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Via simplicity, a poet attains the universal
Wheeling Motel
By Franz Wright
Knopf. 112 pp. $26.95.
Reviewed by Anis Shivani
"I wanted to write poems of religious devotion in a less obvious and, I hope, more humble way - one people might more easily identify with," says poet Franz Wright, and right from the beginning, one senses a departure from his earlier collections.
In these poems, awe is rooted in greater humility, and the book's expansiveness signals a more mature style than his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Walking to Martha's Vineyard. Yet despite the greater reach, even detachment, the lyric intensity never wavers.
Wright's poems are deceptively simple. Like the other poems, "Baudelaire" can be read many times, only to yield further complexities. Its opening salvo from Baudelaire -
" 'When I have inspired universal horror / I shall have conquered solitude' "- comes to have both less and more in common with the poet's own ending aphorism: "Evil isn't hard to comprehend, it is nothing / but unhappiness / in its most successful disguise."
It's common for critics to interpret Wright's work through the prism of his mental illness and his religious devotion, but Wheeling Motel resists such easy reductions. One need not have shared the poet's experiences to welcome the beauty of the language, the way the poems unfold into miracles of uncontainable passion. He genuinely believes that "I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone."
Consider "Intake Interview," which Wright explains as "an attempt to reproduce my 3 a.m. admission to a mental hospital and the sensation of having an obviously indifferent and jaded psychiatrist fall asleep in the middle of asking me a series of rather idiotic questions." Here are a few of those questions:
Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false? / Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? / Name five rivers. / What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?
These lines are interrogations of the compliant self by its more restless counterpart. They are also codes of obedience implanted by the bureaucratic imagination.
Wright's relentless self-questioning has enabled him to reach a solidity of perception that seems to be simplicity itself yet attains a universality transcending specific experience. Consider this from "Why Do You Ask":
That's right: I breathed
on a little black fly-
husk there on the sill
and it came back to life, why?
Wright says that "poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns." Only the greatest poets have enough confidence to avoid extrapolating and gesticulating when the thought provoked by the image will do. Wright always finds the perfect image for the soul of the poem.
