Unfinished Book Report: Ill Lit by Franz Wright

Franz Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry a couple of years ago for his book Walking to Martha's Vineyard. Wright has a backstory more suited to a memoirist these days: a long history of alcohol and drug abuse, poverty and general misery. But I read that book and thought about half of the poems were pretty good. I then picked up The Beforelife and thought that was ok, too.

His father is James Wright, perhaps the best American poet of the 20th century. That's a good reason, perhaps, why Franz Wright shouldn't be a poet. But apparently if you're related to a great poet, you can get 5 or 6 books of poetry published without displaying anything resembling talent.

Ill Lit is a selected poems covering Wright's work in the 80s and 90s, mostly from books that are thankfully out of print now. I read over half the book before giving up. The poems have that feeling of self-importance and seriousness that seems to spring from knowing whatever you put on the page will get published.

The worst example of this are a couple of poems that are notated as being fragments of ideas he never fully made into poems. He thought enough of them to put them in the original books, then still thought they were good enough to put in a selected poems. Here's an example from "Winter Entries": "Hazel wind of dusk, I have lived so much." Ok, one more: "Friendless eeriness of the new street--" These are the pinnacle moments of 20 years of writing? This gets published and republished?

Don't read this book.