“There is only one heart in my body, have mercy / on me”
(“One Heart,” Walking on Martha’s Vineyard)
Franz Wright, the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, grew up shrouded in a legacy of abandonment by his alcoholic father, the renowned poet James Wright. Later, Franz suffered abuse at the hands of his stepfather. In pursuit of respite from his childhood pain, depression, and suicidality, he fell into addiction.
Though Franz Wright’s poetry is scored by his depression, self-harm and addiction, his predilection to fixate on the darkness took a sudden turn in 1999. Wright had just emerged from a two-year period of such crippling depression that he could not write. His doctors felt he may never recover. But he did, defying the predictions of medicine and the trope of the doomed poetic voice. Thus began a period of prolific writing that contends with the mystery of God. His voice in the poem “My Pew” from his later collection Wheeling Motel touches this experience with tenderness:
Are You
just a word?
Are we beheld, or am I all alone? And
as that little girl on the psych ward
recently asked her father,
When I am very old
can I come back
home, and
will you be there?
The despair that Wright had danced with for so long, which begs for the dark relief of an ending, was substituted in his Kierkegaardian leap of faith—the decision to stay with us amid desperation and distress. (Lung cancer claimed Wright at the age of 62 in 2015.) His poetry offers insights, oftentimes in a supplication that recognizes the impossibility of the human position, unable to allay or make sense of suffering. By recognizing his own failures and limitations, Wright finally found God’s ever-present grace available to him.
Wright’s work is often described as confessional, colored by irony and humor. His irreverence, juxtaposed with honesty and humility, make his poetic voice unique in addressing God. Writers and poets often traffic in spiritual themes, but few modern poets echo the prophetic Old Testament tradition of crying out, approaching God with the concision and raw emotion that Wright does. He excels in voicing the concerns and ruminations of the human experience of suffering, while simultaneously shifting towards his own embodiment of grace.
The revenant Wright was baptized into the Catholic church at age 47. It was the culmination of a long flirtation with high church practice. Instead of a more deist conception of an indifferent God, sometimes referenced in his earlier work, Wright’s relationship with God as a transformative mystery began to permeate his poems.
Most striking in these one-sided conversations, highlighted in the name of one of his collections, God’s Silence, is Wright’s candor. The honesty in the poetry’s questioning of God, often simply through the honorific of “you,” resonates with the contemporary blurring of the lines between the sacred and the profane, a modern freedom derived from centuries of pulling away from traditions that confined access to God to the realm of priests and holy men. Wright’s personal relationship, evinced in his later poetry, seems more evangelical than Catholic. He does not emphasize the saints, Mary, or even Jesus himself. Rather, Wright focuses on the Father in his soliloquies.
The theme of fatherhood and the absence of his own father parallels Wright’s invocation of God. The absence and abuse of James Wright reverberates often in his collections. “My father beat me with his belt / for my edification and further / improvement and later that other / stranger took over.” (“Primogeniture,” The Beforelife) In Franz Wright’s petitions, the absence—failing—of his earthly father and stepfather loom in the background, shading in the questions Wright now aims at God the Father.
The concepts of failing, striving, and atonement shadow our lives, framing much of our existence. Although these ideas frame the overarching narrative of our lives, we often sidestep them in our unholy busyness and increasingly secular existence.
For Wright, forgiveness was the white-hot center of his faith.
Wright confronts the tension of forgiveness and guilt in working out his religion and how to exist in this world, how to make meaning out of what rends and pains. His work acknowledges that people seek something beyond comprehension, and that this is part of the trouble. What we can know, what is seen, is not enough.
“I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear.” (“My Place,” Walking on Martha’s Vineyard).
During an interview with Image Journal Wright said, “I myself am not what I wish to be or think I am. To know this is to be very close to actual forgiveness. And without forgiveness, everything is dead. Without my ability to forgive, I am dead. I can’t be forgiven. I know there is a connection in understanding that other people are in this struggle to rise beyond themselves. To see that in people, to know that about people and about oneself, I believe is really the key to everything.”
In one of his poems from God’s Silence, Wright evokes Job, the long suffering servant of God who dares to question, in his agony, God’s benevolence and providence: “Who did I imagine I was, that things / as they are, reality as God gave it, was not enough for me?” (“The Past”)
For someone so ill at ease with the world, Wright is consistently moved and overwhelmed by its beauty. He was acutely aware of his failures and deficiencies, knew death as a companion, knew addiction and alcoholism. When asked why Southerners are great storytellers, Flannery O’Connor quoted writer Walter Percy, who referenced the legacy of humiliation in losing the Civil War by saying, “…we have had our fall.”
So, too, Wright takes from his lowest ebb of defeat God’s willing embrace of him and turns this into his story. The poet Kazim Ali writes in “Home” that “You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God / will still welcome you.” Wright’s poetry is marked by the understanding of someone seen at his worst, and then loved unconditionally—beyond all reason. This is the mystery that Wright waits on, mulls, and returns to again and again.
This echoes the Gospel of Luke, where on the day Christ was crucified the thief on the cross beside him cried out, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Christ answered, “…today you will be with me in Paradise.” For the thief, there was no chance to make amends or rectify the evils he had done in his life. But from his dying cry, he found the necessary and overwhelming paradoxical forgiveness of Christ. In embracing the acceptance and love of God, Wright found his second sight and was able to shift his focus from the inward eye to the wonder around him.
Acknowledging our wretchedness—our anger and vehemence, our self-harm and loathing, violence and even despair—transforms us. God loves us not despite who we are but because of who we are. Wright accepted this mystery of grace, desperate, knowing fully his many transgressions and willing to be humbled, exchanging the guilt and shame for the truth that God loves us unconditionally. He never forgot the pain he had caused—indeed, the word “monster” comes up continually in his writing—or disregarded the effort required in continuing to live. In his questioning and conversations, Wright continued to search out God.
Although he rarely speaks in the poetry, God’s message is profound when Wright records his voice. In one of Wright’s most striking poems on this subject, “Heaven,” God answers the poet, even though he does not raise a question. The gift of grace, Wright seems to say, is not only undeserved, but unsolicited:
I lived as a monster, my only
hope is to die like a child.
In the otherwise vacant
and seemingly ceilingless
vastness of a snowlit Boston
church, a voice
said: I
can do that—
if you ask me, I will do it
for you.
Realizing the vast love and grace of God transforms us into a light, embodying love in a way that reveals the face of God. While some have critiqued Wright’s poetry for its generalities, that same quality is what allows the reader to participate in the contemplation and the grieving present in his work. After all, mysteries are inherently imprecise.
In our grace, Wright also realizes that though we wander through a world beset with pain and suffering, we can be that light for others:
…fellow monsters while we are still here, for one minute, think
about this: there is someone right now who is looking
to you, not Him, for whatever
love still exists.
