5 Poems by James Wright

Title: 5 Poems by James Wright

Added: Feb 6, 2010

Author: PoemsBeingRead

Duration: 4:54

Description:
James Wright 1927-1980Neither 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 tonative 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.****************************Webliography:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wright_(poet)http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/73http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/12http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7564http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/j_wright/bio.htmInterview:http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3839Bibliography:Above the River, the Complete Poems James Wright, Farrer, Straus and Giroux, (New York, NY), 1990......................................Image Credits:Moon and trees image:Prateek Karandikar Wikimedia.orgBear video: public domain

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james  wright  father  sitting  in  small  screenhouse  on  summer  morning  beginnings  march  honey  poems  poetry  martins  ferry  ohio  carew  being  read  poemsbeingread 

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