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Introduction
- Wesleyan University Press
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Introduction david lehman In 2002, when two Pleiades editors solicited work for Dark Horses, an anthology of unjustly neglected poets, I was not the only contributor who put in for Joseph Ceravolo, but my hand went up first, and I got to praise this overlooked genius of American poetry.1 A master of lyric concision, Ceravolo enjoyed a stronger connection to childhood and the child’s perception of the universe than any poet since Theodore Roethke. In the 1960s and early 1970s, which appears to have been his Abstract Expressionist period, he used simple words and phrases but linked them unusually or leaped elliptically to achieve a sublime innocence. A six-line poem begins: “O moon / How ghost you are.” A liberal use of exclamation points and a crafty sureness in the line-breaks contribute to the effect, as in the close of an early poem: “How are / you growing? / No better to in a stranger. / Shack, village, / brother, / wild provoke of the endurance sky!” All the pathos of childhood informs the moment in “Ho Ho Ho Caribou” when the speaker says, “Like a flower, little light, you open / and we make believe / we die.” In short, Ceravolo was a homegrown original, possessing an utterly distinctive style. The claims I would make for Ceravolo today are as great, and now there is twice as much evidence to back them up. Until now, only a limited portion of his work—the mostly small-press editions that appeared between 1965 and 1982—has seen the light of day. Edited by Rosemary Ceravolo, the poet’s widow, and Parker Smathers, the Collected Poems gathers the far-flung fugitives and adds the crown upon the his lifetime’s effort. During the last twelve years of his life, Ceravolo accumulated several hundred pages of poetry, some titled, some not, almost all dated, and under the working title Mad Angels: 1976–1988. It is the appearance of these poems that makes this a particularly momentous occasion. We will, in the light of the Collected, need to revise upwards, not only our estimate of Ceravolo’s achievement, but also our understanding of his singular place in modern American poetry. Born in the Astoria section of Queens, New York, in 1934, the first son of immigrant parents from Calabria, Italy, Ceravolo graduated from City xxiv introduction College in 1954 and began writing poetry while serving in the U. S. Army in Germany three years later. He wrote poems while on all-night guard duty in a stockade tower. A civil engineer by trade, he took Kenneth Koch’s writing class at the New School in New York City in 1959. Koch’s teaching had a strong and lasting influence on him. Frank O’Hara called him “one of the most important poets around,” and it was fitting that Ceravolo’s debut collection, Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, won the first Frank O’Hara Award in 1968.2 (Koch and John Ashbery judged the award named after their late friend.) It is a book I have long loved, and it would suffice to establish Ceravolo’s reputation even if, in his clandestine way, he hadn’t added to it substantially in subsequent years. The publicity-shy poet lived quietly with his wife and three children in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He had a powerful dislike of the “phony.” He was fifty-four when he died of an inoperable tumor on September 4, 1988. In 1994, The Green Lake Is Awake, a volume of his selected poems, was published with an admiring foreword by Kenneth Koch.3 According to Koch, a Ceravolo poem was a sort of “amazing perceptual archeology,” its effect almost mystical. “It faded like the mirage of a gorgeous building: then, as soon as I reread it, it was there again,” Koch wrote. He singled out some of the linguistic “oddnesses” in Ceravolo’s poems: disjointed phrases and incomplete statements, which occur often in a “context of simplicity, quietness, and directness.” Koch pointed to the materiality of the language in such a poem as “Drunken Winter,” quoted here in full from Spring in This World of Poor Mutts: Oak oak! like like it then cold some wild paddle so sky then; flea you say “geese geese” the boy June of winter of again Oak sky In these and other poems of that period, the words seem as physical as objects and as strange. It’s as if the poet were practicing, naturally and without calculation, a...