In 1963, Wright composed a twelve-line lyric to his hometown entitled “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.” A brief hymn to the working class, the poem accounts for the phenomenon of high school sports heroics. Almost like a verse essay, the first stanza introduces place and economic motivation in laborers who invest their dreams in gridiron hero worship. The second stanza contrasts the testosterone-driven hunger for winners and the excluded females. Levering on “Therefore,” Wright concludes his brief treatise with the next generation, who “grow suicidally beautiful” by acting out an artificial valor in theatrical combat at “Shreve High football stadium.”
Composed in the same year, “Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960” (1963) is a stark, yet winsome elegy. As is typical of Wright, he identifies the time in the title and the setting—”on the South Dakota border”—in line two. The poem’s tension mounts to a peak in lines 15 and 16 with “I am sick / Of it, and I go on.” As though touring the gravesites of “Chippewas and Norwegians,” the poet-speaker admires the moonlight, which dazzles the eye with points of light. In spiritual repose, like a mystical father of the nation’s sons, he ponders “the beautiful white ruins / Of America.”
In the same style, “A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion in Minnesota, 1862” (1971), an oddly assertive history, is based on the death of the famed militant whose remains were first dumped at a Hutchinson slaughterhouse, then put on display by the Minnesota Historical Society. The poem moves beyond racism to social violence wrought by the Civil War. At the emotional pinnacle, the poet-speaker remarks to Little Crow, “If only I knew where to mourn you, / I would surely mourn. / But I don’t know.” Double spacing forces a rhetorical pause, as though the reader must hear out a hesitant voice laden with regret, not only for a dishonored leader but for the foundation of America on the graves of its Indians.
The unexpected detail of the wartime career of “Old Paddy Beck, my great-uncle” reminds the reader of a nation’s shame, depicted as the loss of “the dress trousers.” With a mild jog of thought from past to present in “Oh,” the poet-speaker speaks distractedly of hobos, then segues to the personal with “I don’t even know where / My own grave is.” Almost embarrassingly frank about self-imposed exile, he departs from the usual breast-beating over past racism against natives and Africans to remind the reader that casual brutality, both past and present, compromises not just the republic, but also the individual citizen.
Wright displays another side of compassion in “Small Frogs Killed on the Highway” (1971). He adjusts the linear emphasis by varying from the single introductory adverb “Still” in line 1 to a lengthening span that reaches its height in line 10. An emotive hymn to the lowest levels of life, the poem disarms the reader with a contrast between the drivers’ careless acts and the jubilant “tadpoles . . . dancing / On the quarter thumbnail / Of the moon.”
The poet’s celebration of self-regeneration anticipates a broader vision in “The Journey” (1982), a frozen moment set above Anghiari in the Tuscan hills of Italy. An upbeat discovery, the study of a spider poised on a web amid dust and corruption is an ambiguous image that could as easily apply to a local woman, “poised there, / While ruins crumbled on every side of her.” Unlike his contemporaries, Wright carries implications to a straightforward statement—for example, “[don’t] lose any sleep over the dead.”
