James Wright by Jonathan Blunk

Author:Jonathan Blunk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PART III

22

I have torn myself out of many bitter places / In America

January 1973–January 1974

Monday morning in Jan., 73:

Every poet ought to visit the grave of John Keats at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

I don’t mean for Keats’s sake, for Christ’s sake, I mean for the poet’s sake. Whatever may have happened to you in the past, and whoever you are, and however you hope to go on living, you take forever to find the grave, that doesn’t even have Keats’s name on it.

The tough little bastard got his work done. Never mind his work. You don’t mind it when you stand there and know he is in the ground. You know that the best thing to do is to get your work done. You are going to die, too. Just like John Keats.

I don’t know why it is. I have nothing flowery to say about the graveyard. Shelley is there, and Goethe’s son, and all kinds of professional Italians. What I like best is the café just across the street from the phony pyramid of Cestius, where at least you can get a cheap cup of tea.

I don’t want to die, not even just like John Keats. I want to live my own life, though, just as he did, the little Cockney hell-raiser.

This entry in a new journal is a kind of invocation. It fills one side of the small lined loose-leaf pages Wright slipped into his typewriter; his prose entries often reach the end of just one page. Wright’s travel letters—tissue-thin, single-sheet aerograms—show this same compression, as though his imagination could wander more freely when aware of a boundary. Over the next seven years, his journal moved to the center of his life and work.

Relieved of teaching for the coming year and with page proofs due for his new book, Wright felt unrestrained as 1973 began. He resumed correspondence with many writers that winter and completed a long-promised essay on Richard Hugo’s work along with other critical prose. Writing to Mary Oliver in January, Wright could boast, “This spring, thank Christ, I don’t have to teach. All I am doing is fooling around in my new notebook, working on an essay, and letting myself be delighted.” However, Wright had agreed to a heavy schedule of readings throughout the spring; he wrote only sporadically in his journal before leaving for Europe in June. And without the responsibility of teaching, little remained to curb his drinking. At a favorite local bar on Eighty-fifth Street and York Avenue called Loftis—much like an Irish pub—Wright became known as “the Professor” among the regulars.

On the last day of January, Anne Sexton sent Wright an entire manuscript of thirty-nine poems written over the course of twenty days, “with two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital.” This would become Sexton’s posthumous book The Awful Rowing Toward God, a collection she had resolved to dedicate, in part, to Wright. Sexton implored him to give the poems the kind of close,

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