In Ohio: A Town and the Bard Who Left It

By Bruce Morgan

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.

"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.

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.