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5 Poems by James Wright

October 21, 2010

James Wright 1927-1980

Neither of James Wright’s parents attended school beyond the eighth grade. His father endured lay offs during the 50 years he worked at the Hazel-Atlas glass factory. His mother worked in a laundry after leaving school at fourteen.

James Arlington Wright was born in the steel town of Martins Ferry, Ohio December 13, 1927. Bordering West Virginia and Pennsylvania, this area of the Ohio River Valley is highly industrialized. Wright’s high school graduation was delayed a year after he suffered a nervous breakdown when he was sixteen. He served in the Army in Japan during WWII, then attended Kenyon College on the GI Bill where studied under John Crowe Ransom. Ransom’s emphasis on traditional meter and prosody influenced Wright’s early work.

After graduating with honors, he studied at University of Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship. He then returned to the US to earn master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington where he studied with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz.

The hardships Wright witnessed growing up never left him. Donald Hall met James Wright in 1954 and writes in the introduction to Above The River, the Complete Poems, that Wright suffered from a bipolar mood disorder and that he used alcohol as a self medication. Hall recalls an August visit during which Wright was intensely nervous. He says he spoke without stopping and his good nature eventually turned blackduring the visit when Wright made a speech about how he would never go back to the mills, no matter how much they tried to push him there….

Wright champions society’s downtrodden in his work. In The Minneapolis Poem” he gives voice to
native Americans ,African-Americans, the homeless, and homosexuals.

Though recognized with awards including a Pulitzer prize, he acknowledged his own weaknesses. In a Paris Review interview he said of his work that “My family background is partly Irish, and this means many things, but linguistically it means that it is too easy for me to talk sometimes. He thought he could be glib.

In the Partisan Review, Paul Zweig described Wright’s work as …A style of pastoral surrealism, built around strong images and a simple spoken rhetoric. Wright’s art lay not in complex grammar, but in a stark structure of perceptions which became their own statement.”

A chronic sore throat was finally diagnosed as tongue cancer in 1979. James Wright died March 25, 1980.

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Webliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wright_(poet)

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/73

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/12

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7564

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/j_wright/bio.htm

Interview:

http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3839

Bibliography:
Above the River, the Complete poems James Wright, Farrer, Straus and Giroux, (New York, NY), 1990

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Image Credits:
Moon and trees image:
Prateek Karandikar Wikimedia.org
Bear video: public domain

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Poetri doing DATING MYSELF on Def Poetry

September 8, 2010

ALL SINGLE PEOPLE MAAAAKE SOME NOOOISE!!!

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Billy Collins – Litany

September 5, 2010

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2008/04/07/A_Selection_of_Poems_by_Billy_Collins

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins discusses stealing material from other writers, and reads his poem, “Litany.”

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Poet Billy Collins is a unique literary figure – a widely read contemporary poet. The former US Poet Laureate and New York State Poet has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, though his most dramatic honors come from a wide and appreciative readership. Collins’s poetry collections, including The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and Picnic, Lightening, have broken records for poetry sales. His writing is marked by inventiveness beyond traditional poetry forms with ironic twists and lyrical turns of phrase that resonate powerfully. An advocate for integrating poetry into everyday life, Collins compiled the anthologies Poetry 180 and 180 More with poems for every day of a typical school year. Billy Collins has been a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York since 1968 – City Arts & Lectures

Billy Collins is the author of several books of poetry and two anthologies of contemporary poetry, including The Trouble with Poetry: And Other poems; The Arts of Drowning, which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall prize; and Questions About Angels, which won the National Poetry Series in 1990. He is also a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY). Collins served as US Poet Laureate (2001-2003) and as New York State Poet Laureate (2004-2006). Collins’ poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among many other journals and periodicals. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has won several awards and prizes.

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