The James Wright Mystery Tour
I live in Duluth, springtime’s last stop, so my wife and I looked forward to our short stay in the Twin Cities over the weekend. I’ve edited a collection of poems in honor of a great American poet, and we went 150 miles south to do a couple of book events and to see green grass. We called our trip The James Wright Mystery Tour, the mystery being whether anyone would show up for the events. From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright has contributions from some major American poets–Galway Kinnell, C. K. Williams, and others–and also from some fine poets with a more regional fame. A few in this latter group joined me to read both their own poems and Wright’s, and to talk about his importance to Minnesota. Wright had taught at our state university in the Sixties and wrote some of his best poems during those years.
The folks at the university bookstore gave us a great reception. A huge and attractive poster, with our names correctly spelled, beckoned people as they passed by the main entrance, some at aerobic speed, others slouching like Yeats’ rough beast. A good young man named Andrew waited inside to record our event for a future podcast. Unfortunately, the crowd was laughably small. Apparently the English Department felt that a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet who had taught there 45 years ago was not worth remembering, despite the fact that the department’s current best poet had contributed to our book. We read our poems and talked about Wright to an audience of three. But I took away a great poster. As the years go by and my grandchildren check it out, the size of the crowd will no doubt grow. Others have already noticed how kind my memory is to me.
The following evening the Mystery Tour played Magers & Quinn, an excellent independent bookstore (new and used) in south Minneapolis. Hope was restored. All the chairs were filled, and six or seven people in their twenties leaned against the stacks. My co-editor, Robert Johnson, recites poetry form memory, a talent James Wright had to a prodigious degree, and Robert favored us with poems by Wright and two of his friends, Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke. Connie Wanek and Barton Sutter, the latter Duluth’s reigning Poet Laureate, read beautifully, as did Joyce Sutphen, who won a Minnesota Book Award four years ago for her wonderful collection of poems, Naming the Stars.
We all sat quietly for a moment after Joyce read one of Wright’s last poems, “Yes, But.” Wright had led a troubled life, laden with periods of depression and chemical dependence. But in his final decade he and his wife, Annie, found peace in their travels in Italy. His last poems, which describe scenes and events in that country, have a serenity that rests far beyond any praise I can make. He knew that the cancer he had when he wrote “Yes, But” would kill him, and in that poem he imagines being buried in Italy where his ghost would rise in the quiet afternoons to mingle with lizards and mosquitoes. Here is how the poem ends:
We are not exhausted. We are not angry, or lonely,
Or sick at heart.
We are in love lightly, lightly. We know we are shining,
Though we cannot see one another.
The wind doesn’t scatter us,
Because our very lungs have fallen and drifted
Away like leaves down the Adige,
Long ago.
We breathe light.
Soon after writing that poem, James Wright returned to a hospital in New York to die. That was in 1980, when he was 52. One wants people to remember James Wright, or to find him for the first time. When I was young, such discoveries happened in universities. Universities were where one was supposed to taste sweetness and breathe light. Maybe the light hangs out in other places now. I don’t know where those kids came from who leaned against the book racks at Magers & Quinn–it’s a new mystery uncovered by the Tour–but bless them.
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