Not the wrist of the sunset
which sinks every night
below the electrical wires—

The value of “writing a life” that Wallis Wilde-Menozzi undertook a quarter century ago is now the model to express our times.

In my early readings, I thought the final line of James Wright’s poem was a statement of defeat. Now I’ve come to understand it differently.

  “I vant to be alone,” my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo’s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Garbo herself never said it. What …