CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1303
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Label:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
Series:
The Poetry Series
Sub Series:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
James Wright at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 13 December 1968
Title Source:
Cataloguer
Title Note:
"I006/SR157 JAMES WRIGHT" written on sticker on the spine of the tape box. "I006-11-157" written on sticker on the reel.
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Wright, James
Dates:
1927-1980
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
American poet James Arlington Wright was born on December 13, 1927 in Martins Ferry, Ohio, an industrial town along the Ohio River. He began writing sonnets as a young child, was encouraged by his teachers to continue writing, though he suffered from a nervous breakdown in 1943. After graduation in 1946, Wright joined the U.S. Army, serving in Japan until 1948 when he returned to Ohio and enrolled in Kenyon College (where the influential John Crowe Ransom was teaching). His poetry was published in the Kenyon Review, Poetry (Chicago) and in The New Yorker. In 1952 he married a high school classmate Liberty Kardules and spent the next year on a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Vienna. His first child, Franz, was born in 1953, and Wright enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where his teachers were Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. His first book, The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1958) was published because of his submission to the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, which W.H. Auden was judging. His second book, published in 1959 was Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press), the same year he completed his Ph.D. dissertation on Charles Dickens. During the next few years, Wright’s marriage failed, and he was denied tenure at the University of Minnesota. Wright’s next publication, The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963) proved to be groundbreaking, and was followed by Shall We Gather at the River (1968). Wright spent a few years at the Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and was then awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965-66. Wright moved again, to New York City and took up a position at Hunter College in 1966. He met his second wife, Edith Anne Runk that same year. Wright was awarded both a Rockefeller Foundation Grant and an Ingram Merrill Foundation award for the publication of Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University) in 1969. Wright was able to publish his Collected Poems (Wesleyan University, 1971) which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, and was followed by Two Citizens (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973) and To a Blossoming Pear Tree (Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 1977). Wright was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue, and died four months later, in New York City on March 25, 1980. This Journey (Random House, 1982), Collected Prose (University of Michigan Press, 1983) and Above the River: The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992) were all published posthumously.
CONTRIBUTORS
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Playback Mode:
Mono
Sound Quality:
Good
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:54:38
Size:
131.1 MB
Content:
James Wright
00:00:00
Well, I feel about poetry in a curious way, I guess. I have a very strong classical streak in me, I think, I like poems that are very regular, and poems that rhyme, and poems that are passionately intellectual, and I think that I feel this way because the poems that are the most passionately intellectual have a way of spilling over into something which is completely free in its feeling. Oh here's a little poem by Ben Jonson
. It's called "On My First Sonne"
. A little elegy.
James Wright
00:00:52
Reads "On My First Sonne" by Ben Jonson.
James Wright
00:01:55
Poor old Ben Jonson, in a pig's eye. The next poem I would like to say is by an American poet, W.S. Merwin
, who has just published his selected translations, and of course in addition to the very beautiful poems of his own that Merwin has, he's been a prolific translator, and he, he really does know the languages. I've loved his poetry always because he has such a beautiful ear, it was very interesting to me when I saw him in New York
a few weeks ago, when he said that his Selected Translations were about to appear. I asked him if he remembered the transla--well of course he remembered, I just told him I always liked very much the poem he had translated, a later poem by Garcia Lorca
called "Gacela of Unforseen Love". What a weird thing! He didn't remember that he had done it. And it's not in his book. Well, I wish it were. "Gacela of Unforseen Love".
James Wright
00:03:35
Reads "Gacela of Unforseen Love" by Federico Garcia Lorca and translated in English by W.S. Mervin.
James Wright
00:04:30
Can't imagine doing that in English and then forgetting that you've done it. Maybe it was frightening. Here in Montreal
I've been thinking about what in the United States
we hear about Montreal, about the English background, and the French background, and the Canadian, all of which are very vital and alive, but what do you make of the Irish up here? Are there any Irishmen in Canada
? [pauses for response]. Just on March 17th. Only on March 17th, fine. My own family background is kind of complicated. I'm an Ohioan, which is a kind of hell in itself [audience laughter]. But both sides of my family have roots in the south, but they have a strong streak of Irish behind them; it wasn't until I was quite old that I found out about some of Irish literature, of course we've all of us read Yeats
. The son of a bitch. He not only did everything first but he did it best. We all feel that. But really he didn't do it all first. He may have done it best but there are some Irish things that I found that perhaps he grew out of it. Do you know for example, the poems of, of all people, Jonathan Swift
? Jonathan Swift is a wonderful poet. He published Gulliver's Travels
in 1725, and I found a little poem of his called "On Burning a Dull Poem". Of 1729. And it has a, it's a wonderful expression of the Irish art of the curse. I shouldn't lean on this. I don't mean the poem, I mean the lectern. [Audience laughter]. But it's a wonderful example of the Irish art of the curse, what is supposed to be very regular and it's almost like a prayer. The art here is that you should decide first of all whether or not what you feel annoyed by really is worthy of a curse. And then if it is, you should not come out and blast it directly, but exercise some indirection on it. So here we have Swift, "On Burning a Dull Poem".
James Wright
00:07:29
Reads "On Burning a Dull Poem" by Jonathan Swift.
James Wright
00:08:25
I can't help bringing that a little closer to our own time. We all know the very beautiful plays of John Millington Synge
. Perhaps people haven't so widely enjoyed his poems. He didn't write a great many, but to my mind he wrote enough. He also, he made a translation of Petrarch
into the same language as those people, as those women on the Aran Islands
who used to clean his room. He said he learned something about the rhythm of his language just by listening to them. So that in the sound of the Petrarch after Laura is dead and is appearing in heaven, and the angels are astonished by her beauty, the sestet of that sonnet, in Synge's translation, the angels see Laura and suddenly say, "What rare beauty is that now? What rare beauty at all." So that those old women who cleaned his room on the Aran Islands have the voices of the angels. Well, after The Playboy of the Western World
was first produced, he was criticized and he wanted to write something about the criticism. He didn't know whether the, who the critic was, really, he didn't know anything about him, he didn't know whether or not the critic had a sister. But there was the poem, and since he realized, as Aristotle
said, that “poetry is a higher and more philosophical thing than history”--history being limited to what is or was, and poetry having available to it what ought to be, what might be...Synge invented a sister, and he wrote a little poem called "Upon the Sister of the Critic who Attacked the Playboy". [Audience laughter]. This is a prayer. [Audience laughter]. And blasphemy also is a very delicate art. "Lord"...no I have to say, that you have to understand, really what "Mountjoy" is. Mountjoy is a place on the edge of Dublin
, a kind of charity place where the Skid Rowers go.
James Wright
00:11:06
Reads "Upon the Sister of the Critic who Attacked the Playboy" by John Millington Synge.
Audience
00:11:32
Laughter.
James Wright
00:11:43
I came to like those Irish poets, so much, because they enjoyed poetry. My God, you've got to do something, life is a mess. Well, alright, I want to say one more poem that I care about. I know I'm going on too long with this business. One more. Let me say it in English first, and you can't say that I'm translating at sight, but perhaps by ear, and it'll be very awkward, but it's not awkward in the German. When--it's a poem that doesn't have a title. I don't think I'll tell you who wrote it. The poem goes: "When the clocks nearby strike as if their own hearts were beating, and things--that is, material objects-things, with hesitant voices say to me softly, ‘Are you there?’ Then I am not the same man who woke this morning, for the night has sent me a name which no one to whom I spoke by daylight can listen to without being deeply frightened. Every door in me opens, and then I know that nothing dies, neither gesture, nor prayer. Things are too heavy for that. My whole childhood stands always around me. I am never alone. Many who live before me, and many who spring forth from me”--which I would also, I suppose, translate as ‘many who spring forth out of my body'--”wove, wove into my being. And if I sit down opposite you and say, lightly, I have been suffering, do you hear? Who knows? Who murmurs that voice with me?"
James Wright
00:14:19
Reads untitled poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in German.
James Wright
00:15:28
Oh, no that's corny, of course it's by Rilke
. I mean it's corny to hold back the name. It's one of those lyrics that Rilke wrote between those New Poems
and the big terrible ones, the Duino Elegies
and the Sonnets. Well, let me proceed now to some poems of my own. The first one I think I will read is a poem called "A Note left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack". I've been thinking about that poem a little bit recently for a lot of reasons. I think I should tell you something about what's behind it. There was an old guy called Minnegan Leonard who, or maybe Francis Leonard, who grew up--no, [laughter] I mean he was old, I grew up--he was already there [audience laughter]. Back in Martins Ferry
, Ohio
. The story about him was that he had been a very well-educated man and he sort of deteriorated, everyone said. One night, a couple of friends and I found him in the, when the snow was starting to fall. And his, he wore a pair of overalls, the ones that cross behind, and they were too big, my friends and I helped him get home. We were very much afraid of his brother, Jimmy. Minnegan had drunk so much that his brain was practically gone, and he had nothing left to say to the universe except "God bless my soul." We were stupid, we were afraid of his brother Jimmy, because his brother Jimmy, although drunk, was still mean. He still had some of his humanity left. And we were afraid of him. I thought about this poem as being spoken by a boy, I was about twelve years old. I also wanted to see if I could get away with swearing in a poem, and give the word, give the profanity some of its true force. The only thing that I deplore about the open use of profanity is that very soon, when the four-letter words are used commonly, they start to lose touch with their old, magical, dark force. When I was in the army, twenty years ago, I realized that this happened. You couldn't say "fuck" to refer to anything dark or anything interesting. It became a musical notation. Merely a musical notation, like a comma, when you were having chow. [Audience laughter]. But then there came those necessary moments when one absolutely needs to curse, and what does one do then? Then I saw all sorts of people around me, floundering, turning to what Wordsworth would have called the "poetic diction," and finding that to say "fuck" had about as much effect on the release of one's feelings as the Finney crew had on anybody who was trying to read about fish in the end of the 18th century. Then I met a poetic genius named Mark W. Patrick from Crafton, Alabama
, who was not hobbled by this. Someone asked him once, no he had invention, true invention. He knew how to swear. My wife has heard this before. Alright, I'll say it again. Someone said to him, "Where are you from?" And he said, "I come from so far back in the country, they have to fan the coon-farts out of the kitchen to keep from making.” [Audience laughter]. No, wait a minute, you didn't hear the rest of the conceit. Now listen to this carefully and think of it as in Shakespearian. "I come from so far back in the country they have to fan the coon-farts out of the kitchen to keep from making ring-tailed biscuits." [Audience laughter]. I thought, let us somehow rescue through invention our power to curse. Well this poem is called, "A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack". It's about taking Minnegan Leonard home when he was helpless in the snow.
James Wright
00:21:07
Reads "A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack" [from Saint Judas].
Unknown
00:22:43
Ambient Sound.
James Wright
00:22:58
Now for a while I think I would like to read from my new book. There are a couple of city poems in this new book, well, more than a couple, and many of the things that I had written before were about the country, more or less, in Ohio, and in Minnesota
. But I developed a certain feeling about cities, I guess, and...I didn't have a very happy time in Minneapolis
and St. Paul
, but I lived there for about eight years, and before I left I thought I ought to say farewell, somehow. I couldn't think of a title for this poem that would convey or suggest what I really felt, and the true title came to me. I wanted it to be a poem about, not only about Minneapolis but about many American cities, and what has been happening in them. Minneapolis is my favourite because I lived there for quite a while, and they had a very big Skid Row there, and the Skid Row was cleared out by the city administration, the last, the most recent one. It was a very big Skid Row, between the Great Northern Railroad Station and the Mississippi River
, right a strip across there, several blocks wide. And they sort of flattened it. They put up an insurance building and the rest were parking lots. And it never occurred to them that the people who lived there would...well, even existed. And I know where those people went, they went down Nickolet Avenue, scattered down there. It's a very strange thing. Spiro T. Agnew
, our new American Vice-President said, during the campaign, "The reasons the slums are so over-crowded is that there are too many people in them." [Audience laughter]. Well, this is my city poem. It's called "The Minneapolis Poem".
James Wright
00:26:11
Reads "The Minneapolis Poem" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:30:39
The next poem is called, "In Terror of Hospital"-- [cut or edit in tape] "In Terror of Hospital Bills".
James Wright
00:30:51
Reads "In Terror of Hospital Bills" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:32:36
This poem is called "The Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter". It's about leaving Chicago
. I went down there for a long Thanksgiving weekend to visit a man whose poetry I had seen, I had never met him, I admired it very much. His name is Bill Mott. He has finally published a first book. He lived in an area down there where there were some sort of poor people...I don't mean poor people in the sense of being savagely poor, really really put down, but just sort of drifters, the guys who go into the, who go in on Thanksgiving and get a dinner there from the Salvation Army
and look at it and then sweep up and leave.
James Wright
00:33:53
Reads "The Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:35:43
You know, George Orwell
remarked in Down and Out in Paris and London
that when he got back to London
from France
where he'd been a dishwasher, he had so little money that he realized that he would have to beg, only somehow his clothes, ratty as they were, were still too good to beg with. And so he, he sold what clothes he had, or traded them, rather, for a really crummy suit of clothes, and when he got those old, really poor man's clothes on, he noticed all sorts of strange things. The way people looked at him. The way women looked at him. As well as other men. And the fact that he was poor had an effect on the way people's souls were shaped, somehow. I only had a very slight experience of that in my life, and I don't want any more of it. Because it's not very romantic. For a while I had a sort of, an account at a department store in Minneapolis, and I was behind in my payments. At that time I had an old green coat my father had given me, it didn't quite fit but a coat is a coat. So I had it, and I was, in order to keep myself going one way or another, I went up to the cashier's office at this department store and tried to cash a small cheque for twenty dollars, or something like that. There was a very beautiful girl there, the cashier, and she looked at me, and she disappeared for a moment and she came back with a fellow who had a crew cut. And he evidently was the Grand Vizier, or something. Well, they were about a foot and a half away from my face while I waited, and they talked about me, without paying any attention to me. And I realized something I had never realized before. That I'm, I am content simply to think about it, I don't want it to happen to me again I thought, Jesus Christ, there are millions of people in this country who are treated like things, every single intimate moment of their lives. And it's not pretty. Well. "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store". The poem is in different parts and I think I'll indicate the numbers.
James Wright
00:38:45
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store", Part 1 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:39:17
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store", Part 2 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:39:44
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store", Part 3 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:40:20
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store”, Part 4 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:40:38
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store", Part 5 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:41:11
I think that I'll read a couple of nature poems. Nature, in poetry and song. One of the parts of the United States that I like very much...I came to like, I've spoken kind of harshly about Minneapolis, and I have harsh feelings about that city, but actually I love the West, out at the edge of Minnesota, you have, there's Minnesota, North Dakota
, and South Dakota
, and that part of the country there is sort of the, it's not really flat, it's a little rolling, but it's the beginning of the prairie, and the prairie is a beautiful thing. I spent a summer up around Fargo
, North Dakota, and I like Fargo, I like to walk there in the summer evenings, I would go even out to the other end of town, and, well it really is a real city, there are about eighty-thousand people, but you could walk out to the edge of town, and just a little beyond the town the prairie would begin. There is something about that sudden opening that I like. his is called, "Outside Fargo, North Dakota".
James Wright
00:42:45
Reads "Outside Fargo, North Dakota" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:43:07
No, may I start the poem again, I miss, I made a mistake.
James Wright
00:43:11
Reads "Outside Fargo, North Dakota” [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:44:04
Now this one is called "A Poem Written under an Archway in a Discontinued Railway Station, Fargo, North Dakota". I love those old trains, we were talking about this earlier, there's a certain thing about trains, especially in the West, west of Chicago. It's not true in the East. One of these days somebody's going to get a train from New York to Connecticut
or something and that train will never return, it'll keep coming back, every forty years with ghosts on it, flying Dutchmen. But it's different in the West, and...there's a discontinued railroad station.
James Wright
00:44:53
Reads "A Poem Written under an Archway in a Discontinued Railway Station, Fargo, North Dakota" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:46:30
I think I'll read...I think I'll read just a few more very short poems, perhaps two or three, and they're kind of nature poems, I guess. Nature indeed, one of them is a love poem. This is called "A Light in the Hallway".
James Wright
00:47:07
Reads "A Light in the Hallway" [published as “The Lights in the Hallway” in Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:48:06
And then a couple out of my previous book. This poem is called "Mary Bly", it's for my goddaughter, and I stood up there in the church and they said, well, I went through the ceremony and I am her godfather, Mary Bly, it's the first child of my old friend, my old friends, Robert and Carol Bly. I feel very proud of this poem, but it's one of those times that, it signifies one of those times in my life when I really thought of something nice to do and did it. So many things I want to do that would be nice, and usually they turn out to be something either asinine or too late, or something. But I wrote this poem for little Mary's christening, and I had it, it's the only time I've ever done this, I had it specially printed on very nice paper and print and had it put in a little silver frame, and gave it to her mother, on the day of the christening. What a calm thing to pull on an audience, how can you help but like it. [Audience laughter]. If you don't like it, it means you don't like motherhood or small children, no. "Mary Bly".
James Wright
00:49:51
Reads "Mary Bly" [from The Branch Will Not Break].
James Wright
00:50:42
And I think I will conclude with a poem which is just a description. There were some other descriptive poems in my last book which, for some weird reason, drove some reviewers to distraction. For example, in one poem, there was a poem about being at a bus stop at a place in Ohio and looking out the window and seeing a farmer at the beginning of a rain calling his cows in, and one reviewer got terribly upset about this and said, how...he's only stopping there on the bus, how did he know that there were a hundred black and white Holsteins. [Audience laughter]. And Robert Bly urged me and urged me to send the reviewer a postcard. I never did it, I wish I had. It was to have said, "I counted the tits and divided by four." [Audience laughter]. Well, no but, just, I just want to present this poem. It's called "A Blessing", and for what it is, it's just a description of something.
James Wright
00:52:28
Reads "A Blessing" [from The Branch Will Not Break].
James Wright
00:54:02
Thank you.
Audience
00:54:03
Applause.
Introducer
00:54:21
I'd just like to express all our thanks to James Wright
for sharing his poetry and his curses and blessings with us tonight, and to remind you that the next reading in the series is by Muriel Rukeyser
on Friday, January 24th.
END
00:54:38
Notes:
James Wright reads from The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963), Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), and from Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).
00:00- James Wright introduces reading and poem by Ben Jonson “On My First Son”. [INDEX: poetry, classical poetry, rhyme, passionately intellectual, free feeling, poem by Ben Jonson, elegy.]
00:52- Reads poem by Ben Jonson, “On My First Son”.
01:55- Introuces poem translated by W.S. Merwin, by Frederico Garcia Lorca, “Garcela of Unforseen Love”. [INDEX: American poet, W.S. Merwin, translations, New York, Selected Translations (Antheneum, 1979), poem by Garcia Lorca.]
03:35- Reads poem translated by W.S. Merwin, by Frederico Garcia Lorca “Garcela of Unforseen Love”.
04:30- Introduces poem by Jonathan Swift, “On Burning a Dull Poem”. [INDEX: Montreal, United States, English and French, Canadian, Irish, March 17th, family background, Ohioan, hell, Southern roots, Irish literature, Yeats, Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels in 1725, poem, expression of the Irish art of the curse, lecturn, prayer.]
07:29- Reads poem by Jonathan Swift, “On Burning a Dull Poem”.
08:25- Introduces poem by John Millington Synge “Upon the Sister of the Critic who Attacked the Playboy”. [INDEX: time, plays of John Millington Synge, poems, translation of Petrarch, of the women on Erin Islands who cleaned his room, learnt from listening to rhythm of language, Petrarch, Laura, heaven, angels, sestet of the sonnet, quote “What rare beauty is that now? What rare beauty at all”, play “The Playboy of the Western World” produced, criticism, wrote about criticism, critic’s sister, Aristotle quote ‘poetry is a higher and more philosophical thing than history’, prayer, blasphemy as a delicate art, Mountjoy is a place on the edge of Dublin, skid row.]
11:06- Reads poem by John Millington Synge “Upon the Sister of the Critic who Attacked the Playboy”.
11:43- Introduces and reads poem by Rilke, first line “When the clocks nearby strike as if their own hearts were beating...”. [INDEX: Irish poet, English, German, awkward translation, untitled poem, reads entire poem.]
11:14- Reads in German poem by Rilke, first line “When the clocks nearby strike as if their own hearts were beating...”.
15:28- Explains Rilke poem, introduces “A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack”. [INDEX: Minnegan Leonard, Francis Leonard, Martin’s Ferry Ohio, well educated man, deteriorated, snow, overalls, afraid of his brother Jimmy, drunk, humanity, poem spoken by twelve years old boy, swearing in a poem, army, swear word as a musical notation, Wordsworth, ‘poetic diction’, Finney crew, fish, 18th Century, poetic genius, quote from Mark W. Patrick from Crafton, Alabama, power to curse; from Saint Judas (Wesleyan Press, 1959).]
21:07- Reads “A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack”.
22:58- Introduces “The Minneapolis Poem”. [INDEX: read from new book, Ohio, Minnesota, St. Paul, lived for 8 years, poem about Minneapolis, American cities, skid row, Great Northern Railway Station, Mississippi River, Nickolet Avenue, Spiro T. Agneau American Vice-President, quote, slums, city poem; from Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).]
26:11- Reads “The Minneapolis Poem”.
30:39- Cut/edit in recording, sentence begins and then continues, repeated at lower quality sound, perhaps a tape change?
30:50- James Wright introduces “In Terror of Hospital Bills”. [INDEX: from Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).]
30:51- Reads “In Terror of Hospital Bills”.
32:36- Introduces “The Poor Washed Up By Chicago Winter”. [INDEX: leaving Chicago, Thanksgiving weekend, Bill Mott, published first book, Salvation Army; from Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).]
33:53- Reads “The Poor Washed Up By Chicago Winter”.
35:34- Introduces “Before a Cashier’s Window in a Department Store”. [INDEX: George Orwell quote from Down and Out in Paris and London, France, dishwasher, beg, clothes too good to beg in, sold clothes, effects of being poor, not romantic, account at a department store, Minneapolis, behind in payments, father’s coat, cheque for twenty dollars, cashier, Grand Vizier, never wanting to feel poor again; from Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).]
38:45- Reads “Before a Cashier’s Window in a Department Store, Part I”.
39:17- Reads “Before a Cashier’s Window in a Department Store, Part II”.
39:44- Reads “Before a Cashier’s Window in a Department Store, Part III”.
40:20- Reads “Before a Cashier’s Window in a Department Store, Part IV”.
40:38- Reads “Before a Cashier’s Window in a Department Store, Part V”.
41:11- Introduces “Outside Fargo, North Dakota” [INDEX: nature poems, poetry, song, United States, West, North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, country, prairies, summer, city; from Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).]
42:45- Reads “Outside Fargo, North Dakota”.
44:04- Introduces “A Poem Written Under an Archway in a Discontinued Railway Station, Fargo, North Dakota”. [INDEX: old trains, West, Chicago, East, New York, Conneticut, ghost train, flying Dutchmen; from Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).]
44:53- Reads “A Poem Written Under an Archway in a Discontinued Railway Station, Fargo, North Dakota”.
46:30- Introduces “A Light in the Hallway”. [INDEX: nature poems, short poems, love poem; published as “The Lights in the Hallway” in Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).]
47:07- Reads “A Light in the Hallway”.
48:06- Introduces “Mary Bly”. [INDEX: from previous book, for his goddaughter, church, ceremony, Robert and Carol Bly, first child, proud, christening, poem as a gift, audience, motherhood, small children; from The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963).]
49:51- Reads “Mary Bly”.
50:42- Introduces “A Blessing”. [INDEX: description, reviewers, bus stop, Ohio, farmer, rain, cows, holsteins, Robert Bly, sent reviewer postcard; from The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963).]
52:28- Reads “A Blessing”.
54:02- Thanks audience
54:21- Unknown introducer thanks James Wright and introduces next reading, Mary-Lou Kaiser [?] on January 24th.
00:54:38.42- END OF RECORDING.
Howard Fink List of Poems:
James Wright
I086-11-052=AC
Information from the Howard Fink Print Catalogue, Concordia Archives:
Title: James Wright reading his own poetry at Sir George Williams University
Date: December 13, 1968
Source: one two-track, mono, 5” reel, @ 3 ¾ ips, duration 1 hour
1. a poem by Ben Jonson “On My First Son”
2. a poem by W. S. Merwin “Nobody understood the perfume…”
3. a poem by Jonathan Swift “On Burning a Dull Poem”
4. A poem by John Millington Sing “Upon the Sister of the Critic who Attacked the Playboy”
5. A poem by Rilke “When the clocks nearby…” (trans. James Wright)
6. Title: “Note left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack”
first line: “Near the dry river’s watermark…”
7. Title: from his book Minneapolis Poems
first line: “I wonder how many old men…”
8. Title: In Terror of Hospital Bills
first line: “I still have some money…”
9. Title: The Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter
first line: “Well I still have a train ticket”
10. Title: Before a Cashier’s Window in a Department Store
first line: “The beautiful cashier’s face…”
11. Title: Outside Fargo, North Dakota
first line: “Along the…”
12. Title: A Poem Written Under an Archway in a Discontinued Rail Road Station
first line: “Outside the great…”
13. Title: The Light in the Hallway
first line: “The light in the hallway…”
14. Title: Mary Bly
first line: “I sit here…”
15. Title: A Blessing “Just off the highway…”
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Featured:
Yes
Dates
Date:
1968 12 13
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
Supplemental Material
Notes:
Date referenced in "Howard Fink Print Catalogue"
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
Hall Building
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
Notes:
Exact venue location unknown
CONTENT
Contents:
james_wright_ i086-11-157.mp3
James Wright
00:00:00
Well, I feel about poetry in a curious way, I guess. I have a very strong classical streak in me, I think, I like poems that are very regular, and poems that rhyme, and poems that are passionately intellectual, and I think that I feel this way because the poems that are the most passionately intellectual have a way of spilling over into something which is completely free in its feeling. Oh here's a little poem by Ben Jonson
. It's called "On My First Sonne"
. A little elegy.
James Wright
00:00:52
Reads "On My First Sonne" by Ben Jonson.
James Wright
00:01:55
Poor old Ben Jonson, in a pig's eye. The next poem I would like to say is by an American poet, W.S. Merwin
, who has just published his selected translations, and of course in addition to the very beautiful poems of his own that Merwin has, he's been a prolific translator, and he, he really does know the languages. I've loved his poetry always because he has such a beautiful ear, it was very interesting to me when I saw him in New York
a few weeks ago, when he said that his Selected Translations were about to appear. I asked him if he remembered the transla--well of course he remembered, I just told him I always liked very much the poem he had translated, a later poem by Garcia Lorca
called "Gacela of Unforseen Love". What a weird thing! He didn't remember that he had done it. And it's not in his book. Well, I wish it were. "Gacela of Unforseen Love".
James Wright
00:03:35
Reads "Gacela of Unforseen Love" by Federico Garcia Lorca and translated in English by W.S. Mervin.
James Wright
00:04:30
Can't imagine doing that in English and then forgetting that you've done it. Maybe it was frightening. Here in Montreal
I've been thinking about what in the United States
we hear about Montreal, about the English background, and the French background, and the Canadian, all of which are very vital and alive, but what do you make of the Irish up here? Are there any Irishmen in Canada
? [pauses for response]. Just on March 17th. Only on March 17th, fine. My own family background is kind of complicated. I'm an Ohioan, which is a kind of hell in itself [audience laughter]. But both sides of my family have roots in the south, but they have a strong streak of Irish behind them; it wasn't until I was quite old that I found out about some of Irish literature, of course we've all of us read Yeats
. The son of a bitch. He not only did everything first but he did it best. We all feel that. But really he didn't do it all first. He may have done it best but there are some Irish things that I found that perhaps he grew out of it. Do you know for example, the poems of, of all people, Jonathan Swift
? Jonathan Swift is a wonderful poet. He published Gulliver's Travels
in 1725, and I found a little poem of his called "On Burning a Dull Poem". Of 1729. And it has a, it's a wonderful expression of the Irish art of the curse. I shouldn't lean on this. I don't mean the poem, I mean the lectern. [Audience laughter]. But it's a wonderful example of the Irish art of the curse, what is supposed to be very regular and it's almost like a prayer. The art here is that you should decide first of all whether or not what you feel annoyed by really is worthy of a curse. And then if it is, you should not come out and blast it directly, but exercise some indirection on it. So here we have Swift, "On Burning a Dull Poem".
James Wright
00:07:29
Reads "On Burning a Dull Poem" by Jonathan Swift.
James Wright
00:08:25
I can't help bringing that a little closer to our own time. We all know the very beautiful plays of John Millington Synge
. Perhaps people haven't so widely enjoyed his poems. He didn't write a great many, but to my mind he wrote enough. He also, he made a translation of Petrarch
into the same language as those people, as those women on the Aran Islands
who used to clean his room. He said he learned something about the rhythm of his language just by listening to them. So that in the sound of the Petrarch after Laura is dead and is appearing in heaven, and the angels are astonished by her beauty, the sestet of that sonnet, in Synge's translation, the angels see Laura and suddenly say, "What rare beauty is that now? What rare beauty at all." So that those old women who cleaned his room on the Aran Islands have the voices of the angels. Well, after The Playboy of the Western World
was first produced, he was criticized and he wanted to write something about the criticism. He didn't know whether the, who the critic was, really, he didn't know anything about him, he didn't know whether or not the critic had a sister. But there was the poem, and since he realized, as Aristotle
said, that “poetry is a higher and more philosophical thing than history”--history being limited to what is or was, and poetry having available to it what ought to be, what might be...Synge invented a sister, and he wrote a little poem called "Upon the Sister of the Critic who Attacked the Playboy". [Audience laughter]. This is a prayer. [Audience laughter]. And blasphemy also is a very delicate art. "Lord"...no I have to say, that you have to understand, really what "Mountjoy" is. Mountjoy is a place on the edge of Dublin
, a kind of charity place where the Skid Rowers go.
James Wright
00:11:06
Reads "Upon the Sister of the Critic who Attacked the Playboy" by John Millington Synge.
Audience
00:11:32
Laughter.
James Wright
00:11:43
I came to like those Irish poets, so much, because they enjoyed poetry. My God, you've got to do something, life is a mess. Well, alright, I want to say one more poem that I care about. I know I'm going on too long with this business. One more. Let me say it in English first, and you can't say that I'm translating at sight, but perhaps by ear, and it'll be very awkward, but it's not awkward in the German. When--it's a poem that doesn't have a title. I don't think I'll tell you who wrote it. The poem goes: "When the clocks nearby strike as if their own hearts were beating, and things--that is, material objects-things, with hesitant voices say to me softly, ‘Are you there?’ Then I am not the same man who woke this morning, for the night has sent me a name which no one to whom I spoke by daylight can listen to without being deeply frightened. Every door in me opens, and then I know that nothing dies, neither gesture, nor prayer. Things are too heavy for that. My whole childhood stands always around me. I am never alone. Many who live before me, and many who spring forth from me”--which I would also, I suppose, translate as ‘many who spring forth out of my body'--”wove, wove into my being. And if I sit down opposite you and say, lightly, I have been suffering, do you hear? Who knows? Who murmurs that voice with me?"
James Wright
00:14:19
Reads untitled poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in German.
James Wright
00:15:28
Oh, no that's corny, of course it's by Rilke
. I mean it's corny to hold back the name. It's one of those lyrics that Rilke wrote between those New Poems
and the big terrible ones, the Duino Elegies
and the Sonnets. Well, let me proceed now to some poems of my own. The first one I think I will read is a poem called "A Note left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack". I've been thinking about that poem a little bit recently for a lot of reasons. I think I should tell you something about what's behind it. There was an old guy called Minnegan Leonard who, or maybe Francis Leonard, who grew up--no, [laughter] I mean he was old, I grew up--he was already there [audience laughter]. Back in Martins Ferry
, Ohio
. The story about him was that he had been a very well-educated man and he sort of deteriorated, everyone said. One night, a couple of friends and I found him in the, when the snow was starting to fall. And his, he wore a pair of overalls, the ones that cross behind, and they were too big, my friends and I helped him get home. We were very much afraid of his brother, Jimmy. Minnegan had drunk so much that his brain was practically gone, and he had nothing left to say to the universe except "God bless my soul." We were stupid, we were afraid of his brother Jimmy, because his brother Jimmy, although drunk, was still mean. He still had some of his humanity left. And we were afraid of him. I thought about this poem as being spoken by a boy, I was about twelve years old. I also wanted to see if I could get away with swearing in a poem, and give the word, give the profanity some of its true force. The only thing that I deplore about the open use of profanity is that very soon, when the four-letter words are used commonly, they start to lose touch with their old, magical, dark force. When I was in the army, twenty years ago, I realized that this happened. You couldn't say "fuck" to refer to anything dark or anything interesting. It became a musical notation. Merely a musical notation, like a comma, when you were having chow. [Audience laughter]. But then there came those necessary moments when one absolutely needs to curse, and what does one do then? Then I saw all sorts of people around me, floundering, turning to what Wordsworth would have called the "poetic diction," and finding that to say "fuck" had about as much effect on the release of one's feelings as the Finney crew had on anybody who was trying to read about fish in the end of the 18th century. Then I met a poetic genius named Mark W. Patrick from Crafton, Alabama
, who was not hobbled by this. Someone asked him once, no he had invention, true invention. He knew how to swear. My wife has heard this before. Alright, I'll say it again. Someone said to him, "Where are you from?" And he said, "I come from so far back in the country, they have to fan the coon-farts out of the kitchen to keep from making.” [Audience laughter]. No, wait a minute, you didn't hear the rest of the conceit. Now listen to this carefully and think of it as in Shakespearian. "I come from so far back in the country they have to fan the coon-farts out of the kitchen to keep from making ring-tailed biscuits." [Audience laughter]. I thought, let us somehow rescue through invention our power to curse. Well this poem is called, "A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack". It's about taking Minnegan Leonard home when he was helpless in the snow.
James Wright
00:21:07
Reads "A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack" [from Saint Judas].
Unknown
00:22:43
Ambient Sound.
James Wright
00:22:58
Now for a while I think I would like to read from my new book. There are a couple of city poems in this new book, well, more than a couple, and many of the things that I had written before were about the country, more or less, in Ohio, and in Minnesota
. But I developed a certain feeling about cities, I guess, and...I didn't have a very happy time in Minneapolis
and St. Paul
, but I lived there for about eight years, and before I left I thought I ought to say farewell, somehow. I couldn't think of a title for this poem that would convey or suggest what I really felt, and the true title came to me. I wanted it to be a poem about, not only about Minneapolis but about many American cities, and what has been happening in them. Minneapolis is my favourite because I lived there for quite a while, and they had a very big Skid Row there, and the Skid Row was cleared out by the city administration, the last, the most recent one. It was a very big Skid Row, between the Great Northern Railroad Station and the Mississippi River
, right a strip across there, several blocks wide. And they sort of flattened it. They put up an insurance building and the rest were parking lots. And it never occurred to them that the people who lived there would...well, even existed. And I know where those people went, they went down Nickolet Avenue, scattered down there. It's a very strange thing. Spiro T. Agnew
, our new American Vice-President said, during the campaign, "The reasons the slums are so over-crowded is that there are too many people in them." [Audience laughter]. Well, this is my city poem. It's called "The Minneapolis Poem".
James Wright
00:26:11
Reads "The Minneapolis Poem" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:30:39
The next poem is called, "In Terror of Hospital"-- [cut or edit in tape] "In Terror of Hospital Bills".
James Wright
00:30:51
Reads "In Terror of Hospital Bills" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:32:36
This poem is called "The Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter". It's about leaving Chicago
. I went down there for a long Thanksgiving weekend to visit a man whose poetry I had seen, I had never met him, I admired it very much. His name is Bill Mott. He has finally published a first book. He lived in an area down there where there were some sort of poor people...I don't mean poor people in the sense of being savagely poor, really really put down, but just sort of drifters, the guys who go into the, who go in on Thanksgiving and get a dinner there from the Salvation Army
and look at it and then sweep up and leave.
James Wright
00:33:53
Reads "The Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:35:43
You know, George Orwell
remarked in Down and Out in Paris and London
that when he got back to London
from France
where he'd been a dishwasher, he had so little money that he realized that he would have to beg, only somehow his clothes, ratty as they were, were still too good to beg with. And so he, he sold what clothes he had, or traded them, rather, for a really crummy suit of clothes, and when he got those old, really poor man's clothes on, he noticed all sorts of strange things. The way people looked at him. The way women looked at him. As well as other men. And the fact that he was poor had an effect on the way people's souls were shaped, somehow. I only had a very slight experience of that in my life, and I don't want any more of it. Because it's not very romantic. For a while I had a sort of, an account at a department store in Minneapolis, and I was behind in my payments. At that time I had an old green coat my father had given me, it didn't quite fit but a coat is a coat. So I had it, and I was, in order to keep myself going one way or another, I went up to the cashier's office at this department store and tried to cash a small cheque for twenty dollars, or something like that. There was a very beautiful girl there, the cashier, and she looked at me, and she disappeared for a moment and she came back with a fellow who had a crew cut. And he evidently was the Grand Vizier, or something. Well, they were about a foot and a half away from my face while I waited, and they talked about me, without paying any attention to me. And I realized something I had never realized before. That I'm, I am content simply to think about it, I don't want it to happen to me again I thought, Jesus Christ, there are millions of people in this country who are treated like things, every single intimate moment of their lives. And it's not pretty. Well. "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store". The poem is in different parts and I think I'll indicate the numbers.
James Wright
00:38:45
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store", Part 1 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:39:17
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store", Part 2 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:39:44
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store", Part 3 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:40:20
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store”, Part 4 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:40:38
Reads "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store", Part 5 [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:41:11
I think that I'll read a couple of nature poems. Nature, in poetry and song. One of the parts of the United States that I like very much...I came to like, I've spoken kind of harshly about Minneapolis, and I have harsh feelings about that city, but actually I love the West, out at the edge of Minnesota, you have, there's Minnesota, North Dakota
, and South Dakota
, and that part of the country there is sort of the, it's not really flat, it's a little rolling, but it's the beginning of the prairie, and the prairie is a beautiful thing. I spent a summer up around Fargo
, North Dakota, and I like Fargo, I like to walk there in the summer evenings, I would go even out to the other end of town, and, well it really is a real city, there are about eighty-thousand people, but you could walk out to the edge of town, and just a little beyond the town the prairie would begin. There is something about that sudden opening that I like. his is called, "Outside Fargo, North Dakota".
James Wright
00:42:45
Reads "Outside Fargo, North Dakota" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:43:07
No, may I start the poem again, I miss, I made a mistake.
James Wright
00:43:11
Reads "Outside Fargo, North Dakota” [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:44:04
Now this one is called "A Poem Written under an Archway in a Discontinued Railway Station, Fargo, North Dakota". I love those old trains, we were talking about this earlier, there's a certain thing about trains, especially in the West, west of Chicago. It's not true in the East. One of these days somebody's going to get a train from New York to Connecticut
or something and that train will never return, it'll keep coming back, every forty years with ghosts on it, flying Dutchmen. But it's different in the West, and...there's a discontinued railroad station.
James Wright
00:44:53
Reads "A Poem Written under an Archway in a Discontinued Railway Station, Fargo, North Dakota" [from Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:46:30
I think I'll read...I think I'll read just a few more very short poems, perhaps two or three, and they're kind of nature poems, I guess. Nature indeed, one of them is a love poem. This is called "A Light in the Hallway".
James Wright
00:47:07
Reads "A Light in the Hallway" [published as “The Lights in the Hallway” in Shall We Gather at the River].
James Wright
00:48:06
And then a couple out of my previous book. This poem is called "Mary Bly", it's for my goddaughter, and I stood up there in the church and they said, well, I went through the ceremony and I am her godfather, Mary Bly, it's the first child of my old friend, my old friends, Robert and Carol Bly. I feel very proud of this poem, but it's one of those times that, it signifies one of those times in my life when I really thought of something nice to do and did it. So many things I want to do that would be nice, and usually they turn out to be something either asinine or too late, or something. But I wrote this poem for little Mary's christening, and I had it, it's the only time I've ever done this, I had it specially printed on very nice paper and print and had it put in a little silver frame, and gave it to her mother, on the day of the christening. What a calm thing to pull on an audience, how can you help but like it. [Audience laughter]. If you don't like it, it means you don't like motherhood or small children, no. "Mary Bly".
James Wright
00:49:51
Reads "Mary Bly" [from The Branch Will Not Break].
James Wright
00:50:42
And I think I will conclude with a poem which is just a description. There were some other descriptive poems in my last book which, for some weird reason, drove some reviewers to distraction. For example, in one poem, there was a poem about being at a bus stop at a place in Ohio and looking out the window and seeing a farmer at the beginning of a rain calling his cows in, and one reviewer got terribly upset about this and said, how...he's only stopping there on the bus, how did he know that there were a hundred black and white Holsteins. [Audience laughter]. And Robert Bly urged me and urged me to send the reviewer a postcard. I never did it, I wish I had. It was to have said, "I counted the tits and divided by four." [Audience laughter]. Well, no but, just, I just want to present this poem. It's called "A Blessing", and for what it is, it's just a description of something.
James Wright
00:52:28
Reads "A Blessing" [from The Branch Will Not Break].
James Wright
00:54:02
Thank you.
Audience
00:54:03
Applause.
Introducer
00:54:21
I'd just like to express all our thanks to James Wright
for sharing his poetry and his curses and blessings with us tonight, and to remind you that the next reading in the series is by Muriel Rukeyser
on Friday, January 24th.
END
00:54:38
Notes:
James Wright reads from The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963), Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), and from Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968).
NOTES
Type:
General
Note:
Year-Specific Information:
Wright was teaching at the Uptown Branch of Hunter College and published Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan Press) in 1968.
Type:
General
Note:
Local Connections:
James Wright often taught summer courses at universities across the country, and he taught at Sir George Williams University sometime between 1967 and 1972.
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcript, research, introduction, and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Ali Barillaro
Type:
Preservation
Note:
Reel-to-reel tape>CD>digital file
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
Cambridge, Gerry. "Wright, James”. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Jay Parini (ed). Oxford University Press 2004.
Citation:
Wright, Anne & Saundra Rose Maley & Johnathan Blunk (eds). A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2005.
Citation:
Wright, James. Collected Poems. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1971.
Citation:
Wright, James. The Branch Will Not Break. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1963.
Citation:
Wright, James. Saint Judas. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.
Citation:
Wright, James. Shall We Gather at the River. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1968.
Citation:
Wright, James. Two Citizens. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1973.
Citation:
"Wright, James [Arlington]". The Oxford Companion to American Literature. James D. Hart (ed.), Phillip W. Leininger (rev). Oxford University Press 1995.