A Dying Poet’s Farewell to the World
Writing poetry made the late Franz Wright miserable, but it was an improvement on just about everything else in his life. His mentor in this essentially comic predicament was his estranged father, the poet James Wright. When Franz was fifteen, he sent his dad a seven-line poem. The elder Wright’s response soon arrived from New York City, addressed jauntily from one “good craftsman” to another: “Franz, I am non-plussed,” the younger Wright recalled, in a poem. “I’ll be damned. You can write. What can I say? Welcome to Hell.”
It was the only home they shared, and Wright took advantage of his father’s hospitality. In fourteen volumes of poems, including “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, Franz Wright made Hell habitable, almost cheerful. “Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments” (Knopf), assembled by the poet’s widow, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, after his death, in 2015, collects work from the days when Wright was maintaining what John Keats called a “posthumous existence”; dying from lung cancer, he dictated some of these tender, hardboiled, and wisecracking poems into a tape recorder, too weak to write, or left them as voice-mail messages for friends in an “odd-sounding croak that was once a good voice.” Photos taken at Wright’s apartment after his death show lines of verse written on the walls, on the appliances, on coffee filters, and, the most Boston thing evah, carved with a ballpoint into a Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cup. It looks like a crime scene, if writing poetry were a crime. “I feel like Philip Marlowe sometimes,” Wright wrote, lost in a “Los Angeles of words.”
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As his voracious sentience began to cleave away from his suffering frame, this “facsimile of the person” became more and more a poet of the estranged body: “I am traveling away from my body in widening rings,” he writes, and yet, “If I think I have problems, / I look for the mirror.” Any errand outdoors makes him a kind of zombie Frank O’Hara, clomping down the quiet chain-link and brick-faced blocks near his home in Waltham, Massachusetts. Even a trip six blocks to the post office is an “exceptional event, long planned.” Wright’s spectacular disarray—you worried about him, just running into him on the street—was always first an occasion for self-ridicule: spotting his own reflection on a bus one afternoon, “I looked like a suicide / returning an overdue book to the library.” On the edge of death, though, the scenario becomes nearly slapstick; strangers who come across Wright’s body on the sidewalk move “around him, the way you would / dog shit.”
Wright’s poems are usually at least a little funny, and often work like extended punch lines; the way to read them is to try to guess the elided sick joke. What happens to the body of a lifelong smoker when he dies? In “Involuntary Detox: Smoking Porch,” it keeps smoking, of course, but not in any old crematorium:
Nicatorium! Wright went through many periods of detox, and was institutionalized several times; here he is welcomed by a stock character, the catatonic roommate who promises he hasn’t “said a word / all day, and don’t intend to / now.” Or maybe that’s a bored crematory worker, just punching the clock—or is it God, whose weird, voyeuristic silence troubled Wright into composing some of his most powerful poems? In any case, the smoker gets his wish, and his comeuppance: “Consider yourself completely alone.” That’s a poet’s fantasy, and a child’s darkest fear.
In these poems, anticipation is inextricable from dread. Emily Dickinson received “Heavenly Hurt” from the winter “Slant of light” entering her bedroom. As a boy, Wright kept his eye on the door, hoping that the father he idolized would someday return; to maintain this vigil into adulthood is to open oneself up to grace but also to injury. Waking in the night, Wright wonders if there is “someone else / who wakes disturbed, alone; / too bad we can’t talk / on our tiny phone.” In another insomnia poem, “Wait,” Wright keeps watch for the “late light,” which is “always / leaving” even “as it arrives.” For a child, this “steplight” could bring comfort, or it could bring a drunken thrashing. Wright wrote that his father beat him with a belt; his stepfather, he went on, “took over / somewhat more expertly.” If the soul survives, these poems suggest, it’s only by being battered out of the body.
“Axe in Blossom” borrows its title from a line in “I Hear,” by the German Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, who drowned in the Seine in 1970. Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses. In an homage, “Axe in Blossom: To Paul Celan,” the dead are called back to life by the “mere scent of their wives baking bread.” It takes a little more, in fact, than the “mere scent”: it takes an elegiac poetry of sensory nearness that mixes such things as warm bread and burning bodies. Wright is something like a laureate of the putrid, the stale, the acrid, and the moldy, but also of unbidden, stunning adjacent beauty: the “still-daytime / three-quarters moon, / the first snowflakes, swirling,” even as the new day itself is unthinkable.
Celan’s influence is tricky to absorb for any poet who did not suffer in a labor camp or witness his parents taken away to be murdered by the S.S. It is impossible to isolate Celan’s aesthetic innovations from his trauma and its historical meanings; Wright preëmpts that bind by presenting his own suffering as sort of lame and clumsy. It keeps him, in these last poems, from putting his finger on the tragedy scale: there are “so many things worse than death,” he writes, and killing, even killing a fly, is one of them. He quotes the haiku master Issa:
Wright’s body is dog shit, after all—don’t kill his companions! “More than ever I am haunted by the lives of the small, brief, powerless, filthy, and poor,” he writes. But “filthy” suggests something less than a Buddhist’s commitment to the flies’ well-being. In other poems, Wright has some fun at the expense of a cricket (“my friend describing you over the phone, chronicling your brief life and fairly gruesome end, both of us guiltily chuckling”) and a moth (“once it observes you have noticed it or given any indication its presence is a nuisance, you will very soon find yourself the perpetual loser in a chronic contest of wills”). We don’t read Wright for the purity of his moral life but for the erratic comedy of his good intentions yielding to blurted reversals and denunciations.
All the unresolved, zigzagging impulses give even Wright’s finished work here some of the raggedness of drafts. “Axe in Blossom” is in every sense an open book, practically an open studio. We see its striking title gestate through multiple phases—in a translation, an original poem, and a collage poem made from lines by Celan, Czesław Miłosz, and Rainer Brambach. There are “Three Homages,” two poems called “The Writing” (the second, marked “2,” is presented first), one poem called “The Lamp, 2” that insinuates an absent predecessor, two called “The Kiss,” and so on; the poems reshuffle the same vocabulary, the same images, the same settings and themes. The volume begins with more or less “complete” work, passes through some abandoned drafts, then trails off into an appendix, “Burial Herbs,” which works like a commonplace book of maxims, partial poems, and poems nominally complete but “unfinishable,” in the sense that certain poems, perhaps the most ambitious ones, only approximate their maker’s vision.
Among the “unfinishables” is a poem that I consider a masterpiece, probably one of Wright’s very best. Dedicated to the German poet Karl Krolow, “At His Desk in the Past” was “transcribed from self-recorded drafts on audio,” in 2012. It’s “raining in a dead language” out the window, as Wright measures the duration of his life against various phenomena—some brief, like an infant’s fever, some ancient, like the stars. The poem, written in linked prose blocks, is too long to quote in full, and is quite intricate. But one passage gives a sense of its eerie logic. Wright describes the words of his poem “still traveling toward the world although he is not there although he is not here or anywhere”:
Wright welcomes those stars into his own “BRAIN or desert hive this named mind or single roaring.” The poem ends by conferring a childish name, a name that a kid might dream up, on these sad, undying presences, with their “honey-colored irises” and “muted wings” of light and motion: “BEE-iridescent.”
Rounding the bend, the book tours Wright’s points of origin: recollections of his first poems, his first trip to Europe, his first cigarette, the first signs of the addictions that so blighted the poet’s life. Wright hears now “the sound of my name posed, in my young mother’s voice before I finally slept.” The poet tucks into his deathbed, its “sheets / the color of old aspirin”:
But, hey, it’s not a deathbed until you die in it: “I could get some work done / here, I shrugged,” Wright decides. “I had done it before.” ♦