Nick Ripatrazone considers the deep, spiritually introspective words of an award-winning poet who worked with grieving children.
In Arlington, Massachusetts, the Centre for Grieving Children and Teenagers had an operating principle: “Being with others who have experienced a death reduces isolation and can provide hope.” In 2004, the centre’s programme director noted that one particular facilitator for children aged 7, 8 and 9 was well-liked because he shared “his own compassion, his life experiences”, but in a “gentle, quiet way” – the only way to console young children who live with profound grief.
If he was ever absent, the children would look around, and say: “Where’s Franz?”
The Franz these children were looking for was Franz Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry – a prolific poet and accomplished critic.
“It sounds odd,” Wright told the Boston Globe of his work with griev-ing children, “but it’s the happiest thing I have ever done. Pain can connect you to the rest of the human race, rather than separating you.”
Five years before winning one of the highest poetry prizes in America, Wright was sitting in his office one afternoon, “and all of a sudden I had an experience of literal certitude that has never left me, and it’s the most important thing in my life. I didn’t feel alone anymore, and it’s the first time I felt that way.” He’d suffered from depression, alcoholism and addiction for much of his life – and when he made his way to St Joseph’s Church in Waltham, MA, and cornered a priest after Mass, “he looked a little scared, because I looked a little scary”.
Soon after, Wright was baptised. He began attending daily Mass, and working with these grieving children.
Wright’s conversion was a surprise to many in the literary community, and yet it seems strangely inevitable. His father, fellow poet (and also a Pulitzer Prize winner) James Wright maintained a long, thoughtful correspondence with Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn, an American nun and literary critic. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, himself perennially wracked by depression, he found “a beautiful solace, a real joy, in speaking to you this way”. Her empathetic letters – as well as her literary recommendations, including The Cloud of Unknowing, the 14th-century mystical work – saved Wright senior from a “bleak despair”.
Franz himself grew up with the New Testament – no doubt the result of his literary pedigree – yet his experience was more intellectual than spiritual. Still, that childhood linguistic formation served as an anchor for his later conversion. In fact, as Wright would come to realise, much of his despondent poetry was a perpetual journey toward Christ: a recognition that the language of the New Testament was itself sacramental.
“A sacrament,” Wright wrote, “both represents, in a graphic and dramatic way, the state of grace it conveys and also creates an event-situation that predisposes the person receiving the sacrament to experience grace.” In that way, the words of Jesus were a sacrament for Wright the Catholic, and Wright the poet.
His verse is profoundly Catholic, and, dare I say, devotional. “Rosary”, one of his short poems, is the work I have shared the most often in my life. “Mother of space, / inner // virgin / with no one face – // See them flying to see you / be near you, // when you / are everywhere.”
The Blessed Mother who surrounds us, who envelops this wrecked world with love, is so acutely rendered by Wright through the white space of this piece.
Or consider “Transformation”: “It gets early now,” the narrator begins – a lamentation, but also an awareness that this is when the narrator likes “to visit / you at the top of your hidden / still green stairway, holy / Mother”. She, human, “with the downcast / eyes as a girl of sixteen”. The narrator notices that Mary is depicted as pinning a serpent, apple in its jaws, beneath her foot. “Poor thing,” he almost jokes, before his conclusion: “one is tempted / to say, so transformed / by its contact with you / is everything – ”.
The deftness of his line breaks – that marvelous turn on “tempted” – is complemented by his brilliant decision to end the poem on the ambiguous dash, like a spear to our sides. Wright, more than perhaps any other contemporary poet, forces me to look inward, and to not look away. “The life of art,” Wright once said, “like the life of faith, is a perilous radiance, and one makes so many mistakes. But I do not despair now, not ever, not for a second.” A powerful, practical message for Lent.
Wright died in 2015, aware that faith was a struggle yet source of salvation. His conversion, appropriately, transformed his worldview towards one of hope. “Christ turned water to wine, blindness to sight, death to life and – the most improbable of all his acts – hatred to love, and the desire for revenge to forgiveness,” he wrote. “The older I get the more staggering this becomes to me. I’ve been around the block a few times, and have an idea of what men are capable of. I’ve been capable myself.” His willingness to be honest with himself – in spirit and words – has long drawn me to Wright’s terse, imagistic, melancholy poems, but I’ve paid special attention to his work this Lent.
Wright’s poems are Lent in microcosm: a season of intense self-introspection, a journey into our darkest of spaces – lit by the cleansing truth of the Resurrection.
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