The Axe, My Writing Into the Desk Era, and Other Bouquets

— This past week reading Franz Wright’s Axe in Blossom, his last poems and fragments. A fragment: “I hear the axe is in bloom once more.”Which will remind you of Kafka:“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”— Franz Wright, Franz Kafka. Makes sense, yes? — Well, the publisher talks about Franz Wright’s themes in the Axe in Blossom, noting, “his belief in the poem’s ability to rhyme with the mysteries of…