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Franz Wright

フランツ・ライト

Furantsu Raito

Profile

Gender
Male
Born
1953-03-18 （Vienna, Austria）
Died
2015-05-14 （Waltham, Massachusetts, United States） age 62
Nationality
American
Languages
English
Religion
Catholic
Residence History
Vienna, Austria (birth) → United States (primarily Massachusetts)

Career

Occupations
poet, translator
Active Years
1976-2015
Influenced By
James Wright

Education

Oberlin College
Year of Graduation: 1977
Country: United States

Awards

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
2004
Work: Walking to Martha's Vineyard
Category: Poetry
Organization: Columbia University
Result: winner
Whiting Award
1991
Organization: Whiting Foundation
Result: winner
PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
1996
Organization: PEN America
Result: winner
Guggenheim Fellowship
1989
Organization: Guggenheim Foundation
Result: winner
National Endowment for the Arts grant
1985
Organization: National Endowment for the Arts
Result: winner
National Endowment for the Arts grant
1992
Organization: National Endowment for the Arts
Result: winner

Awards & Nominations

Works

Major Works

Walking to Martha's Vineyard

2003 poetry collection

Heartfelt but often cryptic poems featuring self-diagnostics.

painjoyagonies of existence

Kindertotenwald

2011 prose poems

Collection of sixty-five prose poems written while battling terminal lung cancer, concluding with a love poem to his wife.

mortalityloveredemption

F

2013 verse and prose poems

Full-length collection begun in ICU after lung surgery; most positively received of his works.

sufferingrecovery

Wheeling Motel

2009 poetry

Selections set to music for the record Readings from Wheeling Motel.

solitudenight
Adaptations
  • [music] Readings from Wheeling Motel (2009)

Bibliography

  • The Toy Throne
  • The Writing
  • The Raising of Lazarus
  • F
  • Kindertotenwald
  • 7 Prose
  • Wheeling Motel
  • Earlier Poems
  • God's Silence
  • Walking to Martha's Vineyard
  • The Beforelife
  • Knell
  • ILL LIT: Selected & New Poems
  • Rorschach test
  • The Night World and the Word Night
  • Entry in an Unknown Hand
  • Going North in Winter
  • The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes
  • 8 Poems
  • The Earth Without You
  • Tapping the White Cane of Solitude

Translations by Author

  • The Unknown Rilke: Selected Poems (trans.)
  • Buson: Haiku (trans.)
  • Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort (trans. with author and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright)

Style & Themes

Literary Style
starkness of speechcompression of pain and joystoic self-possession
Recurring Motifs
sufferingaddictionrecoverymortalityloneliness

Health

  • lung cancer
    2011-2015
    Wrote Kindertotenwald and F while battling; terminal illness.
  • alcoholism and drug addiction
    過去（回復後）
    Led to hospitalizations and mental wards; later sober.

Legacy

Regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary poets. Only parent-child pair with father James Wright to win Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Known for stark, compressed style exploring pain and ecstasy.

Archives

  • Library of Congress

In Popular Culture

  • Provided lyrics for Clem Snide's 'Encounter at 3AM'. Prose poems featured in David Sylvian, Stephan Mathieu, Christian Fennesz concerts.

Quotes

  • Wright's scale of experience, like Berryman's, runs from the homicidal to the ecstatic... [His poems'] best forms of originality [are] deftness in patterning, startling metaphors, starkness of speech, compression of both pain and joy, and a stoic self-possession with the agonies and penalties of existence.
    Source: New York Review of Books (2007)
  • Soon, soon, between one instant and the next, you will be well.
    Source: Nude With Handgun and Rosary (from Kindertotenwald) (2011)

Trivia

  • Only parent-child pair to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, with father James Wright.
  • Born in Vienna, Austria, but known as an American poet.