Franz Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose father, James Wright, also won that prize 32 years earlier. Franz is the author of 13 volumes of poems, the most recent entitled F/poems. He is also an accomplished translator of Rilke, Rene Char, and others, including (with his wife Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright) the Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort in a volume entitled Factory of Tears. We’ll be featuring his poems this weekend, beginning with “Four in the Morning”:
Wind from the stars.
The world is uneasily happy—
everything will be forgotten.The bird I’ve never seen
sang its brainless head off;
same voice, same hour, untilI woke and closed my eyes.
There it stood again:
wood’s edge, and depression’sdeepening
shade inviting me in
sayingNo one is here.
No one was there
to be ashamed of me.
(From F/poems © 2013 by Franz Wright. Reprinted by kind permission of Alfred A. Knopf. Photo by Abri le Roux)
The Dish 