The Dialectics of Poetry

128 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW THE DIALECTICS OF POETRY Poetry being everywhere, it is necessary to give it back to the people, to all individuals. — Tristan Tzara Vincent Ferrini, Know Fish. The University of Connecticut Library, 1979. 373pp. $5.00. Read Ferrini's first book, No Smoke (1941), and you find the stark reality and pain of the Depression mirrored with an intensity that equals Neruda's best realist work in La tierra se llama Juan (Juan Is the Name ofthe Earth). Neruda's books, with notable exception of the aforementioned, are readily available in bookstores and libraries in every city in the country, while Ferrini's work is almost unknown outside of Gloucester and the small circle of supporters who help the University of Connecticut Library to keep him in print. It is regrettable, especially at a time when much of modern culture is going in reverse, inventing content and copying form. Today more than ever Ferrini should be taken notice of. His poetic development and his recent pursuit of an epic form put us in touch again with the power of poesis that lies at the basis of culture, that creative force in the life of a people that led Vico to say in his New Science that "the Greek peoples were themselves Homer." Ferrini describes his first stage of poetic development as an articulation of urban working class struggle in the period of the '30s and '40s, in No Smoke, Injunction (1943), Blood of the Tenement (1944), and Tidal Wave: Poems of the Great Strikes (1946), he is the selfless voice of socialist realism documenting experiences of struggle in Lynn, Mass., where he worked first in a shoe factory alongside his father, and then for nine years in the local GE plant. Critic Walter Lowenfels once described him as the "last surviving proleterian poet." In the second phase of his poetic development Ferrini was preoccupied with the personal exploration of the self as artist. Dialectically it was necessary, and economically and culturally it was in tune with the times. The predominant experience after the War was one of alienation as the progressive social movements fragmented, and political momentum shifted more and more to the right. In the early fiifties what survived of a left-wing popular cultural opposition was driven into hiding by a right-wing hysteria that wanted to elevate another Hitler. In 1948, Ferrini left factory work in Lynn and moved to Gloucester. In the next two decades, in works like Sea Sprung (1949), The House of Time (1953), In the Arriving (1954), and The Square Root ofIn (1957), the third-person self of socialist realism explored its first-person freedom and possibility. Ferrini sees his third stage, "synthesizing life and literature," as beginning in the midsixties . This turn signaled the revival of a literature of struggle in poetry that is concrete with the fullness of life— local and cosmic at once, a poetry in which the personal and the social are one. This synthesis however eluded him while he continued in business as a framemaker. Poem Eleven of Ten Pound Light (1975) tells us as much: I pull the plug out at 5 and all the nightbirds start whistling in my ears trade is arrested my hands forget the table the stars sway and the tower quivers among them spying out the black spaces in the music the night is ours Only the night, not yet the day. For that he had to await a CETA post as a Gloucester writer, and retirement on social security. The irony is not lost on Ferrini, who began his career in the thirties on WPA. 129 REVIEWS This is where we pick up on him then, in Know Fish, a poet come back to his origins, to the language of his childhood— the Italian-English immigrant dialect of his parents—to the reality of social struggle. In Know Fish, which is epic in length, he seeks to achieve the identity of place and poem that William Carlos Williams searched for in Patterson. The poems of Know Fish appear in the GloucesterDaily Times, as do Ferrini's letters attacking the Mayor as a quisling of the Frozen Fish Industry...