By Lawrence Laban

Lawrence Laban: As a poet who talks openly about your own spiritual crisis and religious beliefs, with what other poets (from the mid and late 20th century, for example) do you see your poems engaging in conversation about spirit and religion? Would it help readers to look at your poems in conjunction with these other poets?

Franz Wright: To answer these questions, I would first like to ask people to reread or discover the very great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. More than any other 20th century poet who comes to mind, he personifies the meaning and the what-you-are-up-againstness of being a poet in our very disturbing times. Through all the horrors of that century, which he experienced personally in the form of both Nazi Germany’s and the Soviet Union’s occupation of his country, Miłosz stands apart, perhaps his one counterpart being Pablo Neruda, although Neruda, for all his wild Whitmanesque greatness and charm, had nothing like Miłosz’s brilliance and sheer prescience in political matters. He preserved in himself a radical innocence, humanity, compassion and—startlingly—a sense of his personal responsibility for contributing to the darkness of the world, in other words a staggering humility and spirituality during times when man’s very real capacity for evil clearly got the upper hand. He is quite openly and unabashedly a poet of religious devotion, and a visionary, a kind of prophet, with both feet firmly planted in an almost uncannily accurate political and historical comprehension in the face of what he witnessed and fought. He saw where it all came from and he saw, and has been proved in his predictions as accurate as Einstein was in his, where it was all headed. He achieved, for all his complexity and genius, a poetic style characterized by absolute clarity and simplicity, as had every great poet who has survived, who continues to be read, for the past three thousand years. Anyone can write obscure poetry filled with mysterious but ultimately shallow and pointless non sequitur-like gibberish. Language like this is extremely dangerous—it provides an excellent hiding place and breeding ground for lies that can affect the lives of human beings, sometimes in lethal ways. (It is also, incidentally, the best way to conceal a lack of talent for writing, or a lack of experience, of anything important to say.) Unfortunately, this is still the kind of writing that is aped by and remains stylish among some prominent younger poets (though there are magnificent exceptions, like Michael and Matthew Dickman, Valzhyna Mort and others.) Nobody outside the literary/academic world will ever be moved by that kind of writing, if any of them can still remember what it feels like to be moved by a poem. Whether it is the stylish imitating of poets of deliberate obscurity, or of groups like the so-called language poets, a type of poetry is still being written for nobody else but other practitioners of it—therefore, it will be forgotten. Great poetry that can be read by any person with a 6th grade reading ability, writing that is not infected with the weird malaise of irony, that is writing of primal sincerity and devotion to the experiences of real human beings in all times and places, has a chance of surviving.

Lawrence: Because poetry reading is often an activity of a small community of readers who talk among themselves, how can today’s poets—especially ones like yourself who have won major prizes and attracted wide attention—increase and stimulate that community?

Franz: I can only say I find there is far too much talk, too much shallow and un-thought-out communication and far too little evidence of a willingness on the part of younger poets to 1) leave the academic world and have a more direct experience of life, though I want to qualify this immediately by saying I have the greatest reverence for anyone who enters the academic world as a serious scholar with hopes of being a teacher of real & serious subjects—and 2) too little evidence of poets willing to endure the decades of silence and solitude that are required to forge an individual style (one, that is, in which the poet has found a way to speak in his or her own voice, a feat which is preceded by a mastery through trial and error of English prosody) and that have produced human depth and profundity in poetry in all times and for many reasons seem so much more difficult to achieve in our time. Perhaps because the Internet, because of the ease and speed for communication it provides, fosters an environment of instant, unmeditated and often outright adolescent levels of thought and their expression in writing. I believe that to some degree the writing programs which began to proliferate wildly by the end of the 1970s are also to blame—while they provide young writers with a sense of community (though I have often witnessed a community of brutal and contemptuous and oddly sheeplike adherence to one currently stylish form of writing), they also deprive young writers of the sense of writing that is something someone does in secret, in real life, until a degree of mastery has been achieved, and not as a means of producing a first book that conforms to some currently fashionable style, with the aim of getting a job in another writing program.

Lawrence: What responsibility does a poet have to help the reader make connections with poems that might at first appear abstract and removed from ordinary experience? What tools of language and form do you use, for example, when the reader can no longer depend on traditional notions like Keats' "negative capability" or Eliot’s "objective correlative"?

Franz: The difficult, long and solitary struggle on the part of a young writer to learn how to write about things of universal validity in a language that is clear—vividly clear and seemingly simple—is probably one of the hardest things any human being can take on. I believe the challenge for young writers is to set their sights or raise the bar higher than merely communicating with other writers. It would be thrilling to see a poetry directed at and addressed to the individual human beings who make up what we refer to as humanity, but this takes much more than talent, it requires a tremendous capacity for solitude, self-reliance and patience, also a kind of primal sincerity, as though involved in something that is a life-or-death matter. Writers should and must communicate with and form connections with other writers, but this is most fruitful when they have first learned how to write, and to do that takes decades of hard, solitary, patient work.

Born in Vienna, Franz Wright was the author of many collections of poetry including Wheeling Motel (2009); Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2003), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; God’s Silence (2006); and Earlier Poems. Wright also translated poems by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Lawrence F. Laban retired from teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004. Although his primary academic field was the British novel, he spent 33 years also helping students develop techniques for reading poetry.