Many of James Wright's early poems introduced uncommonly common subjects, populated as they were by a murderer, a prostitute, a lesbian, an escaped convict, and an occasional drunk. Even W.H. Auden, who chose Wright's The Green Wall as the Yale Series winner, couldn't help but notice Wright's affinity for chronicling the lives of “social outsiders,” those who “play no part in ruling the City” and no part in making its “history.”¹ As Wright matured, beginning with the unpublished collection Amenities of Stone (1961-62) and its successor The Branch Will Not Break (1963), this attention took keener focus, often directing his eye to the “lives / Of the unnamed poor.”²

These coal miners, small farmers, housewives, and factory hands were “outsiders” largely because they lacked access to society's “ruling” circle of power and to the pen that wrote its “history.” Growing up in the mill and factory town of Martins Ferry, Ohio, Wright, of course, experienced first-hand the hard life of America's working poor. He saw the physical, emotional, and spiritual toll exacted on his father by years of labor at Hazel-Atlas Glass, where he once worked himself. Only through the grace of the G.I. Bill was Wright able to attend Kenyon College and, in effect, trade his father's factory for a factory of another sort, one where words were both tool and end product.

Wright's escape from the Ohio River Valley, and from the industrial greed that polluted it, was never complete, nor did he want it to be. His poems insistently return to the work and workers he knew in Ohio, indicting in the process a capitalistic system that devalues both. What's most striking about these poems, however, is the manner in which Wright inextricably binds his empathy for those chained to the machinery of capitalism to his own pressing guilt for having escaped that fate. Recognizing that his personal guilt has its source in larger social realities, Wright refuses to separate the private from the public self.

One goal of poetry such as Wright's is to subvert the silencing of “outsiders” that Auden, perhaps unwittingly, alludes to in his Introduction to The Green Wall. Giving voice to the voiceless fulfills James Scully's call for a “dissident poetry” that “breaks silences: speaking for, or at best with, the silenced.”³ The act of writing “history” thus takes broad sweep in Wright's poems, including not only the communal but also the personal. History becomes inclusive and embracing, drenched with the peculiar spirit of a time, its sources and its future. Wright would take quite seriously C.K. Williams's injunction that history is the proper arena for “our most profound ideas and ideals,” for it grants fundamental grounding, the means of connection to what Williams calls “concrete historical reality with its necessities and its responsibilities and demands.”⁴ For Wright, that meant acknowledging, as he did in an interview with Dave Smith, the unsettling truth about his home, a town where “people were quite shockingly separated from each other along class lines.”⁵ His uneasy sense of himself as risen from an underclass indisputably affected his aesthetics and, just as importantly, his attitude toward a poet's responsibility to a place and its people.

Perhaps the poem that epitomizes this merging of communal and personal, of the spirit of place and the citizens who live there is Wright's widely recognized “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.” The poem is brief enough to quote in its entirety:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman at Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Characteristic of many poems in The Branch Will Not Break, “Autumn Begins” moves elliptically, almost reticently, as if the white spaces of silence paradoxically enlarge and embolden what is spoken in the poem. Returned to the scene of his youth, Wright finds himself afforded a perspective not available to the locals. Now curiously outside of the outsiders, he calls the ballplayers “their sons,” not claiming them personally as “mine” or collectively as “ours.” He comes to recognize the ritualized violence of football as an emblem of the larger competitiveness of capitalism, a system that, particularly in the mill and factory town of Martins Ferry, necessarily produces more losers than winners. Workers, driven to the refuge of “long beers” or made pallid by the “blast furnace” of their workplace, have come to realize that for them the American dream has been irreparably “ruptured.” The residue of their grinding, physically debilitating work carries over to the home front, ineffectuating even the men's relations with their wives. The wives suffer, too, both in need of their husbands' love and in empathetic love for them.⁶

Of course, all this has not been lost on the sons, who know as well as anyone that to dream of “heroes” in our society, whether in athletics or in business, is to dream of the wealthy. Soon to be defeated by the economics of hard labor, they partake of their own “suicidally beautiful” ritual, hoping that they, unlike their fathers, will break the cycle of repression. The boys seize football as the last chance to elude their fate—whether by earning the adulation that accompanies football heroes through adulthood, or by literally escaping the region through a college football scholarship. Wright, who watched future Cleveland Browns placekicker Lou Groza star on his own high school team, appreciated the allure of the latter and readily admitted it:

I realize that … our problem when we were boys in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in that industrial area enclosed by the foothills of the Applachians on both sides, near that big river, was to get out. It has become plain to me that football helped many people to get out. And many of these people came from desperately poor families.⁷

Any cautious critic would do well to question whether Wright, a former semi-pro player in the Ohio River Valley, might have exaggerated the contribution of football in particular, and sports in general, to the upward mobility of the region's youth. That critic need only turn to higher authority, none other than Sports Illustrated, to adduce the following facts.⁸ Martins Ferry, and its neighboring towns along the Upper Ohio River Valley, have produced an astounding number of accomplished athletes, chief among them: Phil and Joe Niekro, the winningest pitching brothers in the history of major league baseball; John Havlicek, college, Olympic, and Boston Celtics star, and member of the Basketball Hall of Fame; Bill Mazeroski, eight-time Gold Glove-winning second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the hero of the 1960 World Series; Alex Groza, a talented basketball player whose career was ruined by his involvement with fixing games while in college; and of course, Lou Groza, third-ranking scorer in professional football history and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It's clear that while “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” may indeed chastise the prevailing economics of repression, it also subtly celebrates the communal spirit and individual will of the region's inhabitants.

“Autumn Begins” was to be included in the unpublished collection, Amenities of Stone (1961-62), the precursor to Branch which Wright withdrew from publication at Wesleyan University Press, and its theme is representative of the manuscript. In fact, of the sixty-seven poems in the March 5, 1961 version of the manuscript, at least twelve can be said to address the fate and circumstances of the working class. The titles of just a few poems make this evident: “On the Foreclosure of a Mortgage in the Suburbs,” “The American Dream,” “The Mill Field at Aetnaville, Ohio: 1960,” “Miners,” and “People Are Sick of Pretending That They Love the Boss.”⁹ The titles alone demonstrate that the redefinition of poetic self Wright had undertaken in Amenities necessarily involved a concomitant reexamination of his relationship to a place and its people.

What occasioned this transformation, though the source of much critical discussion, remains largely speculation. Certainly Wright had lost faith in the odd sort of ventriloquist act he had performed, to general acclaim, in The Green Wall and Saint Judas. There he spoke his poems in the voices of Frost and Robinson, but also Herrick, Donne, and his former teachers Roethke and John Crowe Ransom—none of whom, to be honest, spoke much like the folks back home. Like most young poets, Wright tried on the familiar voices of other poets as a way of finding his own. Surely his work translating Trakl, Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo, and others exposed him to ways of writing and thinking about poems that both startled him and vivified his own conception of what a poem might do and say, as well as what it need not do and say. Wright clearly was looking around for models, as his remarkable association with Robert Bly indicates, though he was looking less for a guru than for someone whose ideas resembled his own emerging sense of the responsibilities and possibilities of poetry.

Wright may have found someone like that in John Knoepfle, a quiet and somewhat shy poet who had collaborated with Wright and Bly in translating Vallejo, and who would later become an occasional visitor, along with Wright and John Logan, to Bly's farm. Not only was Knoepfle interested in translation, but he also had embarked on an ambitious project to record the oral histories of men who had worked as captains, mates, rousters, etc. on side and sternwheel boats on the Ohio River. From that experience, Knoepfle had begun to write what he called “river poems,” often using the men's work stories as their basis. Wright himself had seen these poems, and in a letter of April 1961, during the period of his own struggle with Amenities, Wright wrote Knoepfle, “I want to say that I have admired your translations very much, and your poetry also, particularly the group of river poems. …”¹⁰ Wright may have been referring to a group of Knoepfle's river poems published the previous month in Audit. That group included the poem “Sons of Kanawha,” whose subject is the Kanawha Valley men who worked pumps at a dam site above Cincinnati during World War I, when getting coal supplies downstream from Pittsburgh to New Orleans proved crucial to the war effort. Many of the men died of flu contracted from laboring at the pumps, indirect victims of the war, as the poem's second and third stanzas explain:

They volunteered on pumps
to dry the coffers when
Ohio's dams went up with
Wilson's war and coal
from Pittsburgh needed
good water all the way
to Cairo. No one asked
the price they paid.
There were rooms where
no doctors came when flu
soiled their sleep and
gas lamps sputtered with
lost light for their eyes,
coins for the dead. …

What's most notable about the poem is the manner in which Knoepfle weaves together the sacred trinity of Wright's own Ohio River Valley poems: work(ers), the Ohio River, and death. My point is not at all that Wright got his ideas from Knoepfle (he didn't), but that Wright surely noticed Knoepfle had studied the Valley and its workers and come to similar conclusions about the state of things in his home country. In effect, Knoepfle's poems confirmed Wright's own beliefs about the dire conditions for workers in the Ohio River Valley. Having that confirmation must have strengthened Wright's resolve to speak of this place and for these people, which, after all, were his place and his people.

Wright's own poems about work and workers, as they appear in Amenities, are bleak and imagistic, and often quite idiosyncratic in their choice of images. Most of them show an unguarded, almost shocking will to speak the truth about the life of the working class. The unpublished “People Are Sick of Pretending That They Love the Boss,” for example, closes with this stomach-churning scene:

A merchant seaman
Leans on a fire hydrant
And throws up,
Alone,
Murmuring
The names of items on his mother's shopping list,
Over and over.

And here is the dreary, though understated, opening of “On the Foreclosure of a Mortgage in the Suburbs”: “The friends of my childhood / One after another have fallen behind / Payments / And stones.” Again Wright mingles death and need of money, and he does so with characteristic, albeit bitter, wit.

One other unpublished poem from Amenities, “The Continental Can Company at Six O'Clock,” describes—in violent and incendiary images—the dehumanizing process that eventually overwhelmed those friends who didn't get out. Handwritten, passionately scribbled on the bottom of a draft of another poem titled “Rain” (a version of which eventually appeared in Branch), the poem boldly conflates the polluted Ohio River and the area's exploited workers, implying their mutual victimization at the hands of the wealthy and powerful. Here, the speaker observes workers driving away from a day's labor and witnesses a pernicious transformation:

“THE CONTINENTAL CAN COMPANY AT SIX O'CLOCK”

The faces fall down the ramp into the yard
Beside the river.
Headlights roil over the water,
And the faces divide into drops of blood,
That fall over the high voltage wires of the fence
Into the river.
The water darkens to red fire.
And the blast furnaces of Benwood are lunging at the sky,
Animals blinded with anger.
Suddenly the faces flood into one dark red face.
The hood of each car is a dark sloop bearing a coffin
Toward the river.
This is October, the restless flames of dead blow torches have scarred
the wind.
Men are dying without ever knowing it.
America, America,
It is raining
In the river.(11)

Though the poem is weakened by implicit political rhetoric, its substance is surprising. The workplace itself has become bestial, a violent animal that swallows workers in the morning and spits them up, bloodied by the experience, at shift's end. Even then the workers are not free. Wright negates the stereotypic association of the work day's end with freedom and rebirth, effectively eliminating the only escape available to these workers. In fact, numbed by a day's grueling labor, they drive off to a kind of death-in-life, unaware of their fate.

Wright feared this fate for himself and mourned it for others. Donald Hall, in his introduction to Wright's Above the River: The Complete Poems, quotes from a Wright letter which elaborates the dailiness of the process and its cruel results: “I knew musicians and possible poets and even ordinary lovable human beings, and saw them with brutal regularity going into Wheeling Steel, and turning into stupid and resigned slobs with beer bellies and glassy eyes.” Elsewhere in the same letter, Wright reveals how darkly he viewed the situation back home: “… nothing but the Ohio Valley (i.e., death, real death to the soul) on one side and life (escape to my own life …) on the other.”¹²

By embellishing its flow with a bleak rain of coffins, Wright equates the Ohio River with the mythic Styx. Thus joined, the Ohio and the Styx become what Wright, in “Prayer to the Good Poet,” later calls a “dark river of labor,” ferrying away the broken and defeated. This image, pervasive throughout his work, serves as the focal point of the haunting collection Shall We Gather at the River (1968), a book decrying the fate of “legless beggars” and “Poor Washed Up by Chicago Winter.” To Wright, release from such a place into the heavenly “other world” must have seemed an enticing alternative to enduring this world's sufferings, which surely accounts for Wright's inability to grieve the death of Willy Lyons, his “uncle, a craftsman of hammers and wood.”

In the poem that bears his name, Willy has died with little to show for his years as a low-paid carpenter; “nothing,” Wright says, with bilious irony, “but one cracked ball-peen hammer” and a suit his son “inherited, / For a small fee, from Hesslop's Funeral Home.” At Willy's passing, Wright's mother weeps “with anger,” fitfully mourning his death less than the hardscrabble life of poverty he had been forced to live in the Ohio River Valley.

Unlike his mother, Wright appreciates that by dying Willy has, in effect, freed himself from an unforgiving life controlled by economic forces. In the poem, Wright imagines “roan horses,” often a figure of redemption in his poetry, “plod[ding] slowly” to the Styx to greet Willy's coffin. Instead of carrying Willy into the promised land, the horses mistake the coffin for a “horse trough drifted to shore” and find it empty, a detail which nicely salvages the poem from the possibility of sentimental excess. More importantly, though, Wright grants Willy in death a degree of personal agency simply not available to him in life. To gain redemption, Willy requires neither the mystic blessing of the “roan horses,” nor the clink of coins in his pocket. He works patiently and with care, planing trees by the water's edge, “fitting his boat together” for the crossing to heavenly reward.

In crafting his own death ship, Willy escapes from what any good Marxist would surely label the commodification of labor, that process of reification whereby unique human activities forfeit their various qualitative differences in favor of a single quantitative measure of value—that is, how much one is paid for doing them. Pointedly, Wright, either by aesthetic choice or political inclination, avoids that sort of rhetoric. Though clearly aware of class distinctions and the role work has in them, Wright abjures political theory in favor of a deeply human, though spiritual, faith. He enables Willy to discover in death, in the release from earthly strictures, that craftsmanship itself possesses an immanent and redemptive value not bound to wage. If the poem is a version of American tragedy, it's also strangely, and ironically, beautiful.

In the books up to and including Shall We Gather at the River, Wright's attraction to forms of escape influences much of his poetry concerning work and workers. It also begins to distinguish his poetry of the working class from that of others writing on the same subject, in particular Philip Levine. If, at this stage of his career, Wright frequently yearns for escape, Levine prefers to stay put, sanctioning a kind of fight against authority and privilege that eludes Wright. One need only examine the function of animals in both poets' early work to see this distinction. Levine's lion in “They Feed They Lion” returns full of racial and class anger to riot Detroit like a contemporary version of Yeats's great beast. In “The Fox,” the besieged animal turns to face his pursuers, “shouting and refusing / to budge, feeling the dignity / of the small creature menaced / by the many and larger.”¹³ Wright's animals, on the other hand, often serve as mythologized and beatific sources of transcendence, like the “Indian ponies” of his well-known “A Blessing,” the “great white bird” that he asks in “The Minneapolis Poem” to lift him away from the “police” to safety among the “secrets of the wheat and … the unnamed poor.” In nearly every instance, these animals offer a means for Wright to break free of the discomfiting reality of this world, a way to distance himself from gloomy Ohio. Unlike Levine, who still loosely considers himself a member of the working class and therefore speaks with them, Wright seemed to regard himself as painfully outside of the outsiders and, as such, spoke for them.

While the quest for release compels much of Wright's poetry, so does the guilt associated with successfully achieving it. In fact, the tension that animates Wright's relationship with the Ohio River Valley can be attributed to his own physical if not spiritual escape from it. Wright, unlike many of his boyhood friends, did “get out.” The mere grace, perhaps the luck, of that release infuses “The Flying Eagles of Troop 62” with a ranging, self-reflective intelligence. Appearing in To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977), the prose poem is devoted to Wright's Scout-master, Ralph Neal, who “knew he would never himself get out of that slime hole of a river valley,” or who “maybe … didn't want to.” Ralph Neal stayed because of his scout troop—boys he loved, Wright explains, mostly for the awful “knowledge of what would become of” them. And Ralph Neal was right, on both counts.

After Wright admits, almost ashamedly, that his “portrait hangs” in the Martins Ferry Public Library, he then offers a broken litany of what happened to those who stayed there: “Dickey Beck, a three-time loser at housebreaking, was doing life at the State Pen”; “Dale Headley was driving one of those milk trucks where the driver has to stand up all day and rattle his spine”; “Hub Snodgrass was still dragging himself home to … spend a good hour still trying to scrape the Laughlin steel dust out of his pale skin”; and “Mike Kottelos was making book.”

Making “book” in a different fashion, Wright records his friends' heroically unheroic history. Woven within it are the implicit failures of education, of religion, of capitalism, even of the Boy Scout system and—by extension—the generalized failure of America, “the very name of” which, Wright tells us, “often makes me sick.” The poem might end here, easily dismissed, its tenor that of a familiar and myopic protest poem. But there's the matter of Ralph Neal, whom Wright conspicuously calls “an American.” Dedicating himself to the boys, Neal illustrates “the most sublime of ethical ideals” by refusing to abandon them, behaving much like the poem's saint who refuses “Nirvana” when he realizes his rabid, “scruffy” dog can't “accompany him into perfect peace.” Surely such loyalty became most honorable and most compelling to Wright in light of his own escape.

It's worth noting that Ralph Neal's actions earned no monetary reward. His was volunteer work, offering just the kind of intrinsic satisfaction that capitalism most often imperils. It's this humanity Wright admires in Ralph Neal, his ability to elude economic and spiritual bankruptcy without departing the earth altogether. In his late work, in fact, Wright comes to admire this determination to stay put, to endure travails life foists upon us; gradually but certainly, this attitude counterbalances his yearning for escape.

The turnabout must have taken Wright by surprise, for in “The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” a poem appearing in Two Citizens (1973), Wright is “almost afraid to write down” what amounts to an epiphanic moment of spiritual rebirth. In the midst of the Great Depression, Wright's father and uncles had found work with the WPA digging a swimming pool next to the hopelessly polluted Ohio River, which, Wright tells us, was already “dying.” For once, “that hole in the ground” isn't a grave. Instead, filled with water, it becomes a sort of New Deal baptismal font—providing salaries to sustain the out-of-work men and their families, and offering them the literal and figurative opportunity to rinse themselves in its redemptive waters. Diving deep, Wright himself “rose” to epiphany, delivered by a little girl's solemn—and practical—advice: “Take care now, / Be patient, and live.”

Wright's father, who, he tells us in “Two Postures Beside a Fire,” “broke stones, / Wrestled and mastered great machines,” is the model for this way of life, a worker perhaps weary but decidedly not broken. Wright came to admire the way his father dealt with thwarted dreams and still refused to give in. In the prose poem “Honey,” included in the posthumous This Journey (1982), Wright recounts one story exemplifying his father's response to the frustration of being without work:

I heard my father offer to murder his future son-in-law. … They were fighting with each other because one strong man, a factory worker, was laid off from his work, and the other strong man, the driver of a coal truck, was laid off from his work. They were both determined to live their lives, and so they glared at each other and said they were going to live, come hell or high water. High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river.

Prompted by the loss of work during the Great Depression, the incident starkly demonstrates the two men's will to make a living, no matter what the physical and emotional costs. Still, the most curious aspect of the poem is not Wright's memory of the event itself, but his recollection of another incident, occurring near his father's death, in which his father subtly resolves the earlier dispute: “My father died at the ege of eighty. One of the last things he did in his life was to call his fifty-eight-year-old son-in-law ‘honey.’” The father's gesture of reconciliation is informed as much by stubbornness as by tenderness, for as Wright says at the poem's close, the real lesson here is this: “My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one's life. I don't say a good life. / / I say a life.”

Wright's This Journey is replete with poems revealing his admiration for others who stay put, resolutely determined to resist any trial they encounter, those who show a muted, perhaps understated, courage in the face of adversity. If Wright never fully refuses the enticements of transcendence, he has, by this time, begun to amass a solemn list of those creatures and things that keep themselves firmly rooted to a place, even an irreparably ugly place. In the poem “The Sumac in Ohio,” for example, Wright discovers a grove of sumac opening their buds along the inhospitable slopes of a gulley in Ohio, impervious to the effects of “sap and coal smoke and soot from Wheeling Steel,” their skin so tough it “will turn aside hatchets and knife blades.” And in “A Finch Sitting Out a Windstorm,” he celebrates as well the “damned fool” finch who dares to “return / The glare” of a windstorm, clamps his claws “so stubbornly” around a branch, and “refuses to move”—all the while rejecting Wright's half-hearted advice to “Give up, drift, / Get out.”

Throughout his career, James Wright was compelled to write poems about the work and workers of Martins Ferry, the presiding spirit of a place he both dearly loved and hated. He loved the place for the resoluteness of the people who worked there and the stubborn beauty of the landscape. He hated it for the terrible ravages inflicted by grinding factory labor upon those people and the environment. His escape from that work and that place was itself the source of his most wrenching personal debate, the wellspring of both pride and shame, relief and a pertinacious guilt that reveals itself in his poems—perhaps nowhere more tellingly than in “Prayer to the Good Poet.” Addressed to Horace, the poem asks the ancient poet to welcome Wright's seriously ill father into heaven, imploring him “to gather my father to your bosom.” His father had reached the end of his own “dark river of labor” beside the Ohio where he once gathered his sons to swim, and now must cross the Styx into the afterlife. It's no accident Wright wishes to introduce his father to Horace: in doing so, he links his paternal and literary fathers. More importantly, in bringing the two together, he reconciles the work and place he escaped from and those he escaped to, and is able to confess, revealingly, to Horace:

I once worked in the factory that he worked in.
Now I work in the factory that you live in.
Some people think poetry is easy,
But you two didn't.

Absolved by his two fathers of having chosen the “easy” life over an honest day's work. Wright frees himself to speak for the “silenced” he left behind. In writing a personal and communal history of the working class in the Ohio River Valley, Wright spurns a glib, stereotypical presentation of oppressor and oppressed, and likewise rejects the easy solace of Marxist rhetoric. If the broken lives of the exploited must be recorded, so also must the lives of those who, by strength of will and moral conviction, refuse to succumb to exploitation.

Notes

1. W.H. Auden, Introduction to The Green Wall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), rpt. James Wright: The Heart of the Light, eds. Peter Stitt and Frank Graziano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 24.

2. See Wright's “The Minneapolis Poem,” Shall We Gather at the River (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968). Other editions cited include: The Branch Will Not Break (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), Two Citizens (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), To a Blossoming Pear Tree (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), and This Journey (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).

3. James Scully, Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 5.

4. C.K. Williams, “The Poet and History,” TriQuarterly, 72 (Spring/Summer 1988), 196.

5. James Wright, in “James Wright: The Pure Clear Word, an Interview with Dave Smith,” American Poetry Review 9, No. 3 (1980), 19-30; rpt. in James Wright: Collected Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 192.

6. Paul Breslin argues that the “notion that conditions of work in industrial America repress sexuality is … commonplace in the radical social criticism of the late fifties and early sixties, especially in the work of Marcuse,” in his own fine book The Psycho-Political Muse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 168. As Breslin suggests, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (1955; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1962), 77-78.

7. Wright, interview with Smith, 195. Wright talks at length about Martins Ferry, football in the Ohio River Valley, the importance of “place” to good writing, and his family background. “All of my relatives were working people,” he remarks. “Back in the thirties I would have called them working class” (199). Except for one “distant cousin,” Wright was the first of his family to attend college, and only the second to graduate from high school.

8. See Ron Fimrite, “The Valley Boys,” Sports Illustrated, 68 (23 May 1988), 78-84.

9. As always, I thank Anne Wright for permission to quote these poems. Some unpublished, some retitled, revised, and later published, the poems are gathered in the 5 March 1961 version of Wright's Amenities of Stone. For a discussion of the manuscript, see my James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989). See also the James Wright Papers, Literary Manuscripts Collection, Manuscripts Division, University of Minnesota Libraries, St. Paul, Minnesota.

10. Wright's comments appear in a letter to Knoepfle, dated 19 April 1961, quoted here with permission. The occasion was Wright's seeking Knoepfle's signature on a $10 check, made out to both men, received from The Nation for a published translation of Vallejo. Knoepfle's river poems and accompanying commentary appeared in Audit, 1, No. 10 (March 1961), 9-11.

11. See James Wright Papers. Thirteen lines of the poem mysteriously appear, somewhat revised, elsewhere in Amenities. Wright includes them in “Three Letters in One Evening,” a long, unpublished poem offering a narrative on the death of Jenny, the dead lover/muse of many of his poems. In this instance, each “car-hood is a dark sloop bearing / Living men under water” (my emphasis).

12. See Hall, Introduction to Above the River: The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux and University Presses of New England, a Wesleyan University Press Edition, 1990), xxxi, xxv. Hall also cites an incident, late at night, when Wright, obviously agitated, remarked angrily that “… they wanted him to go back to the mills. He made a speech about how he would never go back to the mills, no matter how much they tried to push him there; he had fought them all his life.”

13. See Levine, They Feed They Lion (New York: Atheneum, 1972), and One for the Rose (New York: Atheneum, 1981), respectively.