Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Franz Wright’s collaboration with celebrated musician Daniel Ahearn (Ill Lit) and acclaimed producer Michael Rozon (Brazzaville, Melvins) – this time switching roles in the studio – has produced Readings from Wheeling Motel, recordings of poems from his most recent collection.
Against hazy sprawls of ambient sound, Wright’s newest poems glitter and glare. Dreamy atmospherics play perfect counterpoint to Wright’s delicate, deliberate lines, delivered in the poet’s singular husky and plaintive growl. Spare piano melodies play across the recordings as Wright’s poems play across the page, with plenty of white space to singe them. The themes of Wright’s poems will be familiar to his readers—despair, love, destruction, grace—but his preoccupation with voice and speaking-as-creation come across particularly well, wedded as they are to his own dusky alto. “Music told me early I should be filled with joy,” he laments in one poem, while in another he soberly recalls that “Some things need to be done in the dark alone.”
Listen to featured poems below:
“Wheeling Motel”
Audio
“Day One”
Audio
Buy the complete album here. Jacekt art for Readings from Wheeling Motel:
What a wonderful poet Mr. Wright is! To hear his actual voice is such a treat – somewhat of a combination of John Malkovich and Tom Waits. He makes The Dark Side seem a like a place of adventurous resignation — a place from which there can be a return. His work is magical inspiration for poetry lovers, and therapy for the disheartened. I can’t wait to read his new book, and am happy to have his actual voice to supercede the one I already had for him in my head.
Motels are shrines to disfigurements
They stay in our memories
As we run from their confining
math with the four walls
and sheets.
We never forget the minutes
spent, the lives changed
as we stepped from one
place to today.
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The line, “like Walt Whitman examining a tear on dead face,” will stay with me for years. What a delight to hear these poems aloud. Tom Waits with a Captain Beefheart sensibility is the perfect vehicle for these works.