Remembering You Through James Wright: Teaching Others, Teaching Myself

from "The Journey"

.................................The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don’t worry.

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From The Writer's Almanac

It's the birthday of the poet James Wright, (books by this author) born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio (1927). His father worked in a glass factory, and James was drafted into the Army during World War II. He read a lot of poetry in his down time, and after he was out of the Army, he went to Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill. While he was in graduate school, W.H. Auden chose Wright's manuscript The Green Wall (1957) for the Yale Younger Poets Series. After that, Wright poured his heart and soul into his second book, Saint Judas (1959). After he finished it, he thought that he had written as well as he would ever write and he became depressed, unable to write or do anything.

Then he picked up a copy of Robert Bly's magazine, The Fifties. Bly had included a translation by one of his favorite German poets, and Wright was so excited that he wrote Bly a 16-page, single-spaced letter to tell him so. Bly responded with a one-sentence letter that said: "Come on out to the farm." So Wright made his way out to Bly's farm in western Minnesota and started working with him on translations. Robert and Carol Bly made Wright do farm chores, and he loved to hang out with the animals, sometimes sitting with his favorite horse for hours. And he did manage to write again, seven more books, including Shall We Gather at the River (1969), Moments of the Italian Summer (1976), and Collected Poems (1971), which won the Pulitzer Prize. He said, "The person whom I would like to be my master is Horace — Horace, who was able to write humorously and kindly in flawless verse. I've achieved that maybe twice in my life, but that is what I would like to be."

Wright taught at Hunter's College, Macalester College, and the University of Minnesota, and he loved being a teacher. He said: "I've written books of verse, but I'm a professor. And to me personally, teaching is the art that gives me the more pleasure. I'm not trying to put myself down as a poet, but I mean what I say. That is, the contact with my students, and my reading of books and trying to share my thoughts and feelings with my students, gives me more pleasure, and I honor this as a high art. Remember that the teachers include Jesus, Socrates, Siddhartha, Meister Eckhart." But he liked teaching literature, not creative writing — he said, "I tried it once and failed at it completely because all I could do was sit and talk to the class. And someone would ask me a question, how I worked on something, and all I could do was grunt."

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These lines from "The Journey," a poem you loved, have given me some pleasure and a little bit of hope as I approach these next weeks, as I face the scattering of your ashes on December 30. I want you with me, but as I travel to the places you loved, revisit them and release you back to the earth, where you wanted to be, and keep a little of your ashes to be with my ashes, I will remember your brilliant life and your brilliant mind and your brilliant prismatic love of the world and of me, and ashes to ashes is what you wanted and I will keep all these things burrowed inside me and ponder you in my heart, and I will let 2010 end (as you told me every solstice) and hope for the forward face of Janus in 2011, when maybe days without you will be a little less mitts-zerable (Raleigh, age 3) and a wee little bit funner (Daniel,age 2).