What if a poem were a social force? Forget for a moment everything you know about poetry: forget the marooned beatnik at the open mic, and the tiny thoughts tattooed on white space in the New Yorker, and the voice reading something nice about apples on NPR. What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness — to leap between people in a kind of curative, relational flash? Imagine. Your average Red Line car at 4 pm is a laboratory of human estrangement: what if poetry could do something about that?
Boston poets Rafael Campo and Franz Wright are divergent, even contrasting, poetic animals. One is a doctor; the other has been, for significant stretches of his life, a patient. One writes metrically, with an appetite for form; the other brings up chunks of almost-unphraseable psychic experience. One is a lapsed Catholic; the other is a Catholic convert.
But both of them, through their work and their relation to the world, have laid bare a live wire between poetry and isolation — physical isolation, social isolation, spiritual isolation. Campo practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, specializing in HIV-related conditions. As a gay man, he has trodden the stations of suffering from fearfulness to compassion, right through "the body's caves and slums."
"The AIDS ward where I worked was like a shipwreck," runs his poem "Night Has Fallen," "on some lost, quarantined island . . ."
Wright, a veteran of mental illness, delivered himself in part by mounting his own low-key ministry among the saddened and the lost. Who are, lest we forget, everywhere: "Someone in Hell is sitting beside you on the train./Somebody burning unnoticed walks past in the street" ("The Choice").
Tonally distinct, their poems are united in a common attempt to abolish separateness, to identify wholly and indivisibly with the other — be that other Jesus Christ, a homeless man with AIDS, or both. Campo, the physician, does it with expertise and quiet self-revelation; Wright, the patient, does it via a sort of reckless, illuminated hazarding of the ego. The un-heroic designation "local poet" is appropriate to neither of them — in our city, these two are a couple of medicine men.
The patient
Franz Wright buzzes me out to the Lincoln woods in his jaunty black Honda Civic Si, the car he bought with the Pulitzer money he won in 2004 for his collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard. "I don't do interviews anymore," he says. "Things always get distorted. But I like the Phoenix. I've always liked the Phoenix."
We park, take a path through tall pines, and find ourselves a couple of friendly boulders overlooking Flint's Pond. The water trembles with afternoon brightness. A rich silence settles around us, nature's old tick-tock, and Wright — thick-jawed, heavy-browed — attains immediately the force of a philosophical emblem. Here he is on his rock, il penseroso: "the only animal" (as one of his poems has it) "that commits suicide."
Wright has poetry in the DNA — not necessarily a good thing. His dad, James Wright, was a copper-bottomed mid-century maniac of an American poet, a prodigious talker, reciter, gasser, up-all-nighter (and fellow Pulitzer winner), companion to the great and doomed of his day — Berryman, Roethke, Lowell. They came thrashing at intervals through Wright's childhood, these mad old eminences. What was it like to be around them? Does he remember? "Well everyone was so drunk all the time. I just thought all adults were fuckin' nuts."
He's had his own problems in that department. "I have a variety of mental illnesses that I suffer from," says Wright, "including not just bipolar disorder but schizoid-affective disorder, which means intermittent periods of schizophrenia-like disorders — delusions and paranoia, inability to leave the house." Shrinks, he says, value him for his Promethean ability to return from such states and make a report. "I tell people this, but no one believes me: when I lived in Everett, there was a period when I didn't leave my house for two years, except to be driven to the doctor."
There's nothing of self-pity in these professions. Wright is an old hand — he knows meds, institutions, the taste of strange rooms. "He's not in the hospital now/the hospital's in him," begins his poem "Self-Portrait at 40," from 2000's The Beforelife (Knopf). Does it bother him to talk about this stuff? "Not at all." He grins. "A friend of mine once said to me, 'The cat's out of the bag, Franz — everyone knows you're crazy.' "
Wright is the man to whom reality presents itself with the queer challenge of a hallucination, and who has been obliged therefore to live by the light of his heart. The adjective most frequently used in his poetry might be "unendurable." Still, he regards himself as one of the rescued. Marriage (to the translator and writer Elizabeth Oehlkers) has saved him, he says, as did sobriety, and also something that happened in September 1999.
