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National Poetry Month: A rhyme and reason for celebrating poetry The little river town of Martins Ferry evokes the name of poet James Wright for an annual festival of poetry and hometown pride Sunday, April 09, 2000 By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor
MARTINS FERRY, Ohio -- They're getting serious about poetry this month in Santa Fe, N.M., at the Dallas Museum of Art, at the Painted Bride Arts Center in Philadelphia, in the Library of Congress, even on the screens of a cineplex chain.
It's all in the name of National Poetry Month, now in its fifth year, 30 days of promotion and shiny new events organized by the Academy of American Poets.
But, in Martins Ferry, April has been poetry month since 1981. Named for its favorite son, the James Wright Poetry Festival opens its 20th season Friday, a celebration of literature that began long before a promoter decided to turn the writing of verse into a product to be hawked like hot dogs.
James Wright was born in this Ohio River town, about a 90-minute drive from Pittsburgh, in 1927. Once he left after World War II to become a serious and influential poet, he never returned. Yet his poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, come home again and again to this land of hills and water and a culture shaped by the mills and mines.
"And still in my dreams I sway like one fainting strand
Wright was a member of 20th-century America's most celebrated generation of poets, a group that included Allen Ginsberg, Gerald Stern, Robert Bly, Anne Sexton, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Richard Hugo and Carolyn Kizer, to barely scratch the list.
He died of cancer March 25, 1980, just as a small band of his supporters planned a reading of his work in Martins Ferry. The following year, the reading became the festival, a grass-roots effort by townspeople, the local branch of Ohio University and Wright's family.
"I'm always surprised at how many local folks show up," said poet Kevin Stein, director of the creative writing program at Bradley University and the author of several critical studies of Wright.
"The festival's a magnet for poets, too, but not scholars. It's people from the town and the region. And students, too. Some of mine have even made the trip [from Peoria, Ill.]. I guess the scholars don't come because they're not the stars of the event; James Wright is."
Twenty years after his death, Wright's poetry still draws hundreds to leave the beaten track and make the trip to this modest town of frame houses, churches and a Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel factory.
But Martin's Ferry was not spared the effects of steel's decline in the river valley. Its population is now around 7,000, a drop of more than 9,000 since Wright left.
Held in the modest public library at 20 James Wright Place (formerly Fifth Street), the festival is low-key, unpretentious and relaxed, due in large part to the dedication of John Storck, library director, and Tom Flynn, who teaches English at the Belmont branch of Ohio University.
Appearing at this year's festival will be old friends (and major poets) Bly and his ex-wife, Carol Bly, Kizer and Galway Kinnell. Also reading will be Stein and Maggie Anderson of Kent State University, who's a University of Pittsburgh Press Poetry Series author.
Wright biographer Peter Stitt, editor of the Gettysburg Review, will discuss his research into the poet's life.
April James Wright Festival schedule
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And as usual, Annie Wright, the poet's widow, will open the festival Friday night.
"I've been doing it for nearly 20 years, I guess," said Wright, who lives in New York City. "Coming back to Martins Ferry and walking on the streets where Jim did always have meant so much to me and, I think, to other people."
Long after his death, the poet is still fondly remembered for both his art and his friendships.
"Jim had such a great capacity for warmth," said his widow. "But everybody admired him for his love of poetry and for his poems."
"This man was generous to a fault, helpful to a fault," remembered Michael Harper, who was an emerging poet in 1974 when Wright wrote him to praise his collection, "Nightmare Begins Responsibility."
"Jim not only praised the content of my poems, but for what he said was 'so much love' that I had managed to get in them. Jim really understood how much love can transform people."
Harper recalled a visit to Wright's apartment in New York. "He said, 'I want to show you something,' and he opened this closet door. All of this mail just poured out on to the floor. It was all letters and poems people had sent to Jim.
" 'If I answered it all, I'd never have time to do my own work,' " he said. "Jim went out of his way to nurture people. He had the greatest respect for most people and their work."
Wright was an astute reader of poetry and a serious scholar, Harper said. "But he didn't feel he had great ability. He was insecure about his work, but it gave him a kind of humanity, a rawness that made him vulnerable to people."
Harper, who teaches at Brown University, has written three poems about Wright and managed a visit to Martins Ferry several years ago to search out the landmarks in his friend's work.
"That visit was the one break in a rainy miserable weekend," he said. "I managed to go all over the landscape of Martins Ferry. Jim was highly regarded in that town."
But Wright had a love-hate relationship with "that town," a working-class place where his family and neighbors struggled with the poverty of the Depression and where Wright came to know the stories of personal failures and tragedy that are common in the rough and tumble of industrial America.
"Martins Ferry was a source of pride and shame for Wright," said Stein. "A place where he felt both love and anger."
The anger and shame came from the ugliness and harshness of the polluted river valley; the pride and love from the strength and nobility of the people who lived there.
"These were the uncommonly common folk, the 'outsiders' for whom Wright found a voice," said Stein, whose essay "A Dark River of Labor" analyzes the influence of the poet's birthplace.
Wright, who played football for his high school team, nicknamed the Purple Riders, captures the very essence of his home in "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio":
In the Shreve High football stadium,
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Therefore,
-- from the collection "The Branch Will Not Break"
And, while the festival honors Wright's hometown associations, much of his work appears to have little to do with Martins Ferry and the Ohio River. A large body of his work was inspired by his days living in Italy and Minnesota, while another portion was translations of German and Spanish poets.
But Martins Ferry was never out his mind, said poet Maggie Anderson, who's appearing at her second Wright festival.
"There are two languages in Wright's work, the language of his home and the language of the home he found in books," she said. "His poems weren't only about Martins Ferry, and they weren't just about his journeys. It's the combination of the two that makes his poems so dynamic.
"He's always in Martins Ferry; he's always in the literary world, too."
A graduate of West Virginia University, Anderson has used Wright's poetry in high school classes near Wheeling, which is down-river from Martins Ferry.
"The students couldn't get over the fact that there was poetry written with places like Wheeling and Benwood in them. James Wright is many things, but one way to classify him is as regional writer with a strong identification with the area."
As in "In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned":
I will grieve alone,
I saw, down river,
I do not know how it was
For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
And nobody would commit suicide, only -- from the collection "Shall We Gather at the River"
Wright's talent to turn this dreary, tawdry vision of rundown Wheeling into an image of rebirth found in the water of the Ohio River is plain, as is his own dark view of his native land.
Before Rachel Carson and the environmental movement, Wright despaired of the fouled river and dirty air that threatened to overwhelm the fragile beauty he found along the shore.
"We knew even then that the Ohio River was dying," he wrote in "The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio."
In another, longer poem in his posthumous collection, "A Journey," is this view, from "A Flower Passage":
There, on the blank mill field, it is the blind and tough
He was also a critic of America's Cold War politics and the Vietnam War before the protests of the late 1960s.
"Jim knew how great the human capacity was to make enormous mistakes," said Harper, "and how people are still making those same mistakes again and again. Above all, in his poems, he was trying to be a decent citizen of his country."
Wright fretted over how he could find a way to "make his lonesome, writer's life" intersect with the public life," said Stein, citing the poet's longtime interest in American history.
Harper finds Wright's social consciousness emerging in works about American Indians, particularly "A Centary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion in Minnesota, 1862":
Little Crow, true father
Coming from a poor childhood, when his parents moved numerous times to rented homes in Martins Ferry, Wright allied himself with the working class, both white and black.
"Jim Wright was supersensitive about color and race," said Harper, citing the numerous mentions of blacks in his work. "I know he came from a kind of repressed family, and it was not easy to write about it. But his childhood and his family were so very, very important to him."
The words and talent of the man Harper calls "the great poet of the Ohio River" will sound again in his birthplace this weekend, a river town that values its poet as it does its football heroes.
This is Wright's tribute to his home and his people:
"Beautiful Ohio" -- from the collection "To a Blossoming Pear Tree"
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