A five-year-old Franz Wright once reportedly made the following request of his parents: "Excuse me. Do you think, because it's my birthday, we could not talk about poetry today?"
Franz Wright was a poet's son. His father's friends were poets. And he grew up with the idea that all grownups did was talk about poetry. Well, four decades later, Wright is still talking about poetry. And a lot of people are talking about HIS, including the committee that awards the Pulitzer Prize. This year, they gave it to him. Thirty two years earlier, they'd given it to his father, James Wright. The gift, you might say, runs in the family. But so do some other tendencies, which once prevented the poet from being able to write anything at all.
