Editor's Note: The poet Franz Wright died last week at the age of sixty-two. Here, in tribute to him, we're running a piece by Micah Mattix that was first posted in January 2014.

I first came across Franz Wright's work in graduate school. It was in Nick Halpern's class on contemporary poetry, and we read Elizabeth Bishop, Denis Johnson, Jane Kenyon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carolyn Forché, and Wright, among others.

We didn't read Wright's latest book at the time, which would have been Il Lit (1998), but one of his most distinctive earlier collections, The Night World and Word Night (1993). The volume is vintage Wright. We have the gritty pathos, the conversational tone, the self-effacing (or self-indulging, depending on how one reads it) dark humor and the occasional aphorism. His drunk father (the poet James Wright) lurks here and there, but he does not dominate the volume. Wright's friends and girlfriend, conversations with dead poets, break in on the lament of lost childhood that has otherwise so much preoccupied Wright. Stylistically, this is the Wright of big white spaces and abbreviated phrases heavy with suffering. At times, it's almost as if the poet can barely write. "Mood-altering cloud of late autumn," he writes in "The World":

Gray deserted street

Place settings for one—dear visible things …

The insane are right, but they're still the insane.

While there is time let me a little belong.

A central characteristic of Wright's earlier work is the tension between confession and construction. The narrative flow of his poems is often coupled with a constrained word choice, enjambment and large spaces between lines or stanzas, sudden shifts in diction, and absurd or pathetic imagery. Similar to other "confessional" poets, Wright views the poet as a "surgeon," as he puts it in "To the Poet," who must cut up his life to save it. Drawing from René Char's practice of "enlèvement-embellissement" ["removing-embellishing/beautifying], Wright cuts words, adds spaces, shifts diction, surprises with absurd, pathetic, or startlingly beautiful images or metaphors to build something beautiful out of his suffering—to create poems that have, as he puts it, a "mysterious commonplace." For the earlier Wright the salvation that poetry offered was at best temporary. It created a momentary community, perhaps, and provided relief from loneliness but it was always unable to overcome that loneliness.

A lot has changed in twenty years, and a lot hasn't. Following a period of institutionalization, Wright converted to Catholicism in 1999 (though he was not baptized until 2003). And hope and joy, which had until then been almost entirely absent from his poetry, quietly announced themselves first in The Beforelife (2000), then on the first page of Walking to Martha's Vineyard (2003):

I was standing
on a northern corner.

Moonlit winter clouds the color of the desperation of wolves.

Proof
of Your existence? There is nothing
but.

Wright's coyness, as the final lines demonstrate, remained, as did his unflinching honesty, his interest in the downtrodden, and his preoccupation with his father. Wright also continued in more or less the same style—the white space, the surprise breaks, the sudden shifts in diction. But the silence of these white spaces is no longer heavy with a certain darkness, as in The Night World and Word Night, but became the "silence" of God out of which God nevertheless speaks and comforts—a theme Wright took up in God's Silence (2006), his follow-up volume to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Walking to Martha's Vineyard.

Wright began to speak of poetry as a sacrament. Poetry's redemptive potential, it turns out, is a reflection of Christ's redemption, not a replacement of it, as it was for Rilke. The near despair expressed in previous volumes is transformed in his later work. "There is hope in the past," Wright writes in "I for One": "I am so glad // there is no fear, / and finally I can // ask no second life."

In his three latest volumes—Wheeling Motel (2009), Kindertotenwald (2011) and F (2013)—Wright returns to his childhood in part, while at the same time continuing to explore his faith, but with a shift in style in Kindertotenwald. Mostly gone (though not entirely) are the white spaces and constraint. Instead we have big block—sometimes surreal—paragraphs.

Block after block text can be off-putting. When I first received the volume from the publisher, I skimmed it and put it to the side. I was wrong to do so. Kindertotenwald is a pleasure. The poems themselves are some of Wright's most varied in terms of subject matter. We have folk tales, vignettes of Nietzsche, Verlaine, Basho, Saint Teresa, Kierkegaard, and other unidentified voices.

These voices often long for some communion with others. "On My Father's Farm in New York City," for example, begins: "In the yard it is just getting light, as they say, and I wish I could meet them sometime and shake hands. I have been waiting all night for this, here by the one window, enthroned in his absence." In other poems, such as in "As Was," it is the speaker who is responsible for his own isolation: "You may be the beast right now but one day, rest assured, of something you are going to be the gory feast. Take me. The arrow found me in the end, one I myself had so long ago blindly let fly, what the hell was I thinking?" In "Deep Revision," the poet laments: "I don't want to write anything, ever. I just want you."

This takes us back to one of Wright's earlier preoccupation with the power of poetry to heal human loneliness. As in The Night World and Word Night, poetry fails to heal the wounds others inflict on us and the wounds we inflict on ourselves. In "The Last Person in Purgatory," Wright writes: "Company! But nothing happens, of course, that was all over with long ago, there remains no one but me, me with my tiny bat wings that don't work."

And yet, unlike in The Night World and Word Night, poetry's failure does not lead to despair in Kindertotenwald. In "Song," the penultimate poem in the volume, Wright, perhaps addressing himself, writes: "Are you finished debating the blind who insist that light doesn't exist, and have proof of it? Nobody's alone, God is alone. If you liked being born, you'll love dying."

I'd quibble with "God is alone." After all, if our capacity for community did not come from the Trinity, where did it come from? God is alone and not alone at the same time. His point, however, if not in this particular poem but in his work from at least The Beforelife is that while human poetry cannot save, God's can.

The central piece in F is "Entries of the Cell," a long poem in which Wright, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2008, considers his life and work, death and the afterlife. The poem is dedicated to the poet Fady Joudah, whose Textu (2013) is a collection of cell phone poems each with stanzas exactly 160 characters long—the character limit of the software Joudah used to write the poems.

There are no such arbitrary constraints in Wright's long poem, which also contains the only reference to the title of the volume: "And look what I've come across in the middle of these disintegrating / pages. // It's a capital F that takes up the whole page. // My name, or grade in life?" The appearance of the first letter of his name, created by the lines of poetry, may, indeed, have been an accident, but it is one that is particularly relevant to the central argument of the poem. According to Wright, we have been deluded by narcissism and materialism. We are infatuated with ourselves. We disregard the suffering of others and view love as an illusion. The only thing we view as real, Wright suggests, is animal suffering, which was his own view, in part, before he came to Christ:

Then I remembered how long long ago I had bought it, the
whole illusion, everything from the most
remote star to the bubble of time that will burst
before I can finish this phrase; everything from
the small bloody scream of our first appearance
to our speechless and forsaken exit. All will be
forgotten, everything you perceived, thought,
dreamed, hoped, remembered … all the past

As Wright suggests here, this belief in the meaningless of the universe is itself a yearning for a sort of salvation—one in which "all the past," all the suffering will be forgotten. The rub, of course, is that it requires the annihilation of all that is human: "Show me the first to form / words, the first to weep, the first to sing. The / first to kill no others but himself. The first to / die for someone else." True salvation begins when one recognizes that love is "Of all things least illusory."

Nobody does love and joy better in poetry—and perhaps worse in life—than Wright. He, of course, has had is fair share of public outbursts. There was the back and forth with William Logan in 2006 and, more recently, his angry complaints about MFA poetry on Facebook. This shows up a little in these later volumes, too. In "Märchen," for example, from Kindertotenwald, Wright imagines a "Prince" and his "Mrs." who "become hopelessly lost in the forest and apply to several minor writing programs."

In Wright's defense, his antagonism toward MFA programs seems to me to be mostly an expression of his love for poetry and his frustration at how some—by no means all—MFA programs have turned poetry into a technique that is less about art and more about getting a first book publication and a cushy tenure-track job at another university. It has been bad for risk in art, and Wright is not the only one to have suggested so.

In his poems, however, he has nothing but compassion for the unnamed homeless, the addict in the corner of a gutted building, and strangers walking down the street infected by loneliness. And regarding joy we have lines like:

Here am I, Lord,
sitting on a suitcase,
waiting for my train.
The sun is shining.
I'm never coming back.

It was phrases similar to these in Walking to Martha's Vineyard that set Logan off. He wrote at the time that they were no different from the "kitschy sanctimoniousness that puts nodding Jesus dolls on car dashboards." Joy is offensive, and it can look like "kitschy sanctimoniousness," especially when a poet does not give a little wink and nod to a knowing skepticism that excludes feelings such as this as impossibly false from the get-go.

Logan's point, and rightly so, is that it's the poet's job to make language work. The question is for whom. I think many readers of Wright, myself included, are attracted to his work in part because these blunt and at times embarrassingly happy lines are not found anywhere else in contemporary poetry. It is a refreshing respite from the hedged hand-me-down Ashberian surrealism of Stevenesque doubt.

This is not to say that it always works in Wright. In "Crumpled-up Note Blowing Away," for example, the pathos gets a little out of control: "But I've said all that / I had to say," he writes, "In writing. / I signed my name. / It's death's move." Except he hasn't said all he has had to say in writing, and it's always death's move. The additional periods here have the effect of making these lines more dramatic than they can or should be in this particular context. It just doesn't work.

But I'll take these sorts of missteps for lines like this:

I am standing alone with everyone else at the center of the world,
a violet ray of noon piercing my forehead.
And all at once it is the middle of the night.

Concision, pacing, the juxtaposition of absurd or striking images and direct speech are all used by Wright to capture something of what it means—what it feels like—to be "a stranger in this world." And few poets writing today do this better than Wright.

Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of writing and literature at Houston Baptist University and a senior contributor at The American Conservative.

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