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April 15: Franz Wright’s “My Pew”
Franz Wright explores the possibilities and the challenges of religious life (and its relationship to poetry) as almost no one else writing today. We often meet him in church, as in this poem from the collection Wheeling Motel.
My Pew
I love this
window
way in the back
in early gentian morning
down which light’s long
labyrinthine whispers
reach my ear, I
would like to describe it to someone,
to myself, my blind companion—
Why did I turn to this
forsakenness again?
Are You
just a word?
Are we beheld, or am I all alone? And
as that little girl on the psych ward
recently asked her father,
When I am very old
can I come back
home, and
will you be there?
Read more from Wheeling Motel
Also recently published: the paperback edition of Wright’s Earlier Poems
6 Responses to “April 15: Franz Wright’s “My Pew””
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Knopf's Poem-A-Day 2011
April 1: The opening lines of Amy Tan's "I Love a Broad Margin"April 2: Philip Levine's "Unholy Saturday"
April 3: Deborah Digges's "The Coat"
April 4: David Young's "The House Was Quiet on a Winter Afternoon"
April 5: W.S. Merwin's "The Folding Cliffs"
April 6: Cynthia Zarin's "Late Poem"
April 7: Leonard Cohen's "These Heroics"
April 8: Marge Piercy's "Wellfleet Shabbat"
April 9: Anthony Hecht's "Devotions of a Painter"
April 10: Emily Dickinson Letters
April 11: Kevin Young's "Ash Wednesday"
April 12: Edward Hirsch's "Happiness Writes White"
April 13: Amy Clampitt's "Green"
April 14: Walt Whitman's "The Artilleryman’s Vision"
April 15: Wallace Stevens's "A Dove in the Belly"
April 16: James Merrill's "The Candid Decorator"
April 17: Emily Brontë's "No coward soul is mine"
April 18: Julia Hartwig's "Yet We Desire It above All"
April 19: Kenneth Koch's "To My Fifties"
April 20: Stephen Sondheim's "Green Finch and Linnet Bird"
April 21: Stan Rice's "Tornado at Night"
April 22: Kwon Homun's "Two Poems On Fishing"
April 23: Franz Wright's "Rooms"
April 24: Brooks Haxton’s “Three Lilies”
April 25: C.P. Cavafy's "The Mirror in the Entrance"
April 26: W. B. Yeats's "Down by the Salley Gardens"
April 27: Peter Davison's "The Level Path"
April 28: Sharon Olds's "True Love"
April 29: Langston Hughes's "Daybreak in Alabama"
April 30: Farewell, with poems by Jane Hirshfield and Simon Armitage
Knopf's Poem-A-Day 2010
April 1: Edward Hirsch’s “Self-portrait”April 2: Marge Piercy’s “Seven Horses”
April 3: Dan Chiasson’s “Banquette” and “Next”
April 4: Marie Ponsot’s “Transport”
April 5: Alexander Neubauer’s Poetry in Person, featuring Derek Walcott
April 6: Mark Strand’s “Mirror”
April 7: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Spring”
April 8: Philip Levine’s “MY FATHERS, THE BALTIC”
April 9: Vera Pavlova’s “A Remedy for Insomnia”
April 10: Stan Rice’s “The Fragment of Statue”
April 11: Marina Tsvetayeva’s “Poems Grow”
April 12: Kevin Young’s “EYES + EGGS [1983]“
April 13: Janusz Szuber’s “About a Boy Stirring Jam”
April 14: Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”
April 15: Franz Wright’s "My Pew"
April 16: Mary Jo Salter’s “Welcome to Hiroshima”
April 17: Yehuda Halevi’s “A man in your fifties—and you still would be young?”
April 18: Langston Hughes’s “Black Workers” and “Black Dancers”
April 19: W. S. Di Piero’s “In Our Room”
April 20: Robert Wrigley’s “Kissing a Horse”
April 21: Sharon Olds’s “When He Came for the Family” and “The Signal”
April 22: Irving Feldman’s “Stretched Out at Length”
April 23: W.S. Merwin’s “The Furrow”
April 24: David Lehman’s “Poem in the Manner of a Jazz Standard”
April 25: John Keats’s “This Living Hand”
April 26: Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes
April 27: Garrett Hongo’s “Volcano House”
April 28: Wallace Stevens’s “Large Red Man Reading”
April 29: Izumi Shikibu’s love poems
April 30: Deborah Digges's "Write a Book a Year"
Knopf's Poem-a-Day 2009
April 1: Half Moon, Small Cloud by John UpdikeApril 2: Going Back to Bed by J.D. McClatchy
April 3: Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes by Ruth Padel
April 4: Waiting On Elvis, 1956 by Joyce Carol Oates
April 5: Exile’s Child by D. Nurkse
April 6: A Summer Outing by Du Fu
April 7: Touch-Me-Nots by Jill Bialosky
April 8: Sweet Voices and Voices by C.P. Cavafy
April 9: On the Jetty by C.P. Cavafy
April 10: Fragment on Dissembling by Lucie Brock-Broido
April 11: Page From the Koran by James Merrill
April 12: Spring Song II by Jean Garrigue
April 13: Ode to Pepper Vinegar by Kevin Young
April 14: Greeter of Souls by Deborah Digges
April 15: You’re Beautiful by Simon Armitage
April 16: Two Short Poems by Mark Strand
April 17: To See My Mother by Sharon Olds
April 18: Wallace Stevens and Donald Justice
April 19: Robert Lowell’s Poetry Class by Stephanie Hemphill
April 20: Storm by Brooks Haxton
April 21: A Good List by Brad Leithauser
April 22: The Pond by Jim Powell
April 23: Impressions of Africa by Kenneth Koch
April 24: Notes For Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary by Jane Mayhall
April 25: Some Playthings by John Hollander
April 26: There is No City that Does Not Dream by Anne Michaels
April 27: Description of Her Eyes by Franz Wright
April 28: Some Different Kinda Books by Sapphire
April 29: The Mistake by Jack Gilbert
April 30: Creeper and Fine Point by John Updike
May 1: Written Late at Night by Janusz Szuber
Are we beheld or all alone?
I love the biblical language and the quiet mystery of this poem. I felt a little mental gasp at the end line with the girl’s poignant question. Beautiful.
Thank you.
What a creatively outrageous name, “Wheeling Motel,” as though there could be anything poetic about either Wheeling [any of the several in the country] or a motel.
If I had a penny for everybody I might expect to know “gentian,” I wouldn’t expect to be able to purchase a first class postal stamp, but I too once used it in a poem {as yet unpublished}. I came across it first as “gentian violet,” an herbal stain used still in modern medicine as well as a swab against bacteria and fungus. My own mind created a bridge between the fungicide property and the cleansing properties of a new morning.
Surely you can appreciate the complex synaesthesia of “light’s long labyrinthine whispers” in which visual ["light"], spacial/tactile ["long labyrinthine"] and auditory senses ["whispers"] are melded.
A damned humbling experience, reading that, but I can’t wait to share this with my friends.
I loved the word “gentian”. Unusual, but the vocabulary of poetry are its jewels. I thought of the beautiful colour of a dawn sky, the serenity that pale blue can give us.
The last two verses, however, made me feel desolate, close to physical weeping.
Like others who commented in this forum, I also loved the word “gentian” for its sound. Its similarity to the word gentle gives a softness to the beginning of the poem. For fun I checked out wikipedia to see the lovely blue that gentian literally refers to, and it is a color that is often used in art for the cloak of the Virgin Mary so I would say it is a heavenly blue . . .
I also like the sound and the creative metaphor of the phrase “light’s long
labyrinthine whispers.”
I especially liked the choice of the magnificent word “beheld” for the word to describe how a magnificent God might view a person sitting in a church . . .
The word “forsakenness” carries a lot of weight, quietly alluding to the cry of Jesus on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” An article at http://www.mccmanchester.co.uk/sermons/sermon_22mar09.htm indicates that when Jesus said those words, they also carried allusions that Jesus’ listeners would have connected to, so the allusions echo back through time . . .
a very thoughtful poem that took me on a thoughtful path as well . . .
You, Rose Blessing, have an insightful mind and a light touch. I have framed a copy of this poem and read it each morning when I re-enter my study to begin my writing. I recognize the question, “Why did I turn to this foresakenness again?” a little more readily each morning, but I don’t have an answer as yet.
“…..light’s long/ labyrinthine whispers/ reach my ears…”. The merging of sight and sound in this phrase is a trope for the ages. Is Mr. Wright the master poet we so badly need?