Walking to Martha's Vineyard

by Franz Wright

In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal. As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death . . . There is only / mine / or yours,– / but the world / will be filled with the living.” In prayerlike poems he invokes the one “who spoke the world / into being” and celebrates a dazzling universe–snowflakes descending at nightfall, the intense yellow petals of the September sunflower, the planet adrift in a blizzard of stars, the simple mystery of loving other people. As Wright overcomes a natural tendency toward loneliness and isolation, he gives voice to his hope for “the only animal that commits suicide,” and, to our deep pleasure, he arrives at a place of gratitude that is grounded in the earth and its moods.From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Faith, The United States Of America, Religion, Read For School

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franz Wright and his father James Wright are the only father and son to each win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In addition to a Pulitzer, the two shared other things: alcoholism, manic-depression, and lives shortened by cancer. In my opinion—based only on this, his prize-winning book—Franz also inherited a little more than half his father’s genius and a little less than half his talent. But that in itself is enough to make Walking to Martha’s Vineyard worthy of a Pulitzer prize.

His parents divorced in 1961, when he was eight, and Franz was always haunted by the spectre of his absent father. An alcoholic and serious drug-user by the time he graduated Oberlin in 1977, he managed to write more than ten small volumes of verse in the next ten years, and earn prizes too—including a Whiting and a Guggenheim. But the bottom fell out in 1989, when he was fired from Emerson for drinking, fell into a profound depression and attempted suicide. Even worse, the poems stopped coming.

After ten years of drought, his life improved: he married Elizabeth Oehlker, stopped drinking alcohol, experienced a spiritual awakening, and entered the Roman Catholic church. The poetry started flowing again too, and in 2001 he published his first major collection, The Beforelife.

Walking to Martha’s Vineyard is a moving book—particularly when it speaks of the hunger for fathers and the possibility of spiritual enlightenment. Wright is effective—as was his father—in the evocation of solitude, despair, and sudden illumination, all achieved through stark diction and startling images. Often, when I was reading these poems, I missed his father’s distinctive music and gift for architectonic structure, yet I always felt strongly that Franz possessed his father’s openness to satori, his compassion, and his unconquerable heart.

Oh, and Franz achieved something his father never achieved: a peace, a wisdom, a sense of reconciliation toward the end.

I’ll conclude with two of Wright’s poems. The first is about fathers (God and James W.), the second is an epitaph he wrote for himself.

FATHERS

Oh build a special city
for everyone who wishes

to die, where
they might help one another out

and never feel ashamed
maybe make a friend,

etc.
You

who created the stars and the sea-specimens
come down, come down

in spirit, fashion
a new heart

in me, create
me again—

Homeless in Manhattan
the winter of your dying

I didn’t have a lot of time
to think about it, trying

to stay alive

To me

it was just the next interesting thing you would do—
that is how cold it was

and how often I walked to the edge of the actual
river to join you


EPITAPH

Now I’m not the brightest
knife in the drawer, but
I know a couple of things
about this life: poverty
silence, impermanence
discipline and mystery

The world is not illusory, we are

From crimson thread to toe tag

If you are not disturbed
there is something seriously wrong with you, I’m sorry

And I know who I am
I’ll be a voice

coming from nowhere,

inside—

be glad for me.

[D. Pow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book matters to me. Here I've found phrases, images and ideas that bludgeon like a hammer or caress like a feather. Here I recognize a God I know. The God of recovering drug addicts and booze hounds, the God you turn to when it's three am and you're convulsing and shivering on the bathroom floor, the God I turned to when I was a young man and I had shipwrecked against the shoals of my own fucked up self. Wright writes about a Catholic God, about 5am masses, signs of the cross, and the fearful, stumbling roadblock and freedom of the path of Christ but he does it with a Zen-like lucidity and minimalism that is utterly like anything else I've read in traditional religious literature.

Wright get the absurdity of religion, of hoping against hope that there is some power out there, up there, somewhere, who gives a rat's ass about our existence. He gets the bigger impossibility too: the fact that we exist at all. The wonderful mystical `itness' of our paltry, gorgeous beyond reckoning lives. He writes beautifully about beautiful things. He writes about lives that have been wrecked and mosiaced back to some semblance of order and meaning through something that some people call grace, something so small and minute, that it remains impossible to prove except, maybe, through poetry.

I don't even know any longer if I worship the God that Wright does, but reading these poems brought tears to my eyes, shudders of recognition and what I once would've marked as a `presence' of 'the other'. And while I might have grown too cynical to chase after the sacred with the abandon of Franz Wright, his poems have once again brought me to the place in my own life where I can recognize that such beautifully harebrained interior meanderings can still have a lasting value even in an age as soul-sick and ruthlessly materialistic as our own.


Thanks to Paul Bryant, Data Recovery God.

[tee · Rating 3 out of 5]

a book of grace and gratitude! with turns sharper than enough to tear away the illusions of stillness almost immediately, this was honest, heartfelt and very intense (also too religious for my liking but that’s my problem)! decent guy, franz wright!!

“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”

[sheereen · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you laila for bringing this book into my life, and the brooklyn public library for placing it in my hands. these poems reminded me of the baldwin quote about how you think you’re having a singular human experience and then you read dostoevsky and realize he had that experience too. if i could give 6 stars i would

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the saying goes, this is not your father's Oldsmobile. Hit or miss. At some points, I felt 3-star-ish, at others, 4. Round up like the kind math teacher, then. I thought all the poems would be about Martha's Vineyard but, truth told, only the title poem is about Martha's Vineyard (you know, walking on water to get there). The rest? Mostly about life, and the end that's always under the bridge (Death as troll or billy goat gruff).

Sometimes you get a head scratcher like "Quest":

The bell which
when struck emits
silence--

I don't want to sleep with you
I want to wake up with you,

when I was sick in bed.


Not Poe's bells, bells, bells, I fear. But at least the "you" is lower-cased. Many poems here feature the convention of capital-Y "You" for Big-G God. Example?

"The First Supper"

Death, heaven, bread, breath and the sea
here

to scare me

But I too will be fed by
the other food
that I know nothing
of, the breath
the death
the sea of
it

Day
when the almond does not
blossom and the grasshopper drags itself along

But if You can make a star from nothing You can raise me up


Interesting to me was the haphazard line breaks, use (or not) of punctuation, stanza choices. Mostly personal, they struck me. I read poetry-writing books about the importance of line breaks and then I read poets like Franz. And laugh.

[martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about grace. It focuses on Franz Wright's newfound sobriety and conversion to Catholicism. It's my understanding that he got a lot of flack for the latter, since religion -- or earnestness about religion -- is an unpopular topic in modern American poetry. But he's unapologetic about it and the poems are careful and spare and intense. The senses of both hope and struggle are tangible.

I kept being astonished by how *not* overwritten these were. It definitely deserved the Pulitzer it won.

I read every poem in here two or three times. I really highly recommend it.

Here's one from the book:

Letter — Franz Wright

January 1998

I am not acquainted with anyone
there, if they spoke to me
I would not know what to do.
But so far nobody has, I know
I certainly wouldn't.
I don't participate, I'm not allowed;
I just listen, and every morning
have a moment of such happiness, I breathe
and breathe until the terror returns. About the time
when they are supposed to greet one another
two people actually look into each other's eyes
and hold hands a moment, but
the church is so big and the few who are there
are seated far apart. So this presents no real problem.
I keep my eyes fixed on the great naked corpse, the vertical
corpse
who is said to be love
and who spoke the world
into being, before coming here
to be tortured and executed by it.
I don't know what I am doing there. I do
notice the more I lose touch
with what I previously saw as my life
the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes—
it is infinite. What we experience
as space, the sky
that is, the sun, the stars
is intimate and rather small by comparison.
When I step outside the ugliness is so shattering
it has become dear to me, like a retarded
child, precious to me.
If only I could tell someone.
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.

[Eliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of poetry you can read over and over again and pray a new prayer every time.

[Erika Schoeps · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book that brought me back to poetry again. Wright is an absolute visionary who knows what minimalism is and how it should look in its most ideal form. Wright does so little and creates so, so much.

As a religion-less theist, I love talking about God in an exploratory fashion, and Wright does not disappoint. As a Catholic, Wright believes in God, and makes statements about God's existence and how he found God, but he at times contradicts himself in subtle ways (hint: read the line breaks as independent lines). Wright winds the reader through the implicit and explicit in a thought provoking, enticing way.

The book has a series of common themes that it explores and develops throughout. Absence vs. presence, isolation vs. unity, transcendence vs. knowledge, and of course, death. Although these themes are common and well explored, watching Wright change his mind, develop, and revisit these same themes was fantastic, and constantly comparing poems to other poems gave me more to look at and think about.

As an analytic person who enjoys the creative, the structure of Wright's poems was so pleasing and helpful for me. Almost like a lawyer, Wright uses image, exposition, and metaphor, and then ends with a conclusive statement (occasionally he ends with an image, but more often, he uses expositive statement). Even though interpretation is ultimately up to the reader (especially considering how minimalist this poetry is), Wright will deliver his take on the situation in a clear, deliberate fashion.

The greatest strength of this book is its push and pull between Wright and the reader. Wright's experiences, thoughts, and structure push through to create a defined picture of who Wright is, where he comes from, and what he believes, but because of the minimalism, this experience can still be shaped so intensely and drastically by the reader. Wright has created a fluid, ever changing experience that can be revisited again and again that still clearly bears the beautiful, indelible mark of himself.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a short collection of minimalist poetry but each poem has such depth that I have found myself re-reading them immediately in my attempt to capture whatever I might from the experience. Some are so personal as to be almost inscrutable while a few are almost playful. Most are prayerful, full of fear, longing, pain, sadness, love and occasional delight. God is present everywhere, affirming his life.

From "Walden":

this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can't imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret something to perceive

Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.

This is the final poem of the collection, a summing up perhaps of Wright's views, thoughts and beliefs. For me it is simple and beautiful. There are more selections I have marked but they would divert from this. So I will end here.

Definitely recommended for poetry readers among you.

[Dhanaraj Rajan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collection. Each poem is a point of reflection for hours.
I do not want to talk a lot about his poems. Will give a sample and that would suffice:

PROMISE

Long nights, short years. Forgiving
silence

When morning comes, and pain--

no one is stranger, this whole world is your home.

[فاروق · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felt like reading Rilke for the first time again. Sublime, sorrow, completely singular. An incredible collection from which I have been sending friends photos of poems every few pages. The type of poems that make you marvel at the ability to breathe and feel, in all of their idiosyncrasies.

[Kayla Hollatz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the perfect poetry collection to read on a Saturday morning. The contrast between light and death in the setting of winter opened up a whole new understanding of faith in the dark places. His words are written with intention and clarity. I really enjoyed this spiritual collection!

[KFed]

There are few volumes of poetry that have had more impact on my life and on the way I read -- which are really maybe the same thing -- than this, Franz Wright's stirring and heartbreaking 'Walking to Martha's Vineyard.'

It's the crispness of the language and thought offered here, combined with the complete absence of language and easy answers/allusions in many places, that make this book so outstanding. (To say nothing of the subject matter.) Consider descriptions like the second stanza from the opening poem, 'Year One,' the 'Moonlit winter clouds the color of the desperation of wolves. Proof / of Your existence? There is nothing / but.' Language has rarely been so precise. The desperation here is almost unbearable, and yet, because of the precision of the image, and because of the uniqueness of the poet's vision and his allowance of meaning to take hold in the poem's white spaces and lack of language, the meaning here is almost tangibly real, almost frightening in its realness.

Remarkable, also, are Wright's subtle turns. The transition of the poem 'Fathers' from an elegy to an unknown, unknowable but longed-for God -- one 'Father' -- to an elegy to the poet's own father, who died by drowning. The transition here is so precise that it startles me every time.

I re-read this book and keep wondering how each poem here works -- how the meaning is achieved, how the language, spare as it is, manages to contain in it entire worlds of despair and sadness. And I can't. The volume resists my ability to expose its mechanics. I love it so much for for that reason. I bathe in the words offered here and cherish the man so capable and generous to offer them. A true work of art. I cry every time.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

there isn't a single poem in this book that i wasn't thrilled to read. very tenuous and lonely and questioning, but also affirming. i wish i could copy out every poem right here. just one (the title poem):

"
And the ocean smells like lilacs in late August-how is that.

The light there muted (silver) as remembered light.

Do you have any children?

No, lucky for them.

Bad things happen when you get hands, dolphin.

Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing?

There is no down or up in space or in the womb.

If they'd stabbed me to death on the day I was born, it would have been an act of mercy.

Like the light the last room, the windowless room at the end, must look out on. Gold-tinged, blue

vapor trail breaking up now like the white line you see, after driving all day, when your eyes close;

vapor trail breaking up now between huge clouds resembling a kind of Mount Rushmore of your parents' faces.

And these untraveled windy back roads here--cotton
leaves blowing past me, in the long blue
horizontal light--

if I am on an island, how is it they go on forever.

This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught
glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have
I described it, I can't, somehow, I never will.

How is it that I didn't spend my whole life being happy, loving other human beings' faces.

And wave after wave, the ocean smells like lilacs in late August.
"

[Lauren · Rating 1 out of 5]

I saw him read from this book, and it was really terrible. Nothing worse than seeing a formerly good poet, suddenly find god. Yuck.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am the only person in the world who thought this book was awful, and I am at peace with that.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hopelessly cheesy. Like a Hallmark card mixed with those awful Footprints Jesus cards. And this all coming from a hopeless romantic like me.

[Edita · Rating 2 out of 5]

I close my eyes and see
a seagull in the desert,
high, against unbearably blue sky.

There is hope in the past.

I am writing to you
all the time, I am writing

with both hands,
day and night.

[Bookish · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose this work because I love Martha's Vineyard and I needed to select a book from my least-read genre (which happens to be poetry) for a reading challenge. I did not know anything about this author, but saw that this won the Pulitzer Prize, so I picked it.

There are dark, reflective themes to this collection, which appear to be centered on looking back on one's life in middle age. My favorite parts were the poems detailing and appreciating nature, but overall, I did not connect with the overtly religious undertones of this work. I also found the use of "kindersluts" to describe young women dressed up for a night out as offensive.

[Emilia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found myself thinking a lot about the organization of this collection, its parallels to the structure of the titular poem, and how Wright’s spirituality informs his sense of time. Makes me wonder how much that sense of time (not sure how to define it—suspended? nonlinear? perpetual? lacking beginning or end) lends timelessness to his work, or whether maybe to some readers it instead makes his work more feel dated or didactic. Interesting that I think this was the first collection he published after becoming Catholic? Anyway I loved it

[Gwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite poem was Reunion. Inspired writing to come.

[beau · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my tip top faves.

MY PLACE
for Beth

Rain land, walnut blossoms raining
white
where I walk at sixteen

bright light in the north wind

Still sleeping bees at the grove's heart
(my heart's) till the sun
its "wake now"
kiss, the million
friendly gold huddlings
and burrowings of them hearing the shining
wind
I hear, my only
cure for the loneliness I go through:

more.

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will
disappear


THE MAKER

Planet, the mind
said, all
poppyfield

as I was
waking--

The listening voice, the speaking ear

And the way, always, being
a maker
reminds:

you were made.


YEAR ONE

I was standing
on a northern corner.


Moonlit winter clouds the color of the desperation of wolves.


Proof
of Your existence? There is nothing
but.


THE POEM

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


5:00 MASS

The church is a ship in the brightening snowstorm;

shafts of light falling in through blue windows.

It's almost night and starting to get light!

The planet, too, adrift

in an infinite blizzard of stars--

Where most of us are sick

and starving in the pitching dark, and the partying

masters up above

don't know where we are either.

We love one another. We don't really know

anyone well, but

we love one

another


CLOUDLESS SNOWFALL

Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody's put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone--
Vasp whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

UPDATE, April 4, 2020 - some poetry tries to write itself into joy and ecstasy. Wright’s poetry comes straight from the maelstrom at the heart of that centerpiece of human existence. I’d be hard-put to name much other poetry that so essentially captures such raw emotion with an honesty and technical prowess that makes the internal logic of his best work so exquisitely reliant on itself. Despite reading through this collection again in a day, I started over again and again, page after page, not so much because I didn’t get the poem, but I wanted to see again how it delivered, or turned. Wright’s work also nicely works on a Peter Lorre method of tone, never undoing itself but still able to be despairing, or funny, or downright scary without hackneyed cues. Such strong stuff. Franz, you are missed.

Franz Wright is so amazing that I think he would be dangerous to show to young writers, mainly because his style can quite easily be copied into trite, vague and emotionless crap. But Franz spins galaxies of depair and forgiveness (mostly of the self) where even the street outside the window may wish you ill or take suicidal turns towards the ocean. Wright's poetry is the poetry of deep-rooted pain and the need to find happiness in the world, and it is delivered in quick punches, startling images that reinvent the world and its own grammar to invite...no, dare...you to come along.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Resurrection of the little apple tree outside
my window, leaf-
light of late
in the April
called her eyes, forget
forget-
but how
How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me -
The world
is filled with people
who have never died

- On Earth, pg. 4

* * *

Highway shrine,
lighthouse
of time

in the bleached-
gold winter
wheat -

listening in
another tongue, I

walk there

Come help through
the long hour
of our death

- Medjugorje, pg. 19

* * *

Planet, the mind
said, all
poppyfield

as I was
walking -

The listening voice, the speaking ear

And the way, always, being
a maker
reminds:

you were made.

- The Maker, pg. 37

* * *

Once I held your face
in my hands, I saw through
space

Poor spirit
drifting off now

like smoke in pouring rain

Wait -
are you there?

Everywhere. I'm

everywhere

- Weekend in the Underworld, pg. 50

* * *

Bee light
The bees of the icon
The little prayer
to Mary, maybe
I won't remember
anything
only

the words. And
that these words
are only

things, but
that all things are shining

words, busy
silently
saying themselves -

they don't need
me.

- Icon from Childhood, pg. 68

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Someone recommended this book to me years ago, because she said her boyfriend was going through a phase where he was questioning mortality and he was loving this book. She said she thought I might enjoy this book too.

Now, I don't know what vibe I was giving off that she made the correlation between her boyfriend's issues and me - but I'm glad she recommended it. I previewed a bit at the bookstore and knew I had to own it. "Walking to Martha's Vineyard" was my first exposure to Franz Wright, and he has since become my favorite poet. I only have a small shelf of poetry crammed with about fifty or so poetry books, so maybe calling him my "favorite" isn't saying much to those who are more widely read in poetry. I just know this: this book speaks to me, and continues to do so over and over again.

I reread it about once a year, preferably in the autumn when things start getting gloomy and dying, and I find it comforting, cozy, and almost even magical.

[R.G. Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read Franz Wright with interest for years. When I heard him read at the Dodge Poetry Festival this weekend, though, I felt as if a switch had been thrown in my brain, reactivating my own poetic desire. This book is less dark and disturbing than much of his work that I know, almost prayerful in some poems, but still it is a collection that continually surprises and stuns. Isn't that what poetry's all about?

[W.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite book from this very readworthy author, although this is the one that netted him a very nice prize.

I love The Beforelife and others by him.

Happy Birthday, Franz!

I am glad you are here and writing and crafting such poetry, such great misery-safety-nets for all of us misery acrobats here on earth!

[Karen Hausdoerffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't realize starting this book that Franz Wright was the Son of James Wright. Having been drawn in and troubled by James Wright and his luminous cruelty (women cluck like starved pullets dying for love), it was interesting to see his son's poems wrestling with the legacy of what must have been a difficult father. I found FW's imagery compelling, but wanted the theme to wander more.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this, but didn't much.

Also, I can't get past the word "kindersluts". What a nasty word for a nasty, judgy thought. This phrase was applied to some random people seen on the street. Yuck. Am I being too literal or simple-minded here? Isn't the whole point that words really do matter?

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

His poems are filled with a quiet, aching desperation....the poems I most connected with in this volume were: "The Word "I", "The Poem", "Cloudless Snowfall", "Promise", "One Heart" and "Old Story"