Here is a disclaimer. I have lived in Ohio. I have spent many happy days in Ohio, and many of my family members still live there. In fact, I just enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving in Ohio. It’s a lovely state; I adore the people; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Of the poets to come out of Ohio, I believe James Wright to be the greatest. Martins Ferry, where Wright grew up, with its steelworks and pollution, the dying of the industrial hegemony along the Ohio River (although much still exists), and all the resulting human suffering, was good to James Wright. Even as he traveled to Vienna on a Fulbright, and later taught in Minnesota and New York, Martins Ferry was present in his mind as a kind of hell. From that hell, he wrote some of the most brilliant poetry to come out of the Midwestern ethos. Wright understood what it was to be trapped in a town where the choice of vocation was either to work at the steel mill or to sell life insurance to the wives of steel mill workers. He understood the desperation, the animal sense of fear and desire to escape.
Not that I can relate to any of that. I like Ohio.
There are two poems I cannot get out of my head. Two poems that haunt me, and come back whenever I’m driving through Pennsylvania, knowing that soon the I90 will rumble over the border toward Cleveland. One of these poems would be enough to convince any sane person to run out and buy the Complete Poems of James Wright. Two of them should be enough to rip out your spleen.
I am going to give you three. Why? Because the first two are Wright’s true feeling about Ohio, and the third is a bit of an apology to the state, albeit a creepy apology. Oh, Mr. Wright, may you be in a heaven of your own making, far from these earthly hells you made beautiful with words.
And be sure to visit www.poets.org to hear a recording of James Wright read his own poetry.
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
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 of 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.
--James Wright, from Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio (1963)
In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned
I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.
I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.
I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?
For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.
And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.
--James Wright, from Shall We Gather at the River (1969)
In Ohio
White mares lashed to the sulky carriages
Trot softly
Around the dismantled fairgrounds
Near Buckeye Lake.
The sandstone blocks of a wellspring
Cool dark green moss.
The sun floats down, a small golden lemon dissolves
In the water.
I dream, as I lean over the edge, of a crawdad’s mouth.
The cellars of haunted houses are like ancient cities,
Fallen behind a big heap of apples.
A widow on a front porch puckers her lips
And whispers.
--James Wright, from The Branch Will Not Break (1963)
