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Now, I would like to
introduce our introducer

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for Franz Wright--

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Chris Nelson.

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Chris is the author of the
Poetry Society of America's

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Chapbook, Blue House.

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He's a Jacob Javits fellow here,
and he's a second year student

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in the MFA program in poetry.

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Please welcome Chris Nelson.

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you, Gail.

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Franz Wright is the author
of 14 collections of poetry,

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including Walking to Martha's
Vineyard, for which he received

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the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.

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And, most recently, Wheeling
Motel, published last fall.

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He's also translated the poetry
of Rene Char, Valzhyna Mort,

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Erica Pedretti, and
Reiner Maria Rilke.

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He has taught at several
colleges and universities,

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has worked in a
mental health clinic,

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and has volunteered at the
Center for Grieving Children.

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He joins us tonight from
Waltham, Massachusetts.

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For three decades, he has
confronted ancient lyric themes

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with a contemporary
sensibility all his own.

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His poems investigate mortality,
divinity, and the complexities

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of the human heart.

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And he treats these
themes with an ear

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attuned to the
musicality of language,

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with maximal compression,
with clear surfaces,

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and with a voice at times
confessional, paradoxical, or

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darkly humorous, but a voice
always wise, as in these lines

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from his poem, "The Visiting."

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"Dark blue morning glory,
I reached to touch.

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There is another world,
and it is this world."

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Sometimes his poems
are overtly religious,

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yet they remain free of dogma
and outside of orthodoxy.

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Perhaps, this quality
is better described

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by what Baudelaire called
the insatiable thirst

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for everything
which lies beyond.

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In any case, he
speaks to us lucidly

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from the mystical margins
as did Blake and Rilke.

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A poetry that fuses the
universal and the personal,

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the spiritual and the mundane.

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Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome Franz Wright.

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[APPLAUSE]

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