James Wright's Northern Italy

By Sander Zulauf

A talk given at Poets House, New York City, March 27, 2004, as part of a tribute to James Wright entitled “Baptism by Fire” featuring Donna Masini, Jonathan Blunk, Michael Graves, Victor Shermer, Lee Bricetti, Anne Wright, Sander Zulauf and Robert Bly.

After Baptism there is the new life. After the harsh industrialized landscapes of steel mills and slag heaps, after the impoverished and brutalized lives lived in his native Ohio, after the bitterness of the Minnesota winters, after the wreckage of his marriage to Liberty Kardules and the loss of his sons, after the loss of his position at the University of Minnesota, there was the refuge offered James Wright by Robert and Carol Bly, there was a position at Hunter College, and there was Annie, and James’s new life began with her and took on a whole new dimension when they journeyed together to Italy.

The first harvest of their travels came in the form of a remarkable book entitled Two Citizens, which was published by Farrar Straus after his Pulitzer Prize and which begins with a poem that attacks violence and attacks critics, “Ars Poetica:  Some Recent Criticism,” a poem I love for its pugnacious anger and its moral courage which immediately made him some critical enemies, including the appropriately named Edward Butscher, who were determined to destroy him. It is a love poem devoid of sentimental love about his mentally ill Aunt Agnes and shows her compassion for the helpless in this world, which parallels James’s overriding compassion for the world’s victims. And in Two Citizens there are the first poems of travel to Italy.  Interspersed with nightmare poems about Ohio are poems of Fiesole, and Florence, and Bologna.

In a review of his close friend Richard Hugo’s poetry in American Poetry Review in 1973, James asks “How do you discover Italy if you are born and grow, grasping into despair, in the American Pacific Northwest?  I don’t know about you, and I suppose you don’t know about me, but in Hugo’s poems he tells us that the first thing he does is to go fishing, and I guess his purpose is love, but in his poem we find that we have discovered, and studied, the secret faces of the fish. There is a trout that has a certain smoky shadow on its sides under the gills, and that shadow looks like “apples in a fog.”  I like those trout, because I ate four of them one afternoon,  but that is not the only reason I like them. I like them because I know now what they look like, and I should not have known if Hugo had not told me in his poem. Fish have secret faces, but they have a good deal more than faces. I am not about to paraphrase Hugo’s descriptions—is fulfillment the word?—of a gar gliding through the water. I am about to confess that I too have secret apples in me and on me somewhere behind my gills, and if anybody is going to eat me alive I wish I could recommend to him my own choice lakes and stones, where I swim day and night. If you are going to kill me in this century, friend, first try to know me.”

Two Citizens was followed in the Autumn of 1974 with prose poems in the Ohio Review—“Epistle to Roland Flint,” which offers a scathing condemnation of the poet “Gregorious,”  “The Flying Eagles of Troop 62,” which finds his boy scout troop members by name in adulthood—I actually ran into Mike Kotelos’s wife during a James Wright Festival in Martins Ferry, Ohio,  one Saturday morning, and she told me they were preparing to go to the Kentucky Derby, so I guess he’s still making book in Wheeling—and a magnificent celebration of art and Italy entitled “The Lambs on the Boulder.”  That luminous poem is one of my favorites of James’s, and I was astonished by this masterful achievement, this bold experiment in prose. They have always been poems to me, no question. “The Lambs” next appeared in a paperback book from Dryad Press in 1976 entitled Moments of the Italian Summer.  That wonderful collection of prose poems contains several written in Sirmione, as well as Verona, Venice, and Padua, which is the inspirational location for “Lambs.”  I would like to focus on some work from these four places in James’s poetry.

Sirmione is a 2 and  1/2 mile long narrow peninsula jutting out into the clear waters of Lake Garda. James and Annie stayed in a beautiful waterfront hotel next to the Scaliger’s castle and a short walk from the Roman ruins, a tourist attraction at the end of the peninsula known as the “Grotto of Catullus.”  The lake reaches north from there into the snow-covered Alps. One poem, “Piccolini,” centers on the lake, with a nod to Catullus. It is a glorious simplicity, in which James acknowledges the genius of the place, while expressing pleasure escaping wretchedness, and ends with James enjoying the fish tickling his ankles.

[Read “Piccolini.”]

Sirmione is the place Ezra Pound fell in love with on his first trip to Italy, and it has that effect on travelers. The village of Sirmione is about 45 minutes by bus northwest of Verona. Once there you never forget its grace, its gentleness, its peacefulness, its beauty, its lack of American tourists. The Grotto of Catullus is supposedly the summer residence of the sensuous Roman poet. But the massive structure’s remains look more to me like the ancient setting of a vast Roman resort hotel with pools and spas and shops and rooms and piazzas and walks all around that northern tip of the peninsula.

When Farrar Straus published James’s next book, To a Blossoming Pear Tree,  he refers to these poems as “prose pieces.”  The city that emerges out of that book is Verona, with its perfectly preserved pink marble Roman amphitheater where open-air Opera is performed every summer.   Verona is the city of Romeo and Juliet, the city hugged by the river Adige. It is the home of the café Dante where James and Annie befriended Alberto Silvero, a kind and welcoming older waiter who served them espresso and tempted them with sweets in the shadow of the statue of Dante, the exiled poet. A great arch leads to the Piazza Herbe, where the vegetable market opens under dozens of market umbrellas twice a week. Here James discovered zucchini blossoms that the people would buy and take home and fry up and eat. The idea of eating flowers is a long way from the strip mines and slag heaps and steel mills of the Ohio Valley.

[Read “Written on a Big Cheap Postcard from Verona”]

As Madeline and I were preparing to travel to Italy on our first trip abroad,  James told me “Learn the courtesies.”  I did, and generally the reaction to the slightest effort by an American to speak Italian is warmth and grace. In most cases. It made me want to learn much more than the courtesies. On a subsequent trip to Italy, a hotel hustler approached us at the Venice Mestre terminal, wanting to take us to the hotel of his employer. I began “Molto grazie, ho prenotazione,” (“Thanks very much, I have a reservation,”) and he said “Speak English!  Speak English!”  I said “Desidero parlare Italiano!” (“I want to speak Italian!”). His face reddened like a radish and he walked away. It was a small moment of triumph for my incipient Italian, and perhaps the most courteous.

The city of Venice is sparkling bright, with sunlight playing off the canal waters on the walls of the stunning ancient pastel buildings and the underside of the glistening white Rialto Bridge, and can suddenly turn dark and watery and decadent. It fascinated James and he wrote another one of his successful “moments” there, a natural and literary reflection on the city, actually “Two Moments in Venice,” two prose poems ranging from the Giudecca Canal to the Lido, referring to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice with Aschenbach’s “harrowing vision of perfection,” and Byron on horseback in the moonlight. James brings Venice to life in his Venetian evening, along with the vaporettos —the “buses” of Venice—and the trash scows,  the canals with slimy steps going down into the water,  the gorgeous gondolas and their proud gondoliers, and those puzzling maze-like confusions of walkways spilling out onto the Piazza San Marco if you’re lucky.

A short train ride from Venice westward lies the ancient university city of Padua, with its St Anthony cathedral and the overwhelming masterpiece by Giotto, the Scrovegni Chapel. Giotto, who is generally credited with the introduction of perspective into Medieval painting,  painted the interior of the chapel hundreds of years before Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. To say it is astonishing and breathtaking is a disservice to it. I see it as the inspiration for “The Lambs on the Boulder,” and James relates the story of the shepherd boy Giotto being taught by Cimabue after Cimabue sees him scratching the faces of sheep on a boulder with a pebble. He ends up juxtaposing Giotto’s glorious achievement with Rockefeller’s mall in Albany, New York, and condemns the deprivations imposed upon the poor by public excesses, as symbolized by King Jeroboam the Second. It ends with a magnificent choir of Giotto’s angels, and focuses on a weeping angel. I believe it contains James’s elusive hope for humanity—perhaps suggesting the only way to live is through compassion for all the victims of this life and relentless dedication to the truth of one’s art.  “What makes Wright’s poetry special,” James Seay concludes (perhaps too prematurely) in an essay on the Collected Poems, “is not that he has any new philosophical insights into the problems of existence but that he has the gift of using language in a way that the human spirit is awakened and alerted to its own possibilities—both the possibility of diminishment and the hope of increase through participation in an existence outside its own.” 

I would like to conclude this brief tour of James Wright’s Northern Italy by reading “Lambs on the Boulder.” http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6912&poem=36396

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