Franz Wright ‘escapes the constipation of the lyric poem’

The Huffington Post gets exclusive this week with Franz Wright, whose spooky new prose-poetry collection, Kindertotenwald, hit the shelves two weeks back. Through a series of e-mails, Wright shares his memories, musings, and good old-fashioned germanophila with Anis Shivani. A sample:

Anis: Franz, can we begin by talking about the significance of the unusual title?

Franz: […] I love the almost three-dimensional quality, the thinglike quality, particularly of the long compound nouns routinely made use of, so mysterious to an English speaker, though again a clue as to why it might be that the Germans have often tended to be among the world's greatest sinologists.

There is an almost a suggestion of the pictorial, I surely felt this to be the case with Kindertotenwald, a world I coined while writing one of the very first pieces in the book, the longish "The Scar's Birthday Party" which does in fact take place in this very wood, the forest of dead children or of the deaths of children […] Granted the dead child is not a subject one is likely to enthusiastically seek out, it is undeniably one that involves a universal aspect of human experience, one not well served by a word as dull as puberty, the physiological and psychological metamorphosis which causes, God knows why, the light around children to go out at about eleven, as Freud sadly noted, and which rushes the lost and bewildered soul into Experience, in Blake's haunting terminology, into contact with sex, and its connection to birth, itself notoriously the inseparable familiar of death . . .

(Wright's mysterious title, by the way, gets posthumous approval by Celan later on in the interview.)

Anis: Why did you turn, in Kindertotenwald, to the prose poem? In terms of your capacity to say things as a poet, what did you gain by turning to the form, new to you?

Franz: […] Over the years, I have become far more confident about my ability to wield prose, and I love the way it allows you to escape from a certain, well, constipation of the lyric poem! When the thing really works, it is a miracle of nature in its weird perfection, I mean when you really pull it off, as happens a few times a year, in my experience, a pure gift. And naturally, it will be a poem people single out as their favorite--not the one you spent five and half years on, I'll tell you that.

And the muse of Kindertotenwald gets busy:

Anis: How long did it take you to write the book, and how did the conditions under which you wrote it affect the final result?

Franz: I wrote this book in--for me, at least--an unprecedented fifteen months. I just could not stop, the mood was there, not once or twice a week (or month) as during so much of my previous life, but every single day (and night) for days and weeks on end! I once worked for sixty hours straight, with little half hour "naps" when I needed them.

[…] I finally cut the thing down from perhaps, finally, one hundred and fifty to sixty-five pieces, plus the sixty-line lyric poem (Poetry published it last January) that comes at the end. By the time I had reached the final stages of the book, that point where you know nothing, nothing, nothing can stop it from happening, I had received a diagnosis of lung cancer and was congratulated right and left by doctors who said this news just plain rattles some people when they receive it, while I reacted as though I'd been told I needed to lose some weight or get to work on my blood pressure. One doctor said he had never seen anything remotely like it.

What they did not know was that I was walking on the air about an inch above the floor. I knew I was on to something.

There's more where this came from: here. Wright is giving a reading and talk atCopper Colored Mountain Arts Center tomorrow and Saturday if you're in the Ann Arbor area.