This is poetry
that makes one want to weep and pray. It soothed the wound that was still in me
from my sister's death. I began to see the calamity that befell my family as
itself a kind of blessing. In my reading, the line about "the skin over a
young girl's wrist" was always Kathy's wrist.
It surfaced a
sense of the preciousness of the things we love, especially the fragile things
that don’t last long in the world. And it fired me to want to put my own
stories, my own poems, down.
I showed some of
my writing to Elsie, who picked up on the resemblance to Wright's work. So she
arranged a car trip to New Concord, where Wright's parents lived. James and his
wife Annie would be there, and I would have a chance to meet them. Elsie was
doing in a small way for me what her sister Elizabeth had done for Wright.
Wright was there
with his wife Annie. She was tall and strong and sympathetic. He was soft and
sweet and genial, full of gentle quips and funny stories. He didn't put on a
show for me. But he communicated to me in a respectful way that words could be
part of a life.
What struck me
immediately was his voice. It was incredibly soft and un-mean. And there was no
fussing or high-faluting or show-offy about him. He knew I was a young dabbler,
but he neither patronized me by offering to read my work, nor dissed me in any
way. He treated my like a young colleague, a student perhaps. He respected me,
and it rocked me.
After lunch we
walked in his mother's vegetable garden, and he showed me the cabbages and
zucchinis he helped put in. And he talked about the German poems he was
translating, by Theodor Storm -- and surprisingly, by Herman Hesse -- that were knife-deep with the pangs of young
wanting.
I bristled with
pride that I already knew the name Theodor Storm. He was the heartsick poet
Thomas Mann quoted in his novela Tonio
Kroger, about the hapless lot of sensitive young poets. All I knew about
him was the Mann connection, but I pressed it to Wright. Who was either
impressed, or forgave me -- both great.
And he asked if I
had seen the new movie 2001: A Space
Oddyssey. He and Annie had seen it the night before, on the big screen in
Columbus.
"You really
should see it," he said. "And listen to the voice of Hal, the
computer on the Jupiter spacecraft. In all the loneliness of space, his is the
only human voice. I don't know -- I found it very touching."
And he told me
that the secret of cantaloupe is the sweet smell at the stem. "With
watermelons, you go by sound. With muskmelon," he said, "it's all
smell."
And that was my day with James Wright. I rode back
to Cleveland with Elsie feeling I had had an important meeting in my life. I
fantasized about hitchhiking to New York City and offering my meager skills as
handyman to Annie, whose Montessori school in Morningside Heights needed
painting. Anything to keep the fresh bond alive.
I didn't, praise
god. Even I was catching on that my surprise visits were more of a burden than
a gift. But I did go to see 2001, and
I too was moved by the character of the computer. The voice, by the way, was
identical to the soft tones of Wright's own voice, reaching out to the
emotionally detached astronauts:
"Your drawing
is definitely improving, Dave."
I don't think that
was what Wright wanted me to notice. But there it was, unmistakably, the most
human thing in the empty reaches of space -- an encouraging voice.
Truth is, I think
I wrote him once, to tell him how much my afternoon with him, and his work
generally, meant to me. But I did not want to be a pest. Or I did, but -- well,
you know.
So it was with
such regret, in 1980, that I snatched an AP report from the teletype machine at
the newspaper I worked for, and read that James Wright had succumbed to cancer
of the tongue in New York. God, what an ironic affliction for a poet as
sweet-spirited as him.
I hoped -- and I
think I was right -- that his life with Annie was a near-reversal of the
difficult years he had spent before her, years of drunkenness, depression, and
getting fired from the English faculty at the University I would eventually
attend -- another minor coincidence -- in Minnesota. Healing came big time, and
I understand he let it happen to him.
It may be what I
liked best about him, that he could know the full meaning of sadness and still
be on the lookout for joy.
Wright at his best
legitimized something I hear many poet peers railing against -- self-pity. I
often hear writers condemn another writer for obsessing about personal
suffering. Writing about one's own hurting is suspect -- unmanly, and
"stuck" in its own sorrow, not providing movement away from grief.
When I say he
legitimized self-pity, I mean he found a way to love oneself in writing, to
feel genuine sorrow for one's situation, not out of selfishness or
self-absorption, but out of forgiveness. How can we have compassion for what is
outside us if we can’t have compassion for what we know best? Not that we
wallow in this feeling, either -- this sorrow is a necessary interim stage,
like "hitting bottom," to a return to living. Angry, but not bitter; sorrow, but not despair.
Wright was the
sort of poet who could, with a false turn here or there, have wound up as one
of our poet suicides. What an execrable fate (and awful example) that would
have been. And how grateful I am that he did not.
Wright was part of
the confessional school, but he was bigger than it. Though his estimate of
himself was humble, he wound up being important. He helped introduce us to
great Latin and European writers. And he altered the poetic landscape, away
from the owlish academicism of the 1950s and toward something much more
personal and passionate and alive. And his books live on as testament to a life
felt fully and appreciated.
But I will
remember him as a man who looked on a confused up-and-comer as someone worth a
kind word or two. Thank you, Uncle James ... or whatever.
