Franz Wright Dead at 62

William Haskins

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Franz Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work illuminated his passage from abiding despair to religious transcendence, died on Thursday at his home in Waltham, Mass. He was 62.

The cause was lung cancer, said Nicholas Latimer, a spokesman for Mr. Wright’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

Mr. Wright won the Pulitzer in 2004 for “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.” In that collection, as in much of his work, he explores the competing imperatives of self-annihilation and self-preservation; his yearning for his father, who abandoned the family early; his labyrinthine struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction and manic depression; and his eventual, cautiously hopeful passage out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/a...-prize-winner-for-poetry-dies-at-62.html?_r=0



Wheeling Motel
Franz Wright, 1953 - 2015

The vast waters flow past its back yard.
You can purchase a six-pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee

a block down. It’s twenty-five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.

There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.

The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.
 

C.bronco

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That is so sad. When he won the Pulitzer, I thought they gave it to him just because his Dad did, and then I read his work, which was amazing. That is a real tragedy. He was an amazing poet.
 

Steppe

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I have three books of his poetry. A very good poet. Someone once said his stated goal was to write the entire history of the USA in a poem on the back of a postage stamp.