Wheeling Motel by Franz Wright - Book Report/Review Example

Wheeling Motel It is not unusual for poets to express the deepest elements of their souls in the linesof their poetry. This is partly because of the nature of the art form. Poetry forces authors to use abbreviated speech in which the universal experiences of mankind must be phrased in the sensory details of a lived life. For example, the concept of love cannot be described in more than a thousand words, but the poet limits himself to a few stanzas by phrasing the experience within a sensory moment experienced by the author. Because of the way this is done, the experiences are couched in the author’s understanding, in the author’s experience that brought that understanding and thus convey an intensely personal moment in the mind of the author. He brings this moment forward in an effort to make a connection with the unknown and unknowable reader. When this connection is made, the poet has achieved success in uncovering a shared experience between himself and the reader that only the reader can know. When enough readers have felt this connection, it begins to take on the sense of a universal meaning and the author, and his audience, no longer feels alone in their understanding of the world. In Franz Wright’s collection of poems Wheeling Motel, the poet conveys a sense of deep grief and trouble but also a sense of hope and faith that not all is lost. This theme of despair tempered by faith is found in almost every poem in the book such as the title poem “Wheeling Motel,” “Triptych” and “After Absence”. In the title poem of the book, Wright seems to be speaking to his father, who died 25 years earlier and who was also a poet. Before he makes reference to his father, though, Wright establishes a mournful mood to the poem by his mention of the river that flows past the backyard as if unnoticed and the reference to buying beer and listening to Tammy Wynette. One of the major characteristics of Tammy Wynette’s music was that it was filled with themes of loneliness and difficult relationships (Bufwack, 1998). Another characteristic was its traditional country music mournful twang. This reference within Wright’s poem to this particular singer immediately gives the poem a sense of isolation and the need for a respite from pain. The cause for the poet’s loneliness is revealed in the second stanza when he directly addresses his father, pointing out that their road divided 25 years ago when his father died and he, the poet, continued living, “which was luckier God only knows” (6). But within this sense of hopeless and never-ending despair, the poet inserts a sense of hope not only in his mention of God as a supreme being that might actually have a plan, but also in his acknowledgement that there remains something familiar yet unknown in the scene. He realizes a connection between his father’s poetry and his own impressions of the moment, “the river is like that, / a blind familiar” (8-9), and he finds in this realization a sense of power and control. “The wind will die down when I say so” (10). In this and subsequent lines, the poet makes it clear that his darkness is a creation of his own mind. When he stops bringing it forward, “the leaden and lessening light on / the current” (11-12) will stop illuminating the problems he has known and “then the moon will rise / like the word reconciliation (13-14) as he gives in to his faith, his hope that there is something larger out there that cares and is watching over him. The poem ends with the image of Walt Whitman examining a tear on the face of a dead man. This reference is a call to the original American free verse poet, naturalist and transcendental realist and thus refers to the hopeful spirit of the poet. Like “Wheeling Motel,” Wright’s poem “Triptych” attempts to make a connection to previous writers of loneliness and despair who had found hope and courage through their writing. This poem begins with a tribute to St. Augustine, an ancient Roman Christian who helped to define the Christian faith in its early days. Having lived his early life following several other faiths that did little to address the longing in his heart, Augustine had a conversion experience that caused him to dedicate the rest of his life to the Roman Christian church (Brown, 1967). His story and his teachings reinforce the concepts of salvation and divine grace which would appeal strongly to a person of Wright’s background experience. The main body of the poem is dedicated to the lament of the poet at not having captured in writing a verse that he imagined. It is a common complaint among writers that their best work has never been written, lost, as is described in Wright’s poem, in the ether of the dream. Many of these authors feel as Wright does, “waking in a desolation deeper / than the one in which I’d finally gone to sleep” (6-7). Within this deeply saddened sense of the brilliance being lost, the poet realizes the transcendence of the moment, of the lines he’d thought of, as he mentions its indescribable nature. “It was going to be great, it was something / about the word cloud ineluctably / billowing … / sailing / without seeming to billow or move” (8-12). The final lines of the poem return to a sense of connection, a sense of remembering and a sense of hope for the future. In these lines, the poet remembers something about the lines he’d envisioned, “It had to do with falling / into the o / of devour, the i / in flight, / something …” (15-19). Rather than concentrating on what was lost, the poet has turned his attention to what remains, leading him to a new thought or consideration and back into the life of poetry. In this way, Wright has completed his triptych, a journey in three panels, in which he has started in connection with those who have gone before, lost his way in the pits of despair and pulled himself back out again with a focus on the hope of the future. The poem “After Absence” does not focus so exclusively on the concepts of despair as the previous two discussed poems, but instead offers a sense of the hope that the poet clings to in order to get through his loneliness and despair. The title of the poem is itself an indication of his previous despair as it suggests a long absence from the divine light that now guides him. The first stanza provides a suggestion that the message God has sent to his people are merely translated into human sounds which “are spoken and shine / on a few upturned faces” (2-3), but that they may not actually reflect what is divine. This is suggested in the next lines, “I will tell you what no eye has seen / and teach you to see / what no ear has heard” (5-7). What the poet seems to be suggesting is that there is no way to truly know the spirit of God except through the process of experience, of feeling the message rather than understanding it through the filter of human speech. This is a difficult admission for a poet whose position is precisely to put these kinds of experiences into translatable, understandable words. The poet’s despair is shown in his italicized lines in which he paraphrases the Lord’s Prayer that he be forgiven for the harm he has caused, perhaps by using the wrong words, and that those who have harmed him also be forgiven. However, he still does not give in fully to despair as Wright again turns to faith as a means of discovering hope. He reminds himself and his readers that when the day of reckoning arrives, the faithful will finally be made in God’s image, whatever that may be and regardless of human conceptions of Him. Until that day, “God is love / they say, / in human words” (23-25). In these lines, he finds both the means of overcoming his despair regarding both his craft and his ability to communicate and the permission for him to continue trying, in his own unique way, to point the way to the kind of deep faith he has found within himself as an effective means of combating the inner despair. Even the opening poems of the book, such as “Another Working Dawn” or “Baudelaire,” in which despair seems to be the pervading notion, Wright seeks to point out the need to turn to faith as a means of conquering the darkness. “Another Working Dawn” describes what seems to be the poet rising from a surrealistic dream in which the evils of mankind are seen to stain the innocence of the dreamer by his own volition. The darkness described is the darkness of the dreamer’s own actions, his willingness to accept it, his skewed perception of it and thus his inability to do anything about it. All it takes, the poem suggests, is a change in perspective to make everything better. This same perception of evil is expressed in the poem “Baudelaire” as the poet explores the dark nature of the 19th century French poet for whom the poem was named. In this poem, Wright expressly states, “Evil isn’t hard to comprehend, it is nothing / but unhappiness / in its most successful disguise” (19-21). Throughout his poems, Wright struggles to define this unhappiness and then finds the faith to combat it, drive it back and provide hope for himself and his readers. Within all of the poems found within Wright’s collection, this give and take of despair and faith cycle through. It is most common for the poems to begin or quickly degenerate into an expression of hopelessness, loneliness and/or feelings of unworthiness. As he works through these feelings within the context of the poem, Wright inevitably turns to examples or expressions of faith that provide him with new hope and energy for the future. In each of the cases expressed here, the poet ends with a sense that he can continue forward with hope. Human words are all he has to express his ideas of God, for now. Unwritten words can be lost, but they can leave remnants in the memory that might lead to something as great, as expressive, as what has been forgotten. New wonder can be discovered even in the harsh reality of a dead man’s tear. Although his verse is sometimes difficult to read and often makes reference to people or events that require further research to fully understand, Wright’s poetry within this particular collection is highly expressive, deeply emotional and ultimately inspirational in spite of its initial sense of bleakness and unusual forms of imagery. Works Cited Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Bufwack, Mary A. “Tammy Wynette.” The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kingsbury, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Wright, Franz. Wheeling Motel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Read More

But within this sense of hopeless and never-ending despair, the poet inserts a sense of hope not only in his mention of God as a supreme being that might actually have a plan, but also in his acknowledgement that there remains something familiar yet unknown in the scene. He realizes a connection between his father’s poetry and his own impressions of the moment, “the river is like that, / a blind familiar” (8-9), and he finds in this realization a sense of power and control. “The wind will die down when I say so” (10).

In this and subsequent lines, the poet makes it clear that his darkness is a creation of his own mind. When he stops bringing it forward, “the leaden and lessening light on / the current” (11-12) will stop illuminating the problems he has known and “then the moon will rise / like the word reconciliation (13-14) as he gives in to his faith, his hope that there is something larger out there that cares and is watching over him. The poem ends with the image of Walt Whitman examining a tear on the face of a dead man.

This reference is a call to the original American free verse poet, naturalist and transcendental realist and thus refers to the hopeful spirit of the poet. Like “Wheeling Motel,” Wright’s poem “Triptych” attempts to make a connection to previous writers of loneliness and despair who had found hope and courage through their writing. This poem begins with a tribute to St. Augustine, an ancient Roman Christian who helped to define the Christian faith in its early days. Having lived his early life following several other faiths that did little to address the longing in his heart, Augustine had a conversion experience that caused him to dedicate the rest of his life to the Roman Christian church (Brown, 1967).

His story and his teachings reinforce the concepts of salvation and divine grace which would appeal strongly to a person of Wright’s background experience. The main body of the poem is dedicated to the lament of the poet at not having captured in writing a verse that he imagined. It is a common complaint among writers that their best work has never been written, lost, as is described in Wright’s poem, in the ether of the dream. Many of these authors feel as Wright does, “waking in a desolation deeper / than the one in which I’d finally gone to sleep” (6-7).

Within this deeply saddened sense of the brilliance being lost, the poet realizes the transcendence of the moment, of the lines he’d thought of, as he mentions its indescribable nature. “It was going to be great, it was something / about the word cloud ineluctably / billowing … / sailing / without seeming to billow or move” (8-12). The final lines of the poem return to a sense of connection, a sense of remembering and a sense of hope for the future. In these lines, the poet remembers something about the lines he’d envisioned, “It had to do with falling / into the o / of devour, the i / in flight, / something …” (15-19).

Rather than concentrating on what was lost, the poet has turned his attention to what remains, leading him to a new thought or consideration and back into the life of poetry. In this way, Wright has completed his triptych, a journey in three panels, in which he has started in connection with those who have gone before, lost his way in the pits of despair and pulled himself back out again with a focus on the hope of the future. The poem “After Absence” does not focus so exclusively on the concepts of despair as the previous two discussed poems, but instead offers a sense of the hope that the poet clings to in order to get through his loneliness and despair.

The title of the poem is itself an indication of his previous despair as it suggests a long absence from the divine light that now guides him. The first stanza provides a suggestion that the message God has sent to his people are merely translated into human sounds which “are spoken and shine / on a few upturned faces” (2-3), but that they may not actually reflect what is divine.

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