Poets

Franz Wright is an American poet.

Background

Wright graduated from Oberlin College in 1977. He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category.

Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009), had selections put to music for the record "Readings from Wheeling Motel". Wright stepped down as the Jacob Ziskind Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University in May 2009. Wright wrote the lyrics to and performs on the Clem Snide song "Encounter at 3AM" on the album Hungry Bird (released in February 2009). His most recent book, is Kindertotenwald (Knopf 2011), a collection of sixty-five prose poems concluding with a longish lyrical poem to his wife.
Wright has been anthologised in works such as The Best American Poetry 2008 as well as the late Czeslaw Milosz's anthology of favorite poems, Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image, and American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets
In 1999 he married the translator Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.

Criticism

Writing in the New York Review of Books Helen Vendler said "Wright's scale of experience, like Berryman's, runs from the homicidal to the ecstatic ... His best forms of or originality: deftness in patterning, startling metaphors, starkness of speech, compression of both pain and joy, and a stoic self-possession with the agonies and penalties of existence." Novelist Denis Johnson has said Wright's p..