Collected Poems

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note parker smathers At long last, Collected Poems brings together in one volume the poems by Joseph Ceravolo written between 1960 and 1988, including the six published books, as well as four long poems (two of which have never been published), and one never before published book-length manuscript. This new collection includes the final versions of Ceravolo’s books and long poems that were published or intended for publication. The six published books have long been out of print, and all had limited print runs. The only book still in print devoted to the poet’s work, The Green Lake Is Awake: Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 1994), represents only a fraction of Ceravolo’s output and draws heavily from poems he wrote in the sixties. This is the first appearance of the epic work Mad Angels (1976–88) in its entirety. The long poem The Hellgate (1969–75), also never published, is in many ways the crystallization of Ceravolo’s poetic vision. This collection begins with Ceravolo’s fifth published book, Trans­ migration Solo (Toothpaste Press, 1979). As he notes in the preface to the book, Ceravolo wrote the first section of poems in the fall of 1960 when he was living outside of Mexico City. He wrote the poem “Pain Songs” that winter, after he had returned to New York. He ends Transmigration Solo with a selection of poems from 1965. Although the dates of the ending selection overlap with the poet’s first book, Fits of Dawn (“C” Press, 1965), Ceravolo had written the highly experimental work in the spring and summer of 1961. Only 300 copies were printed, but the book remains to this day a seminal work in the annals of American avant-garde poetry. In 1980, when a possible reissue of Fits was being considered, Ceravolo wrote a new preface. We include it here. Two long poems also written during this time are included in Collected Poems. In the fall of 1960, when he was returning from Mexico, Ceravolo wrote “Water: How Weather Feels the Cotton Hotels” while visiting a friend from the Army who was stationed in Louisiana. “Sea Level” was first published in 1964 as “What Is That Flying Away” in C: A Journal of Poetry. It was published again a year later with its new title in Art and Lit­ erature: An International Review, whose editorial offices were in Paris, and xxx editor’s note where John Ashbery was the poetry editor. In addition to these poems are the The Hellgate and the long poem “Interior of the Poem” (1971). The latter has an interesting backstory behind it: Ceravolo dictated the poem to Rosemary when he was painting their kitchen one weekend. There exists some overlap of poems in two of the published books. Twelve of the poems in the chapbook Wild Flowers Out of Gas (Tibor de Nagy, 1967) were reprinted in Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (Columbia University Press, 1968). In Collected Poems, to avoid unnecessary repetition, we’ve included these overlapping poems in Wild Flowers but redacted them from Spring in This World—with one exception. To “Passivation” (the last poem in Wild Flowers) Ceravolo added four new sections for Spring in This World; and we’ve included the longer version of the poem, as it appeared in the 1968 book. Transmigration Solo was just one of three books published later in­ Ceravolo’s career. Chapbook INRI, published by Paul Violi’s Swollen Magpie Press (1979), comprises a series of short twenty-syllable poems, dedicated to the poet’s brother-in-law Joseph Robinson, who died in a work-­ related accident in the winter of 1978. Millenium Dust (Kulchur Foundation, 1982), Ceravolo’s last published book, contains poems written over the course of the previous two decades. The unpublished works, The Hellgate and Mad Angels, exist only as handwritten manuscripts. We have tried to be as faithful as possible to the author’s intentions in rendering them for the first time here. In 1969, Ceravolo wrote the beginning of what would become the four-part poem The Hellgate. Three of the four parts are dated, so we can accurately tell when the different pieces were composed: the rest of part one and all of part two were written during the summer and fall of 1972; part three was completed in February 1975; and the fourth part, undated, was presumably written that year as well. Mad Angels spans more than a decade, from 1976...