Word: towns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NUEVO Laredo, Mexico, 1977. I am visually assaulted by poor people selling toys, crafts, and food. In order to avoid being mobbed by vendors, I am not, my mother says, to let my curiosity get out of hand in this border town...
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...
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...
...sexual revolution. Often, in private, they noted the spread of various venereal and gastrointestinal diseases and worried about what would happen if a new disease appeared. Dr. Dan William of Manhattan warned, "The plethora of opportunities poses a public health ( problem that's growing with every new bath in town." That was in 1980, just a year before the doctors learned their worst fears had come true...