Background

Wright graduated from Oberlin College

Oberlin College

Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...

 in 1977. He and his father James Wright

James Wright (poet)

James Arlington Wright was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language...

 are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category.

Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009), had selections put to music for the record "Readings from Wheeling Motel". Wright stepped down as the Jacob Ziskind Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

 in May 2009. Wright wrote the lyrics to and performs on the Clem Snide

Clem Snide

Clem Snide is an alt-country band featuring Eef Barzelay , Brendan Fitzpatrick and Ben Martin .-History:"Clem Snide" is a character in several novels by William S. Burroughs, including Naked Lunch, The Ticket That Exploded, and Exterminator!...

 song "Encounter at 3AM" on the album Hungry Bird (released in February 2009). His most recent book, is Kindertotenwald (Knopf 2011), a collection of sixty-five prose poems concluding with a longish lyrical poem to his wife.

Wright has been anthologised in works such as The Best American Poetry 2008 as well as the late Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin and subsequent American citizenship. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. He defected to the West in 1951, and his nonfiction book The Captive Mind is a classic of...

's anthology of favorite poems., Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image, and American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets

In 1999 he married the translator Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright is an American translator.- Biography :Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright translates texts of contemporary German authors, especially Lyric poetry, into English language. In 1996 she got a MFA for literary translation at the University of Arkansas...

.

Criticism

Writing in the New York Review of Books Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler

Helen Hennessy Vendler is a leading American critic of poetry.-Life and career:Vendler has written books on Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. She has been a professor of English at Harvard University since 1984; between 1981 and 1984 she taught...

 said "Wright's scale of experience, like Berryman's

John Berryman

John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...

, runs from the homicidal to the ecstatic ... His best forms of or originality: deftness in patterning, startling metaphors, starkness of speech, compression of both pain and joy, and a stoic self-possession with the agonies and penalties of existence." Novelist Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson

Denis Hale Johnson is an American author who is known for his short-story collection Jesus' Son and his novel Tree of Smoke , which won the National Book Award. He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.- Biography :...

 has said Wright's poems "are like tiny jewels shaped by blunt, ruined fingers--miraculous gifts." The Boston Review

Boston Review

Boston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. The magazine covers, specifically, political debates, literature, and poetry...

has called Wright's poetry "among the most honest, haunting, and human being written today. Critic Ernest Hilbert wrote for Random House

Random House

Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

's magazine Bold Type that "Wright oscillates between direct and evasive dictions, between the barroom floor and the arts club podium, from aphoristic aside to icily poetic abstraction." Walking to Martha's Vineyard (2003) in particular, was well-received. According to Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...

, the collection features "[h]eartfelt but often cryptic poems...fans will find Wright's self-diagnostics moving throughout." The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

noted that Wright promises, and can deliver, great depths of feeling, while observing that Wright depends very much on our sense of his tone, and on our belief not just that he means what he says but that he has said something new...[on this score] Walking to Martha's Vineyard sometimes succeeds."

Poet Jordan Davis

Jordan Davis

Jordan Davis is an American soccer player currently playing for Atlanta Silverbacks in the North American Soccer League.-College and Amateur:...

, writing for The Constant Critic, suggested that Wright's collection was so accomplished it would have to be kept "out of the reach of impulse kleptomaniacs."
Added Davis, "deader than deadpan, any particular Wright poem may not seem like much, until, that is, you read a few of them. Once the context kicks in, you may find yourself trying to track down every word he’s written" .

Some critics were less welcoming. According to New Criterion critic William Logan

William Logan (poet)

William Logan is an American poet, critic and scholar.-Life:Logan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to W. Donald Logan, Jr. and Nancy Damon Logan. He lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, England with his wife, the poet and artist, Debora Greger...

, with whom Wright would later publicly feud, "[t]his poet is surprisingly vague about the specifics of his torment (most of his poems are shouts and curses in the dark). He was cruelly affected by the divorce of his parents, though perhaps after forty years there should be a statute of limitation... 'The Only Animal,' the most accomplished poem in the book, collapses into the same kitschy sanctimoniousness that puts nodding Jesus dolls on car dashboards." "Wright offers the crude, unprocessed sewage of suffering", he comments. "He has drunk harder and drugged harder than any dozen poets in our health-conscious age, and paid the penalty in hospitals and mental wards."

The critical reception of Wright's 2011 collection, Kindertotenwald (Knopf), has been positive on the whole. Writing in the Washington Independent Book Review, Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri is an award-winning American poet and playwright. She has published 15 volumes of poetry and more than 20 plays and continues to actively write and publish. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband, sculptor Kenneth Flynn...

 speaks of the book as a departure Wright's best known poems. "The prose poems are intriguing thought patterns that show poetry as mental process... This is original material, and if a great poet cannot continue to be original... In this text there is a joyfulness that energizes and makes us feel the writing as a purposeful surge. It is a life force. This is a good indicator of literary art... Memory and the past,mortality, longing, childhood, time, space, geography and loneliness, are all the poet's playthings. In these conversations with himself, Franz Wright shows how the mind works with his feelings and his brains agility in its struggle with the heart."

Cultural critic for the Chicago tribune Julia Keller says that Kindertotenwald is "ultimately about joy and grace and the possibility of redemption, about coming out whole on the other side of emotional catastrophe." "This collection, like all of Wright's book, combines familiar, colloquial phrases--the daily lingo you hear everywhere--with the sudden sharpness of a phrase you've never heard anywhere, but that sounds just as familiar, just as inevitable. These pieces are written in closely packed prose, like miniature short stories, but they have a fierce lilting beauty that marks them as poetry. Reading 'Kindertotenwald' is like walking through a plate-glass window on purpose. There is--predictably--pain, but once you've made it a few steps past the threshold, you realize it wasn't glass after all, only air, and that the shattering sound you heard was your own heart breaking. Healing, though, is possible. 'Soon, soon,' the poet writes in 'Nude With Handgun and Rosary,' 'between one instant and the next, you will be well.""Poems of sin-eaters, souls and suffering" by Julia Keller September 21, 2011

Awards

• 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
  Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
  The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry has been presented since 1922 for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. However, special citations for poetry were presented in 1918 and 1919.-Winners:...
  
  , for Walking to Martha's Vineyard
• Whiting Fellowship
• National Endowment for the Arts
  National Endowment for the Arts
  The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
  
   grant
• PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
• 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship
  Guggenheim Fellowship
  Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
  
  

Selected works

• Kindertotenwald Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, ISBN 9780307272805
• Wheeling Motel Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, ISBN 9780307265685
• Earlier Poems, Random House, Inc., 2007, ISBN 9780307265661
• God's Silence, Knopf, 2006, ISBN 9781400043514
• Walking to Martha's Vineyard Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, ISBN 9780375415180
• The Beforelife A.A. Knopf, 2001, ISBN 9780375411540
• ILL LIT: Selected & New Poems Oberlin College Press, 1998, ISBN 9780932440839
• Rorschach test, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995, ISBN 9780887482090
• The Night World and the Word Night Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993, ISBN 9780887481543
• Entry in an Unknown Hand Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989, ISBN 9780887480782
• Going North in Winter Gray House Press, 1986
• The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes Pym-Randall Press, 1982, ISBN 9780913219355
• 8 Poems (1982)
• The Earth Without You Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1980, ISBN 9780914946236
• Tapping the White Cane of Solitude (1976)

Translations

• The unknown Rilke: selected poems, Rainer Maria Rilke, Translator Franz Wright, Oberlin College Press, 1990, ISBN 9780932440563
• Valzhyna Mort: Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) (translated from the Belarusian language in collaboration with the author and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
  Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
  Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright is an American translator.- Biography :Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright translates texts of contemporary German authors, especially Lyric poetry, into English language. In 1996 she got a MFA for literary translation at the University of Arkansas...
  
  )
• "The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition" (1991)"No Siege is Absolute: Versions of Rene Char" (1984)

External links

• "Franz Wright", The Harder They Fall: Celebrities Tell Their Real-Life Stories of Addiction and Recovery, Gary Stromberg, Jame Merrill, Hazelden Publishing, 2007, ISBN 9781592854769
• April 2004 National Public Radio interview, including readings
• 2001 print interview with The Borzoi Reader
• Ernest Hilbert interview with Franz Wright
• Ernest Hilbert review of The Beforelife
• Watch Franz Wright read "Intake Interview" at Open-Door Poetry

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