[In the following essay, Serchuk relates an encounter with Wright which showed him the link between Wright the man and Wright the poet, as well as the purpose of poetry for Wright.]

Although James Wright was making few campus visits in the spring of 1973, he agreed to visit our poetry workshop at the University of Illinois mostly as a favor to our instructor, Laurence Lieberman, whose poetry he admired and who'd written some of the best criticism to be found on Wright's work. There was only one stipulation: no formal readings. According to his agent, Wright had recently been too ill to handle any such tension or commotion. Instead, he would sit in on a few classes, perhaps recite a poem or two from memory if he pleased, but no formal readings. Lieberman quickly agreed.

No one could have been more disappointed at Wright not reading than I. While others were drawn to Strand or Merwin or Berryman or Lowell or any of the others we were studying, Wright was my poet. He, along with James Dickey and Theodore Roethke, occupied almost every spare moment of my reading time. For me, Wright's work was the embodiment of all that poetry could and should be. Simple. Direct. Understated. Visionary but shy. As formal as the imagination dictated without ever sacrificing cleanness or the natural rhythms of speech. Wright's poetry never bored me, and, more importantly, I believed him. Casting aside every last professional dictum concerning the separation of the artist from his specific creation, I believed Wright completely, unashamedly. For me, his poems were not merely convincing. As MacLeish's “Ars Poetica” demanded, they were.

As the day of his visit approached I kept hoping something would change. Somehow Wright would gather his frayed ends together and at the last moment schedule a reading. Although I'd never heard him read, in my mind I'd heard them all: “The Minneapolis Poem,” “Saint Judas,” “At The Executed Murderer's Grave,” “Autumn Begins In Martins Ferry, Ohio,” “Northern Pike,” “To The Muse,” “At The Slackening Of Tide,” “Wille Lyons,” and on and on and on. Who cared what he looked like? It was that voice I wanted, that clear unmistakable crooning filled with the breath of so many other lives. There was no chance.

Lieberman called me at home the night before our class. He had met Wright at the airport. Wright was tired, tense, a man fighting back from the edge. Even the classes would have to be smooth and quiet. There'd be no surprises and no pushing. Lieberman was determined that Wright take it easy and be inconvenienced as little as possible. “He's too valuable.” And what person in his sober mind was going to dispute that?

The day of Wright's visit could not have been more beautiful. The sun rose early unmarred by clouds, and by afternoon the quadrangle was swarming with frisbees, stray dogs, and tight cut-off blue jeans. The classroom windows were half open. All the chair-desks had been set up in a circle. I walked into the room and there was Wright, middled-aged and rounded, fidgeting with a cigarette as he whispered something to Lieberman. His head was balding. His grey beard was sparse and cropped close to his face. His grey suit pants were dotted with ashes from his cigarette. I kept staring, secretly looking for the source of all those poems. He couldn't have shaken any more if he had been a new leaf hanging from one of the tall trees outside the window.

Lieberman began with some general questions about poetic form and music. Wright branched out into Mozart and Horace, his voice the same one I'd heard in my head, shy and hoarse, quickened by its next thought and tinged with that Ohio nasal. His sentences were like his poetry, heavily end-stopped but never diminished in energy. When there were pauses in between it was always in anticipation of something to come, a gathering of recollection, a parenthetical recharging. The discussion widened. Someone asked if he liked modern jazz. He did. Someone else asked if he believed Bob Dylan was truly a poet. He did. Wright was on his fourth cigarette and as best I could count, had crossed his legs eight times. I still hadn't found the poems. Where did he hide them?

“I'm a teacher by profession not a writer … in fact, I don't even teach poetry.” The discussion was wandering off into areas I didn't like. Wright was talking about theories of criticism and parallel developments in the historical structure of the novel and poem. Somehow his voice was no longer enough for me. In my daydream things were falling apart. The tone was becoming too academic, too many references to things found in books. He mentioned his doctorate, which I knew nothing about. My eyes picked up the ashes on his shoes then drifted to the greening trees outside. Was this really James Wright? Was this the same James Wright who grew up in Martins Ferry, Ohio … whose father worked for Atlas Glass? My eyes raced around the room in search of something, in search of anything that would shout, “YES!”

Suddenly I caught the sound of my name in the air. Excuse me? Lieberman was asking if I had a question for Wright. A question? I felt like a dazzled Charlie Brown in a “Peanuts” comic strip. Yes, of course. My mind flapped its wings in circles. James Wright my beloved poet and James Wright the academic imposter were colliding dead center in my skull. My mouth opened. A rush of words toppled out on top of one another. “Mr. Wright, don't you think you're being a little presumptuous when you align yourself in your poetry with people whose lives couldn't be any more different from your own? Don't you think you're asking us as readers to buy an awful lot?”

If my question had been tied to a string I would have jerked it back fast. But no. It was too late. The question flew across the room and smacked Wright in the face. He puffed hard on his cigarette, brushed some stray ashes off his tie and aimed his stare between my eyes.

“Damn right,” he began. “It's presumptuous as hell. Anytime you claim someone else's life as part of your own you're setting yourself up for big trouble. And there's no getting around it. But what can you do? When it feels right and looks right on the paper you leave it alone.”

Wright took another hard puff on his cigarette. Should I nod in agreement, I wondered. No. Wright spoke up again. “If I may, I'd like to tell you a story that in some ways relates to this particular question. A few years ago I received a letter from a woman who lives in my home town of Martins Ferry, Ohio. She had read several of my books and was writing to say how nice she thought it was for someone from Martins Ferry to have become a well-known poet. She mentioned some of her favorite poems of mine but said there was one poem in particular—“At The Executed Murderer's Grave,”—which she could never understand. Do any of you know that poem?” Everyone in the class nodded. Only a week earlier we had discussed the poem at length in class and I knew most of it by heart.

The poem deals with George Doty, a convicted killer who was put to death in the electric chair by the state of Ohio. Standing at Doty's grave in the poem, Wright recalls the murderer and wonders what purpose was served in his execution. “Well,” Wright continued, “the woman said she could not accept this poem. Her words were something like, ‘I was a young girl then and I remember the Doty case quite well. It was vicious and sadistic. Not only did Doty murder the young woman, but he beat her so badly that her skull was cracked and half of her brain was scattered. Still, in your poem, you somehow find sympathy for Doty and question the morality of the society that ordered his death. Well, as far as I'm concerned, George Doty was a disgusting human being who got exactly what he deserved. Knowing the facts as you do, I can't understand how you could feel any differently.’”

“As you might guess,” Wright went on, “I thought about this woman's letter for a long while and I tried writing something back to her to clarify the poem. I must have written four or five separate letters but never mailed any of them. In the end I sent her a note thanking her for her letter without even mentioning the Doty poem. But in one of those letters which I never mailed I hit the nail right on the head.” Wright took another long breath from his cigarette. He was sweating from the forehead. The lines on the sides of his eyes were taut and puffed. The unhappy circle of his face seemed to be cast in grey steel. “I told her that as far as I was concerned there was no doubt that Doty, as she had put it, had gotten ‘exactly what he deserved.’ I was not trying to defend or excuse him. What the poem tries to say is simply this: I pray to God that I don't get exactly what I deserve.”

The room seemed to fold into its own silence. I kept my sights fixed on the man with the round face and ash-lined pants. This was James Wright the poet, undeniably and unmistakably. Whether or not he taught the history of the English novel was now unimportant. The connection between poet and poems in my mind, however naive, was once again intact. I had touched the source of those poems.

Wright's story had in one breath validated and reconfirmed everything I felt about his verse; namely, that poetry was indeed alive and viable, not merely as an art form but more importantly as a tool by which we learn how to better live our lives. Staring at Wright I was reminded of all the things his poetry had taught me and all the things I was yet to learn; that empathy, for example, whether it be for George Doty or James Wright, was meaningless without personal risk and that on the bottom line there were no wholly individual crimes. Likewise, there would be no individual salvation to save us from ourselves. I knew then that reading Wright's poetry had somehow made me a better human being, morally and otherwise, and that poetry, by his example, would remain a force by which individual lives could be altered and enriched one by one.

What exactly happened in the classroom afterwards I can't recall. I do know Wright never did give a formal reading during that visit. But I saw him again, for the last time, some two years later at a reading he gave in Hungry Charlie's bar in Ypsilanti, Michigan. That night he recited just about every poem any lover of his work could hope to hear. For my friends and me it seemed there'd be no end to our joy. From where I sat nursing my beer I can still see him, grey beard and ash-marked pants, almost singing the final lines to his poem, “A Blessing”: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” For the sake of all of us now saddened, I'm going to believe that's exactly what happened.