Franz Wright

Franz Wright was a haunted and passionate poet, creator of some of the most devastatingly beautiful and dangerous poems written in English in the past 50 years.

Born in Vienna in 1953, he arrived in the world some 25 years after the death of Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet he so loved and the one writer who matches Wright’s radiant and at times desperately spiritual style.

Wright grew up in California in a fractious family that included a famous poet for a dad, James Wright. That he was able to surmount that lineage–not to mention his own demon-driven drug and alcohol addictions and psychosis–to become one of the greatest poets of his generation is a miracle.

From 2001 to 2013 he published half a dozen major collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. When he wasn’t writing these luminous and indelible poems, he worked at the Edinburg Center for Mental Health and the Center for Grieving Children & Teenagers.

His was a mind on fire. The hole he leaves in contemporary American poetry will not, as Wright once wrote, be “scarlessly closing like water” anytime soon.

Dickman is an award-winning poet