In Ohio: A Town and the Bard Who Left It

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"The thing that Jim didn't like about Martins Ferry was some of the evil he saw," comments his sister Marge Pyle, who now lives cheerfully on a farm in Warnock, Ohio. "He didn't like that my dad had to go to work. Really, son, I don't know why. During the Depression, when other people were standing in breadlines, my dad had work and provided for us. But Jim never liked to see the underdog pressed or people misused. That was just his makeup."

This year's James Wright Poetry Festival (the seventh to date) attracts nearly a hundred participants for a night and a day of commemorative talk. The opening session, at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Wheeling, finds Wright's widow quietly reading from his letters and Wright Biographer Peter Stitt delivering several of the landmark poems in a clipped, dry, ironic voice, praising the poet's deft humor and his bottomless affection for "the unnamed poor."

Encountered against a backdrop of wine and cheese, lifelong Martins Ferry Resident Annie Tanks remembers young Jim appearing at her desk to check out poetry books when she was town librarian. "Just about closing time, there he'd be," she says. When asked whether Wright's bleak lines paint an accurate picture of her birthplace, Tanks dips her head and studies the floor for just a moment. Then: "It's probably nearer to the feel of the town than the residents would like to admit."

Gladys Van Horne, another Martins Ferry native in attendance, suggests that some people around town may be keeping a tight lid on their natural elation. "They're proud, I'm sure -- more than might express it." Hardly anything in the poet's canon has the power to irk or alarm this woman, currently an editor for the Wheeling News-Register. "No, because I know all that happened," she says simply. "We were not intellectuals," Van Horne cautions when quizzed about Wright's near total early obscurity. "We were a coal- mining and a steel-mill town. That's where the boys went: they went to the mills or into the mines. I just don't think there was the understanding" -- this with an amused grimace -- "of what had been spawned in our little town."

Dennis Orsen's reasons for being at the festival are mainly evangelical. A balding Lutheran pastor in a pale suit, the peripatetic Orsen recently settled in nearby Steubenville and found the local culture as difficult to crack as a Zen riddle. Someone suggested he read James Wright. And has this helped at all? "There's one poem about football -- when I saw that, I said to myself, boy, that explains a lot of what I'm working with," he answers.

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.

Raised in the shadow of the steel mills, James Wright kept circling back to Martins Ferry in his imagination, starved for more. He resembled "a flower in a coal heap," in the words of his biographer, and suffered cruelly in the small, tough town where he was born. But Wright gave as good as he got. One poem about the rumored demise of a whorehouse in Wheeling depicts a throng of women swinging their purses as they pour into the river at dusk. What the heck is going on? the poet innocently wonders.