RIP Franz Wright

A sad day for writers. Moreso when the passing of  music legend B.B. King seems to unintentionally overtake the passing of this poetic powerhouse. Only one news piece on his passing as I write this, and nothing locally in The Boston Globe. Not even the Wikipedia has been updated yet. No news yet on NPR. Maybe it's still early. I don't know.

I first heard and read Franz Wright at Brookline Booksmith in 2003, a year before Walking to Martha's Vineyard was published. My entry into his work that night was The Beforelife (Pulitzer nominated I think). The power of the poems in this book, his comeback in many ways, affected me greatly. His most lauded work had yet to be published, and stories of his online feuds would soon follow (which seem silly to recount now that Facebook and Twitter has made heated discourse much simpler and much more common). That night in Brookline he seemed very happy and at ease, pleased to simply be in that store's cellar space and sharing his struggles with drinking and mania (as recounted through many of The Beforelife's poems).

I remember scribbling the first notes of a poem during his reading and thanking him at the reading's end for helping that to happen. We never developed a rapport or correspondence after that (I wouldn't have known how to at that stage in my life). Thanks to a mutual acquaintance, however, he was kind enough to donate a signed copy of Walking to Martha's Vineyard for the first of my Out of The Blue Fundraisers in 2005. It's in a lucky friend's home today, and I'm sure he'll be thumbing through that book again soon.

From interviews I read, he appeared to be poetic outsider in many ways in spite of his accolades. It was wonderful to know he just existed and continued to work despite living and working beyond the orbit of the academic world, a champion of hope to us poetry outsiders.

Knowing of his illness years ago via Facebook, it's sad to think that his imagined "death sentence" (read the New Yorker interview linked above) must have felt more real to him in recent years. And yet with the few Facebook comments I was privy to, he showed both strength and acceptance.