Now, I would like to introduce our introducer
for Franz Wright--
Chris Nelson.
Chris is the author of the Poetry Society of America's
Chapbook, Blue House.
He's a Jacob Javits fellow here, and he's a second year student
in the MFA program in poetry.
Please welcome Chris Nelson.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Gail.
Franz Wright is the author of 14 collections of poetry,
including Walking to Martha's Vineyard, for which he received
the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.
And, most recently, Wheeling Motel, published last fall.
He's also translated the poetry of Rene Char, Valzhyna Mort,
Erica Pedretti, and Reiner Maria Rilke.
He has taught at several colleges and universities,
has worked in a mental health clinic,
and has volunteered at the Center for Grieving Children.
He joins us tonight from Waltham, Massachusetts.
For three decades, he has confronted ancient lyric themes
with a contemporary sensibility all his own.
His poems investigate mortality, divinity, and the complexities
of the human heart.
And he treats these themes with an ear
attuned to the musicality of language,
with maximal compression, with clear surfaces,
and with a voice at times confessional, paradoxical, or
darkly humorous, but a voice always wise, as in these lines
from his poem, "The Visiting."
"Dark blue morning glory, I reached to touch.
There is another world, and it is this world."
Sometimes his poems are overtly religious,
yet they remain free of dogma and outside of orthodoxy.
Perhaps, this quality is better described
by what Baudelaire called the insatiable thirst
for everything which lies beyond.
In any case, he speaks to us lucidly
from the mystical margins as did Blake and Rilke.
A poetry that fuses the universal and the personal,
the spiritual and the mundane.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Franz Wright.
[APPLAUSE]