Remembering and Celebrating the Poetry of James Wright

James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio on this date (December 13) in 1927. The author of a dozen books of poetry, Wright’s career as a poet was framed by his first volume, The Green Wall, winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1957 and his Collected Poems winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, the year of his death. Stanley Plumly, a fellow Ohio poet, has written in an essay titled “Sentimental Forms” from his book of criticism, Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry: “Wright’s gift to us is his ability to identify and identify with the sources of emotion. His poems are among the most generous we have because they risk again and again the tension of the form not finding what will suffice.”

In his collection of critical essays, Unassigned Frequencies, Laurence Lieberman similarly describes Wright: “He has the largeness of heart of the great empathizers, and worse, a mind suicidally honest, a mind hellishly bent on stripping away all self-protective devices. His best poems enact the drama of a mind struggling, usually with punishing success, to resist the temptation to take solace from its own compassionating ardor. The pain he feels for another never becomes a disguised way of cheering himself up. It is a tougher thing.”

This blog’s meter displaying statistics of visitors to the site indicates one of the most popular posts published at “One Poet’s Notes”—originally appearing in February, 2008—has been an article written about James Wright and his wonderful work titled “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” which may be the best-known poem concerning football and Americans’ fascination with sport. In that piece I offered how Wright identifies and empathizes with the individuals depicted in his poem, presenting scholastic athletics as part of a metaphor that “addresses social issues of distinction or contrast based upon individuals’ wealth, class, ethnicity, race, and gender.”

Today, as Wright’s birth date coincides with the weekend’s announcement of another Heisman Trophy winner, a pinnacle achievement in scholastic athletics, perhaps this is an apt time to invite readers to revisit my commentary on “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” as well as to urge everyone to take this opportunity to remember and celebrate the poetic achievement of James Wright.