, complicated cannon of the lost soul, as raw slices of American life in the waning days of empire.Wright writes with immediacy about his trials by the fire of drugs and insanity, as if he wakes in the morning with a fountain pen in his throat, ready to etch the words of his demon brain onto his skin.

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

A river of loneliness disguised as humanity's voice.

[meowdeleine · Rating 2 out of 5]

He is somehow more selfish, vain, insecure, and uncurious about the world in his old age than ever before. By his own assessment he wants to talk about love, G-d, pain, death, mental illness, redemption, & cetera, but it is clear that his chief subject is the snark and smartness of Franz Wright, Franz Wright. I'm being harsh. He's simply concerned with his legacy. But I don't think it's the job of a poet to concern themselves with how they'll be remembered. I think a poet's job is to be open and attentive to the world, to remember it even as the world forgets who they are.

Contrast "Für Elizabeth" with two older poems, "Diary Otherwise Empty" and "The Poem":

Für Elizabeth (2011)
“Say I was one naked blind man carrying
this infinite blue mountain on my back,
and all I might have done for love’s sake,
and my best words, written in sleep and forgotten.
Now I have laid them down.”

DIARY OTHERWISE EMPTY (2003)
Caught a brown trout in a trickle of creek;
looks like rain.
When he is no longer needed Christ will come again.”

THE POEM (2003)
It was like getting a love letter from a tree
Eyes closed forever to find you—
There is a life which
if I could have it
I would have chosen for myself from the beginning"

And yet is it charitable? To be so critical of a person? If it's critical, is it useful? I don't think it is..

“Solution (2011)
What is the meaning of kindness?
Speak and listen to others, from now on,
as if they had recently died.
At the core the seen and unseen worlds are one.”

“The world didn’t give me this
word, but
the world cannot take it away—”

[Laila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this collection felt like I was walking through a dream touching these poems as I moved. Wright's grasp of human misery and the failure (and the flat, monotone nature) of the systems and the world we live in are unmatched, especially when it is combined with his insertion and contemplation of the Divine and contrasted with the goodness that exists, in people, in the natural world, in us.

“My Pew" is one of the best poems about faith I've ever read. I know I will be coming back to it regularly.

These poems were a weird (in a good mind boggling way) combination of so much and so little faith at the same time.

[Dan Sendker · Rating 5 out of 5]

My second favorite Franz collection after "God's Silence." It feels like these were written when he was in a good place. They're the first poems I can actually hear in his voice, thanks to the "Readings from 'Wheeling Motel'" album on Spotify. I have mixed feelings about that, but his real voice is as powerful as his poetic one.

[Sam Ging · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much of this collection is beautiful.
But I would have given it 5 stars anyway just because it contains the poem 'My Pew' which makes me cry without fail whenever I utter the last lines.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I breathed on the window and made my initial.

It's true, and then there was the dream
of being present
at my parents' wedding.

That's right: I breathed
on a little black fly-
husk there on the sill
and it came back to life,
why?


My body is lying in bed
all this time,
I know that.

I can see.

You say it's been there for a while?
You have no idea.

- Why Do You Ask?, pg. 14

* * *

A pretty girl asks
for my autograph,
delighted! Except
it's her cigarette
she wants signed,

then lighted. Think about it.
I do. And am
for a moment
the happiest man
that I have ever known -

I have seen my end
and it is someone else's
body, breath,
and lovely
inspiration.

- Günter Eich Apocrypha, pg. 33

* * *

The universe is mostly made of thought,
a few weirdly simple equations
known and still unknown.

Sentient beings are numberless
and I promise to save them,
when you are old and I am a story.

It is all contained
in a few words
written and unwritten.

Winter, thank God. I will wander
from room to room, window to window,
a fictional person gazing at fictional skies.

- Unwriting, pg. 43

* * *

Remember us, you not

yet here. Of the sparrow-coloured
fields

of mid-November, we the
perceivers, the
sayers
and rememberers -

call us
to mind, say the words
in our name:

they are our name, who breathed

here in these underground cloud-
darkened wind-uttered
fields, and spoke
like you

each object's word.

- Address, pg. 47

* * *

The sick wold wandered off
grazing
in his wound's limping shadow,
sidereally alone and immune
to self-pity,
with no need
to describe how he felt
and no need of doctors to die.
Dear Fear,
Fuck off -
I can write to Valzhyna.
Dear Valzhyna,
I woke up this morning
groping around for a pen
to write these words down
on my hand;
I don't know what they mean.
It's just what we do.
The wolf woke with steel teeth
of the trap laid by men
clenched on his wrist
and did what was necessary
and wandered off.

- To a Young Poet, pg. 79

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. Some of my favorite poems were: Pediatric Suicide, Hospitalization, To a Boston Poet, My Pew and The Call. I'm looking forward to reading more of Wright's work.

[Charles Source · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely worth the read, Wright’s poems are grim, surreal and personal, and proceed in unexpected directions. He moves from recollections of childhood and family relations, to his relationship with God, to the different varieties of suffering and pain in the world, fairly effortlessly. It seems like he wants to probe his own mind and sufferings and past more than anything through these imaginative flights of fancy and the revisiting of old memories. There’s something spontaneous-feeling about his verses -- they remind me in some ways of Charles Bukowski’s – as though written in a moment of inspiration, with the poet himself unsure where they’re going or where they’ll end up, which is part of the pleasure of reading them. The tone of many of the poems is far from uplifting, and in a way, they’re like the confessions of an unhappy middle-aged man trying to make sense of the tribulations of his past. But perhaps for Wright (like many artists), creating them is a form of therapy. I heard of the author through another book he was mentioned at the end of, Days & Days by Michael Dickman.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

My admiration for Franz Wright grows.

In this collection, Wright wrestles with his personal suffering, with God, and with the balance of joy and depression; the structure of the poems vary from long lines asking questions, to brief, almost two-word fragments that run like stream-of-consciousness for pages.

My favorite line, from "The Our Father":

"What final catastrophe sent
to wean me from this world."

[RJ Boyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You weren't born that way.

And it didn't happen to you overnight, no, you had to work hard
all your life to achieve it;

a power over you steadily increasing in direct proportion to
your disbelief in it,

to the very fulfillment of your greatest fear:

you're going to live. when you wanted to quit

you could not, and when you could--

when you could you weren't about to."

[Marco · Rating 3 out of 5]

«Why Do You Ask

I breathed on the window and made my initial.

It's true, and then there was the dream
of being present
at my parents' wedding.

That's right: I breathed
on a little black fly-
husk there on the sill
and it came back to life,
why?

My body is lying in bed
all this time,
I know that.

I can see.

You say it's been there for a while?
You have no idea.»

[Matt Morris]

You can listen to Franz Wright, son of James Wright, read many of these plainspoken, ruminating, playful yet melancholic poems on Spotify & other platforms--he sounds a bit like a less gruff Tom Waits--though I enjoy the printed page far more.

For more reviews, visit The Greater Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge https://miscmss.blogspot.com/2022/08/...

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked these poems, some of which have an interesting exploration of spirituality, well enough. Yet I didn't feel I was wowed by any of them or moved/intrigued enough to re-read and re-think any of them after having read them. Perhaps I was not in the right mood to fully appreciate Wrighht’s style or topics.

[Kati · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a peculiar anthology. It felt like most of the poems were written while the author was high as a kite. Or out of his mind. Or something. Still, there were some real pearls hidden in there, like for example, "What did not in time become a source of suffering?"

[Eliana]

These were hit and miss for me. I much prefer his earlier collection, “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.”

[Scott DuJardin · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was almost nothing here I could relate to.
The exception - the one poem that spoke to me - was "Pediatric Suicide".

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Borges said that music was poetry, but even the esteemed Jorge didn't quite predict the songs of Franz Wright - little peeps and chuckles that echo from vast, dark rooms. Plus, Borges couldn't with his affliction couldn't have quite gotten a handle on Wright's power of image, how even the seemingly static image of a rider on the bus quivers down to the soul in Wright's hands, not to mention how a black lake can have a "still cumulus surface." Wright's poetic feet stand between thought and image when his poems are at their sharpest, and the thought is all crammed into the most base of conclusions. What you won't find in Wright is the meandering musing of the lightly poetic mind, but the rock-solid end result that punches one in the face or gut or balls with some of the purest intensity to be found out there right now. In this collection, like so many others, Wright touches on the humorous ("Professor Alone During Office Hours" or "Intake Interview") while others are clearly hard-hitting from the start ("Pediatric Suicide" or "Abuse: To My Brother"), but even in these extremes, Wright touches on the opposite extreme simultaneously. When Wright is on-target, he puts out some of the most viscerally, brutally honest work to be found in poetry today, and this collection has a good number of those to scour through.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the disappointment I felt reading "Walking to Martha's Vineyard," I was reluctant to even read this slim book of poetry. But I'm glad I did. Whereas "Walking" seemed a cheesy (if not kneejerk) reaction to his recent conversion to Catholicism, "Wheeling Motel" is a more mature exploration of faith and compassion in the modern world, from drug-inflicted deathbeds to humble pleas to God for direction. This is the type of book you can read in an hour and re-read again and again. So glad I revisited Franz Wright, and I recommend "Wheeling Motel."

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now this is more like it. Enamored by American poet, Franz Wright's lauded collection, Walking to Martha's Vineyard I wanted to read more of his sparse and haunting poetry. I had a bit of a misstep with his prose poetry collection Kindertotenwald which I didn't enjoy because I do not like prose poetry, but with Wheeling Motel I found the right groove.

Wright's poems are so fricking sad but his sadness also presents a beauty that is equally aching but by god, they will leave you gasping for air as they did me.

I will read his entire oeuvre. Trust. Because he's that good. RIP.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little windy ("wind" like air that moves) compared to his other recent books, and therefore it's missing some of the terse vitality that made those books brilliant. A strong work compared to much of what's out there, though, as Wright's effortless spirituality overcomes his moments of largesse. Altogether, a good read for fans of Wright, but probably not the best starting point for those new to his work.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Wheeling Motel, Franz Wright's poems reel from and deal with fear, delusion, and affliction. For whatever oblivious reason, perhaps, oblivion, Wright's stuff reminds me of Christian Wiman's poems in Every Riven Thing and Frank Schaeffer's thought processes in Why How. Now, in memory palace, Franz Wright returns his books to God.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't get to read alot of poetry, especially newer folks, but have become a big fan of Franz Wright over the past few years. Just got this. Finished it last night; liked the poems towards the end better.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love love love. Can't wait to read it again. Some of my favorite lines: “the knife giving the wound some free advice.” “What a day: I had some trouble/ following the plot line; however/ the special effects were incredible.” “Just what the world needs, another world.”

[Davis Stamford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a few of Wright's books now... Like this the best.

[Phillip Grant · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can never work out what he is doing with his line-endings

[Ulyses Razo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Now I'll have to devour everything else Franz Wright has written

[polly · Rating 3 out of 5]

We were standing alone at the window when it
started
to rain and Schumann quietly.