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-   -   James Wright Biography (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=28923)

R. S. Gwynn 12-12-2017 08:45 PM

James Wright Biography
 
James Wright: A Life in Poetry
Jonathan Blunk
FSG, 2017

I've just finished this. It is very thorough as Wright left behind many letters and journals. Blunk also interviewed many of Wright's friends before they died.

Wright was incredibly learned and had a vast memory for poems, Dickens, sports trivia, etc. He was also a great teacher of literature, though he became somewhat unreliable because of his drinking.

He was the kind of poet whose search for "authenticity" perhaps blinded him to the damage he was doing to others. I personally think that his poetry went astray after his first two books, though I do like individual later poems. He had such a fine "natural" ear that he ended up writing against his own grain for the last 20 years of his life. Still, Blunk shows why it happened and makes the choice sound necessary, given how Wright couldn't detach the poetry from his daily life.

He died at 53. Tomorrow is his birthday.

John Isbell 12-12-2017 11:02 PM

Here's the James Wright poem that James Galvin referred to more than once in class:

Saint Judas

When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.

James Wright

R. S. Gwynn 12-13-2017 08:32 AM

This is one of the poems, read fifty years ago, that helped me discover the type of poetry I wanted to write. Wright somehow convinced himself that this and others like it were "academic" (his word) poetry.

Allen Tice 12-17-2017 11:06 AM

It's a strong poem.

Phil Wood 01-06-2018 09:00 AM

A friend, not a member of Eratosphere, read this thread and remembered that the poem Saint Judas was discussed by Wright in a letter to a publisher:

Quote:

And the final poem in the whole book -- 'Saint Judas' -- is both a dramatic monologue (though very short, a sonnet in fact) and a statement about a loving action (i.e., such an action can have moral meaning only if it is performed without hope of reward -- and Judas, who was in the perfect position to perform an action without hope of reward, by his performance of hopeless and despairing love attains what I would hope to regard as sanctity)


A Wild Perfection -- The Selected Letters of James Wright (pg89)



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