Shall We Gather at the River

by James Wright

The work of the young mid-western poet offers prophetic messages on the banality of life and man's paradoxical fear of death

Genres: Poetry

48 pages

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules. The two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Wright studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City's Hunter College.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the title of Shall We Gather at the River may sound like an invitation to paradise or a communal baptism, it is instead a call to the great graveyard of the Mississippi, for it is in solidarity with the desperate, the suicides—our lookalikes, our brothers—that Wright believes we can most clearly see ourselves.

I think this is Wright's greatest book, but I like the earlier The Branch Will Not Break better. In Branch moments of lyrical transcendence break forth in the midst of despair; in River, however, transcendence is only possible—if it be possible—on the other side of despair's vast wilderness. Only through identification with the abject among us—the drunk, the mad, the vagrant, the murderer, the self-murderer—can we reach a bleak clarity, a formal peace, a place where we can once more treasure what precious little life we still possess.

Wright—an alcoholic, often institutionalized--struggled all his life with bi-polarity. In Branch he evokes his profound depressions and exults in the moments of manic joy. In River he paints a picture of the bars of a spiritual cage, and, although it is undoubtedly his cage, we sense that it is ours too. And yet love is hiding in the shadow of these bars, pointing somewhere beyond here, toward a fuller humanity.

I am including two poems from the book to give you a taste of its range. The first one is very bleak, but still life-affirming. The second is not only a fine example of Wright's wry humor, but probably the best poem ever written about an optical misunderstanding.

INSCRIPTION FOR THE TANK

My life was never so precious
To me as now.
I gape unbelieving at those two lines
Of my words, caught and frisked naked.

If they loomed secret and dim
On the wall of the drunk tank,
Scraped there by a raw fingernail
In the trickling crusts of gray mold,

Surely the plainest thug who read them
Would cluck with the ancient pity.
Men have a right to thank God for their loneliness.
The walls are hysterical with their dank messages.

But the last hophead is gone
With the quick of his name
Bleeding away down a new wall
Blank as his nails.

I wish I had walked outside
To wade in the sea, drowsing and soothed;
I wish I had copied some words from Isaiah,
Kabir, Ansari, oh Whitman, oh anyone, anyone.

But I wrote down mine, and now
I must read them forever, even
When the wings in my shoulders cringe up
At the cold's fangs, as now.

Of all my lines, the one most secret to me
Folded deep in a book never written,
Locked up in a dream of a still place,
I have blurted out.

I have heard weeping in secret
And quick nails broken.
Let the dead pray for their own dead.
What is their pity to me?



IN RESPONSE TO A RUMOR THAT THE OLDEST WHOREHOUSE IN WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA, HAS BEEN CONDEMNED

I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
This Ohio shore
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

[Kimber · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many poems about rivers, rain, flooding on the rainiest day in Michigan. These poems are elegiac, haunting and sorrowful. I have absolute respect for Wright as a poet & a few poems stood out as truly great such as "Willy Lyons" excerpt: "Willy was buried with nothing but a jacket/Stiched on his shoulder bones./It is nothing to mourn for./It is the other world."

My favorite of these poems is "Youth"

Strange bird,
His song remains secret.
He worked too hard to read books.
He never heard how Sherwood Anderson
Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself
From his hatred of factories.
My father toiled fifty years
At Hazel-Atlas Glass,
Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps
Of dumb honyaks.
Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?
Maybe. But my brother and I do know
He came home as quiet as the evening.

He will be getting dark, soon,
And loom through new snow.
I know his ghost will drift home
To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,
Whittling a root.
He will say nothing.
The waters flow past, older, younger
Than he is, or I am.

[Rosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book was a little less accessible and a lot darker, compared to The Branch Will Not Break, which I loved. I also got the feeling that I didn't know enough about American history (a lot is about Native American places and names) and American living conditions (there are quite a few poems that critique the American society) to make sense of some poems. Still, there were a lot of poems which I thought were really beautiful (like the last one, which I think is about a lady who was loved and died of a disease and is missed terribly and a few others, like the one about Bridgeport, Ohio and the one called Late November In A Field, just to name a few).
At the same time I think it's a bit unfair to be comparing this to his previous book because I think the themes and maybe the way his life was going are different. This book deals with other, darker things and I think it also needs to be judged with this in mind.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a truth universally acknowledged that any poet, if he has the good fortune to live a sufficently long life, must eventually make the transition from writing the Poetry of Youth (i.e., passionate and ornate lyrics about erotic love, the beauty of nature, and the self's quest to establish an individual identity) to writing the Poetry of Middle Age (i.e., a more broad-minded and socially-conscious kind of verse that often requires taking a political or philosophical stance). Yes, this is a sweeping generalization, but indulge me for a moment.

In his poem "A Thanksgiving," Auden looks back on his life and divides it into four eras: (1) childhood, the era of nature poetry, during which his idols were Hardy and Frost; (2) youth, the era of love poetry, during which he most admired Yeats and Graves; (3) middle age, the era of political literature, during which he looked to Bertolt Brecht for answers; and (4) old age, the era of religious literature, during which he settled down in an armchair with tomes by Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis. The general outline of Auden's schema is quite generalizable. Consider:

-Neruda made his name by writing erotic love poetry ("The Captain's Verses" and "20 Love Poems") before he moved on to writing fiery political poems like "I'm Explaining a Few Things" (arguably his best poem).
-Robert Hass's early poetry ("Praise"), while philosophically rich, still fits the mold of the ornate and erotically-obsessed poetry of youth, while his latest book ("Time and Materials") is more political-minded. While "Time and Materials" is not lacking in poems about sexual relationships, Hass's tone in these poems is noticeably changed from his earlier work: his blood has seemingly cooled with the approach of old age, and his tone is no longer quite as urgent and impassioned as in "Praise."
-Jorie Graham's career has covered a similar trajectory thus far, from the loveliness of "Erosion" to the ambitiousness of "Sea Change."

When I was a kid and first became interested in reading poetry, works from the latter half of any poet's career bored me: I was only interested in reading poetry that mirrored my own feverishly passionate, inwardly-directed mind. Of late, however, I've started hungering after poets whose writing successfully "came of age" without deteriorating into propagandistic dreck. James Wright is one example.

One reason why I was first attracted to Wright is because he expresses the ambivalence to Midwestern life that many of us feel: "I could not bear/To allow my poor brother my body to die/In Minneapolis," he says, "The old man Walt Whitman our countryman/Is now in America our country/Dead./But he was not buried in Minneapolis/At least./And no more may I be/Please God." While I did not initially have high expectations for poems with such unsubtle titles as "In Terror of Hospital Bills" or "The Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter," this book eventually won me over. Poems like "The Muse," which concern the suicides of the impoverished and desperate, benefit from being juxtaposed with lyricism-heavy nature poems like "3 Sentences for a Dead Swan," which on a fundamental level is actually about the exact same thing as "The Muse." And, in one of the poems in this book, Wright beautifully describes his own transition from an insular individualism to an empathy-based civic-mindedness: "Now I am speaking with the voice/Of a scarecrow that stands up/and suddenly turns into a bird."

Oh, and I forgot to mention that this book contains what may be Wright's absolute best poem: "In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned," a poem that moves smoothly from nostalgia to sympathy to a surrealistic imaginative leap to a withering condemnation of an entire culture.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I kept dipping into this book throughout the AWP conference in Chicago last week. It has been one of my favorites for years, but somehow this past week it seemed even more resonant than it had before. Wright makes extraordinary leaps that work because of how urgent and genuine his voice is. For me Shall We Gather at the River is a touchstone. I can't say what date I finished it because I hope I never finish it.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seemingly effortless, as if, while digging in his garden one Sunday, Wright unearthed the words that make up this book arrayed perfectly and efficiently from eons of geological pressure.

So why "only" a 4-star rating? Because, to borrow a quote from my favorite tv show, diamonds are literally carbon molecules lined up [sometimes] in the most boring way.

Based on others' reviews, i'll read The Branch Will Not Break.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hot damn. Got motivated to read this after reading a Hass essay on Wright; I wasn't disappointed. Really spare, really bleak, & really awesome.

[Jessica Scofield · Rating 5 out of 5]

To The Muse is the most mysterious lovely poem, I tied myself in visual knots trying to make drawings based on it. I could not do it justice, it is something that has to be expressed in language alone. Or maybe my drawing abilities were not as ambitious as the imagery of this poem. Whatever, I'm grateful for having been introduced to this poem, and this poet, by Dr. Burnham back in 1995.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's sublime.

[Claire Sibley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievable. One of the most arresting books of poetry I've ever read.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Inscription for the Tank" and many of the other poems in the first half of the book are sublime and haunting; the back half loses focus (or I did), before finishing with "To the Muse," which returns to the lyrical and emotive intensity of the book's earlier poems.

Here is "Outside Fargo, North Dakota":

Along the sprawled body of the derailed Great Northern freight car,
I strike a match slowly and lift it slowly.
No wind.

Beyond town, three heavy white horses
Wade all the way to their shoulders
In a silo shadow.

Suddenly the freight car lurches.
The door slams back, a man with a flashlight
Calls me good evening.
I nod as I write down good evening, lonely
And sick for home.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a favorite style of poetry. I'll add other notes later.

[Dan Sendker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of water/nature imagery (as the title suggests), and *lots* of references to Ohio and the Midwest. You can see how his writing style has changed from The Green Wall and Saint Judas.

[Ryan Trauman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poetry collections of all timel

[Ly Madden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shall We Gather at the River has always seemed like the less-loved book from this time in his career. It's usually treated on the terms set by The Branch Will Not Break - fairly, when they come from similar places of intention in voice and work, with The Branch Will Not Break preceding Shall We Gather At the River at this breakthrough in his career. If The Branch Will Not Break is his split from emulating his mentors and points of influence, to the poet's private, clearest voice, Shall We Gather at the River can be seen as the less explosive, dramatic end of this moment in his career, if we're viewing this in light of breakthrough and refinement of the poet's work. Shall We Gather at the River is messier in its experiments, while The Branch Will Not Break is a tighter, more central and edited collection working in the same vein. But I've always thought Shall We Gather at the River is the more potent response to his earlier books, Saint Judas and The Green Wall - and a response, or even a completion, to his intentions with tone and style in The Branch Will Not Break.

The sorrow and isolation Wright speaks to in The Branch Will Not Break, unlike the speaker's place in Saint Judas or The Green Wall, is a sorrow he places against form - the looser, freer structure of his poems in the later book grappling with poem making as a form of relief, often to loneliness and despair. If departing from the familiar through this rearticulation of form is filled with an intention towards breaking - previously absent joy and ecstasy, it reads as a response to the presence of similar emotions of sorrow and displacement that have always been consistent in his work. Perhaps this work is a prayer of sorts to leave what is familiar and accepted for the reconstruction of all this, a task Wright arrives at as the restitution of his own familiar sorrow in The Branch Will Not Break - "suddenly I realize / that if I stepped out of my body I would break / into blossom."

Shall We Gather at the River is more dear to me for the ways in which it abandons that concept of restitution from his previous book, but retains the faith in his project of "the pure clear word." If Wright has broken from his familiar, Shall We Gather may present itself as his return to where he previously situated his gaze and intention, back to all we know this voice is always faithful, the themes and struggles of Saint Judas and the Green Wall: an inevitable, ever quickening sorrow, only working towards death. To take on what has been this known element without the constraints of his older form, and to take in sorrow in a form free to pursue sorrow without restraints - there's a reason the mood of the book is unremitting. The free nature of the form Wright works in is less open to bounding this impulse, as it's more cooperative to the author's "true" voice, and the instincts and intentions of the truest words. But, the poems here are well crafted and deft enough to avoid the maudlin risks at work in these pathologies running themselves rampant. It's that precision in his freer craft that delivers to us what has been lying in the shadows of his work - in Branch, not yet able to take on its own expansive bleakness, in his previous books, not allowed to be the expansive bleakness Wright clearly feels it as. To those ends, I've found its essential to understanding Wright's "pure, clear word" - the themes of his previous work, on criminal, intruder, transgressor, and the poet, both asking for the clarity of his wrong, and constantly evading the consequences of his wrongs - all the most visceral, and perhaps honestly spoken, of his works (and also, always the poems I find myself in the most, the book I turn to more than all his other, or most).

[Michael P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, I feel one star of like for this book, but that is what is wrong with the star ratings. How do you star a book you simply don't care for but do not thing is a bad book? My solution is to give it an extra star so it will not appear to be so bad. There was only one poem in this collection that I really liked, a couple more that I thought were OK. One or two that I thought were just bad. Wright is too highly respected to be treated this way by me. You should try him for yourself, but I am not a fan.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic collection of poems. It was required reading for a Poetry class in college. Glad it was.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I envy Wright’s ability to put to words an experience of place. I have known several of the places in this book. I know them differently for having read this poet.