Poet Franz Wright died last year now, on May 14, 2015. I wanted to write about his death, and his poetry, and him, but I didn't have the words. I didn't know him, but I feel connected to him in the way anyone who admires someone else feels connected to that person. And it feels almost too personal to talk about how hard it is to know he's no longer alive, no longer walking around in his home, or writing. Because I didn't know him, he wasn't necessarily real to me as a person, and that somehow enhances the loss I feel. Which is a bit ridiculous, but it's how I feel so *shrugs* Thankfully, I still have so much of his work to read, and what I have read is hardly exhausted in its meanings and pleasure.
I'm here today writing this because I recently read a small chapbook of his, published by Argos Books in 2014, titled The Writing. I want to talk a bit about the first poem in the collection,
Last Day on the Ward
There is a Heaven,
death.
But getting there.
You can't
just say the word...
A blizzard. I can't see
a single person on the street,
a single light on.
I know they're out there, though: the fittest
reading the laptop and drinking their coffee,
winter light
filling the rooms where they sit
unaghast.
It's Monday in the world,
and time to go.
I've unpacked and already
have nothing to do
but lie down
and stare at the snow.
Which is something
I am good at, something I enjoy.
Probably, I'll die like this
a long time ago.
I love how in those two lines, it seems as if Wright is telling death that there is a Heaven, and it doesn't need to worry. But how does death get to Heaven? Or is Wright emphasizing that there is Heaven and death, but note that death isn't first listed. This slippage foreshadows the last two lines, in which Wright says he will die 'a long time ago' (line 23), once again mixing up the generally accepted process of living, dying, Heaven. Reading about this mix-up, though, reads to me now as an act of mourning. Wright is dead, a long time ago, and the time will only get longer. But I revisit his voice, his first person, his present tense, when I read this poem, this book, anything he's ever written. Though I don't believe in the common theme of literature that in books and writing people are eternal in a way because their words live on. No, they're not. They're dead. Whether they're somewhere else is not for me to tell you, but they're not immortal in literature. That has always seemed like a ridiculous fallacy to me, and completely unsatisfying as an end of a story.
What I do think is true, and what I think this poem is an example of, in life, there are visitations to death: we know we will die, we know people have died. This reality is so profound that the fact that people are even living is astonishing, which is emphasized in the middle of the poem,
I know they're out there, though: the fittest
reading the laptop and drinking their coffee,
winter light
filling the rooms where they sit
unaghast (lines 9-13).
This references, in part, the contrast of the fit and unfit, young and old, stable and unstable - the poem is titled 'Last Day on the Ward,' and mental health is an important theme in Wright's work. But I think all of this contributes to the strangeness of how people are actually alive. That simple things exist such as sitting at a desk, drinking coffee, unaghast. Life is not necessarily strange to these people, in the same way it is to Wright, but death has always been on his mind (if you read his other works) - they are not aghast, as he is. Death maybe is not so visibly intertwined with life for them.
This is all really to try and figure out what it means to read Wright's work after he's died, months later, what it means to read this collection where Wright is even more so preoccupied with death. And I guess to mourn, to read his poems as a form of mourning, as a visitation, and to let death be intertwined with life a little more by reading this collection. I think it's okay if it is.
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