James Wright is one of my favorite poets, a man for whom poetry was “the grace of pain” (to quote my earlier quote from Breyten Breytenbach) and whose openness was not a poetic strategy but the fruit of long spiritual/artistic struggle. I chose the following poems from Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems, attempting to steer clear of his more widely anthologized work. One magnificent quality of Wright’s work is that one never doubts there is a human being behind it, as opposed (let’s say) to some Flarfist bot wandering cyberspace like a nihilistic spider.Read More