"I dream of your slow voice, flying,

Planting the dark waters of the spirit

With lutes and seeds."

--James Wright

Born in 1927 in the factory town of Martins Ferry, Ohio, to working class parents, James Wright was already an important, well-respected poet of largely formal verse when, in 1963, came his third book, The Branch Will Not Break, published by Wesleyan University Press. The experimental, largely free verse poems in this volume, with their startling leaps of imagination and deep, haunted images, shocked readers at the time and helped change American poetry.

On this extended web edition of The Poets Weave, I read poems from The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright. The poems include "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," "Lying in a hammock...," "In Ohio," "The Jewel," and "Two Hangovers."