In Ohio: A Town and the Bard Who Left It

When he was still a lonely high school kid in Martins Ferry, Ohio, the factory worker's son who would later become -- in Critic Peter Stitt's phrase -- "one of the very great heroes of American poetry" used to drop by Margret Ashbrook's house and slide his poems across the table for Margret and her mom to see. "He showed us a poem that had the word slob in it, and we told him that was an unpoetic word," recalls Margret. "But he said that's how it is, and that's how he feels, and that's how it's gonna stay. We tried all the time to get him to change things, but he was a hard fella to get to change things; he wouldn't do it. Jim was out of step with the world even then."

James Wright soon snatched his diploma and left for Kenyon College, eventually wandering far from the gritty industrial town strung along the Ohio River above Wheeling, W. Va., but he never really escaped the place. He couldn't. A hypersensitive youth who just happened to be set down amid swirling olive water and factory steam, Wright had had his poetic subject matter handed to him on a dinner plate. He neither forgot nor forgave the misery that he knew.

Following college, he began a more or less conventional career of academic jobs in this country, leavened by ruminative sojourns abroad. Martins Ferry continued to haunt him. Toward the end of his life, strolling through the golden sunlight of Italy, he could momentarily be blinded by a memory of the black snowdrifts back home and "the mill smoke that gets everything in the end." Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry in 1972 and died of cancer eight years later, at 52.

As champion and scourge of the hardscrabble region where he grew up, Wright evokes a world coated in soot, poverty, kindness and loss. He calls the hilly easternmost part of the state "my back-broken beloved Ohio." Yet his poetry can bitterly detailed at times, with the names of his personal malefactors spelled out. This has not always made James Wright the most popular guy around Martins Ferry.

It's difficult to tell about something as subtle and vaporous as a poet's reputation in a town not much distracted by free verse, in the heart of a republic that shuns poetry like castor oil, but lately the local wind seems to have shifted in Wright's favor. "I think there's a great deal of name recognition," observes John Storck, the youngish head librarian at the Martins Ferry public library and an organizer of the festival convened here each spring in the poet's honor, "partly because there are still a good number of his classmates around town. One of our trustees played football with James Wright. There's a feeling of astonishment at how well known he is."

The stage of open animosity has long since passed, says Storck. People realize that Wright's melancholic work is "not going to be Chamber of Commerce material. They may not understand it all, but they're not upset by it." Wright rarely ventured home to test his luck. He could reach the town best from a distance, through the acid of memory.

In a blue rag the old man limps to my bed,

Leading a blind horse

Of gentleness.

In 1932, grimy with machinery, he sang me

A lullaby of a goosegirl.

Outside the house, the slag heaps waited.