The Whole Song : Selected Poems [1 ed.] 9780252091193, 9780252029097
With a voice emerging from class tensions, labor struggles, the Great Depression, and World War II, Vincent Ferrini live
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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
The Whole Song
The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
The American Poetry Recovery Series series editor Cary Nelson board of advisors Daniel Aaron . Houston A. Baker Jr. Carolyn Forché . Karen Ford Reginald Gibbons . Walter Kalaidjian Paul Lauter . Philip Levine Alan Wald
Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.
The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
The Whole Song Selected Poems vincent ferrini
Edited and with an Introduction by Kenneth A. Warren
Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
and Fred Whitehead
The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago & Springfield
Frontispiece: Double portrait of Vincent Ferrini, painting by Helen Bishop
Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
© 2004 by Vincent Ferrini All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America This book is printed on acid-free paper. Ferrini, Vincent, 1913– The whole song : selected poems / Vincent Ferrini ; edited and with an introduction by Kenneth A. Warren and Fred Whitehead. p. cm. — (The American poetry recovery series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-252-02909-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Italian Americans—Poetry. I. Warren, Kenneth A. II. Whitehead, Fred. III. Series. PS3511.E7246A6 2004 811'.52—dc22 2003019684
The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction
xiii
xv
Shoe City The City 3 Jeffery Tallcott Peter Joyce
4
6
Tanney Bronson 7 Nora Omen 8 William McCarthy 9 The Factories 10 Fluoroscope of Evening Workshops in Labor
12
13
The City with Empty Closets 15 Letter to My Brother 16
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Forge Plant 17 Termites in the Floor
18
Ignorance Escapes from the Tomb
20
Under the Heel 22 Live Cemeteries
23
The Reign of Beasts
25
Photograph of Starved Child Dumped in a Burial Cart 26
Fishtown Fishcutters 29 Folksong 30
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A Little Autobiography This House
31
32
In the Arriving (excerpts)
33
The Square Root of In (excerpts)
39
The Other Side 41 The Garden of the Apocalypse 42 The Gold 43 Spades Aria
44
45
The Theia Mania of Charles Olson 46 In the Wake of Night I Beheld the Generations Dialogue with Thoreau Moon Soliloquy
48
52
54
Know Fish The Flood Time of Fishing A Song of Rage
59
63
Council Meeting 64 The Bulldozers Get the Fishermen’s Institute 66 Pharaoh Otto Bosselman
67
Mural of the Harbor 68 Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
Angel of Death
70
Blacklisted 71 Blessing of the Gasoline Tankers Cativo
72
73
Ballad ov da Cut
74
Torch Moynahan 75 Fort Defiance
76
Rag Picca: Trowaways 77 Da Summa Creche: Da Castagnaccis 78 Duntouchables
79
viii
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Da Loss ov da Capt Cosmos 80 Divinin Rod 81 Patty Welch’s Dream & Mimi Dreamin 82
The Navigators One 85 December 26, 1969 January 23, 1970
88
89
September 3, 1970 90 September 29th of the lost year
91
August 5th, another lost year 92 August 7, 1976 94 November 3/1977
95
Gloucester A.D. 1973 Charley Olson
96
98
The Ghost of Rocky Neck
99
The Community of Self We are born sleepworking 101 At the Brink
103
A Preface to the Art of Fishing 105 Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
We Are the Wildflowers
109
The Winter of Ideologies 110 Sea Medicine
111
Stale Supper
112
The Holiest of Holies
113
The Olson Strain 114 The Salt Marshes of Our Lady
115
Mount Ann 118 The Date 120 Answers 122
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ix
Wraith Reading 124 The Big Question 125
This Other Ocean Ellis Island Rediscovered 129 The Interrogation 130 Visa
131
A Poem Is Made of
132
The Gas Poem 133 Hunger 135 The Gold Miner
137
July 4, 1776, Sign of Interdependencies Foreknowing
143
Magdalene Silences Journey to Raiano
147
Love Song for the Jews 152 Miriam 155
Magi Image
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IHS (excerpts)
161
Song of the Amaranth 166 The Rocks of Wisdom
167
The Indweller The Alchemy of the Poem
173
Rhapsody of the God Fish
177
x
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141
Beyond 9/11 The Whole Song 181 A Fact of No Time 183
Appendix: Onions & Bread—From a Rediscovered Manuscript Churches
186
Schools
187
Negroes
188
Bookshop 189 Mass Meetings 190 Notes to the Poems 191 Vincent Ferrini Bibliography
203
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Index of Titles 207
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xi
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Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
Acknowledgments
The late Massachusetts congressman Tip O’Neil famously remarked that all politics is local. For Vincent Ferrini, poetry is also local, but reaches for the Infinite. Hence, he has had a complex, fruitful relationship with the places he has lived and the people around him. For one who like Dante of Florence has been so searchingly critical of the powerful, he has been sustained by many friendships. Ferrini himself has materially aided this project throughout, supplying texts, explaining allusions and personal references, and providing art work that has the effect of illustrating the poetry. Peter Anastas assisted with details of the history of Gloucester and its colorful people. Ferrini also wishes to acknowledge the support of Shaun McNiff, John Brooks Wheelwright, Mike Gold, Truman Nelson, Charles Olson, Herbert A. Kenny, S. R. Scott, Richard Emmanuel, Ka su ra, Mary Shore, Elaine Wing, Tom Taylor, Steve Luttrell, Jain Tarnover, Alan Golding, Henry Ferrini, Roger Taus, Marilyn Bever, Ramona Murray, William Spencer, Jim Leftwich, Horace Hamilton, Paul Metcalf, Shingo Tajima, Peter J. Laska, and Michael McNamara. This collection draws from Ferrini’s entire life of writing poetry but, due to the sheer extent of the work, is necessarily selective. It does not include his plays or his autobiography, Hermit of the Clouds. He has published hundreds of letters in the Gloucester Daily Times, which in their own right deserve a volume. Similarly his personal correspondence merits publication. But here the focus remains exclusively on the poems, presented in chronological order. As editor of the American Poetry Recovery Series of the University of Illinois Press, Cary Nelson guided this project to completion. Reviewers of early versions of the introduction were helpful as well.
The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Introduction
Venanzio Ferrini was born to Rena DeCarlo and Giovanni Ferrini in Saugus, Massachusetts, on June 24, 1913. He grew up poor in the Brickyard section of nearby Lynn, the hub of America’s shoemaking industry. While Lynn had originally depended on the production methods of small, individual artisan shops, that had given way to the machine-based factory system. The proud and selfsufficient artisan was replaced by the industrial worker. Conditions of life were grim: “I am guarding my baby sister in her highchair by the stove when it explodes, kills her, gashes my arm and forehead, my brother Dante under the stove, escaping,” he recalls. “I am crying my heart out, ‘What are we going to do about Yolanda, what are we to be without her,’ the doctor stitching my arm up and the corner of my eye.”1 From the beginning, Ferrini lived in the industrial culture of Italian working-class immigrants and militant anarchists.2 Ferrini was fourteen years old when the shoe factory worker Nicola Sacco and the fish seller Bartolome Vanzetti were electrocuted on August 23, 1927.3 Thus planted in the back of his mind were the bitter fruits of revolutionary struggle. The images of blood, death, murder, and poverty haunted him. Shocked by the collapse of industrialism into the Great Depression, he was overcome by the collective suffering, hungry in a time of economic crisis. Once asked if he recalled how he decided to become a poet, Ferrini replied: “The first moment that pushed me into poetry was when I wrote a poem to Charlotte Harris, when we were in second grade, her name is still with me. I was in touch with my feelings that were the ground of who I was, from then on I had to face the life of my parents, and to deal with Poverty. In my teens I lived fully at what was happening inside me and I had to find the words socially and sexually.”4 He soon located a source for those words. Ferrini, sophisticated in all the arts of self-education, is a child of the public library. As the son of Italian immigrants, he once confessed to a Daily Evening Item reporter, Joel Clemons, “I had trouble in English and spent the greatest pleasures of my life in Lynn Public Library.”5 Ferrini’s poetry is organically linked to the free public space of reading, listening, learning, and thinking. The experience of reading the ancient Greeks taught him that “it is possible to have
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a sound mind in a sound body in a sound society,” as he recalls in his autobiography Hermit of the Clouds (1988). Acting, perhaps, out of an obsession to wholly possess these treasures, Ferrini stored up hundreds of the library’s books in the little room he occupied at his family house. And he read them all: “Shelley was the first big impression in coming to grips with my emotions about the nature of poverty. Then I reached the American Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau. Whitman’s feminine lines and Dickinson’s male poems as erections. Especially Dickinson’s use of the power of words and emotions bringing them together. Then came William Carlos Williams, Pound’s teachings, concentrating on the Image as such.” Eventually he returned the books to their rightful place at the library. His reading grounded him in a wide range of classic literature and philosophy, shaping his penchant for intellectual eclecticism. Desperately poor as he was, he came into possession of a rich “high culture,” including difficult texts such as the complete works of Plato. When Ferrini was educating himself at the outset of the depression, he attempted to master an economic and political analysis of modern conditions. He found in Marx an explanation of how man might pass from necessity to freedom. In his search for answers, he encountered through reading political economy the trinity of his times—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. His radical formation in “the people’s university,” as public libraries came to be called in those days, was made up not only from this historical analysis of Marx and Plato, but from the revolutionary teachings of Jesus Christ and the visionary dreamscape of the South American–born muralist F. Luis Mora. In Hermit of the Clouds Ferrini wrote passionately about a 1929 encounter with the Master in Lynn Public Library: “In my excavations, I meet Jesus Christ. I am electrified. The example of His life stays in my marrow. The Heavenly City is real. His responses are my meat.” In reading the New Testament beneath Mora’s mural The Awakening of Ignorance, he experienced an epiphany of living word and image that would remain crucial to his sense of poetics, a sense manifest through the interplay of word and image in this very book. The image of an angel directing primitive people to the Heavenly City captured his imagination. From the Gospel he was reading in the library he wove the dynamism of Christ into a vision of the Heavenly City that would grow increasingly brighter as the years passed and he moved on to Gloucester. In the Lynn Public Library Ferrini also encountered Truman Nelson, who inquired about his reading matter and struck up what would become a lifelong friendship. Ferrini honed his ability to talk about the subjects of his selfstudy with Nelson and other public library denizens.6 The poem “Tanney Bronson,” from Ferrini’s first book, No Smoke (1941), portrays Nelson: “Poetry spills from his lips / And his consciousness is a sleepless eye . . . In his house xvi
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there is free speech.” This poem evokes the flowering of a small but potent New England renaissance, not of brahmins like that of the 1850s, but of workingclass intellectuals and writers. It was outside the library, on the Common, where Ferrini and Nelson heard Ann Burlak Timpson, “The Red Flame” (so memorably described in a poem by Muriel Rukeyser), cry out against their oppressors.7 It was outside the library where Ferrini was handed a copy of the Daily Worker, the newspaper that persuaded him to place his faith in the Communist Party for several years. There was in it, he found, an analysis of what had happened to cause the Depression, as well as an answer in militant struggle, drawing together rough-hewn and largely immigrant workers from all over Europe, with their own radical heritages.8 It was an exciting and dangerous period in American history. Fascism was rising up in Europe and Asia. Would solidarity arise to fight it? “Saturday nights at Truman’s and Betty’s White House overfronting the marshes becomes a battlefield of positions, each one different in his view as we are,” Ferrini recalls. “People coming in with logs for the fireplace, Truman blasting out the world-premiere symphony of Shostakovitch, arguments rollercoaster, the smell of discussion on his bronzed forehead, the spine crumbling volumes, the smoke of the Boston massacre, the gunshots of Appomattox, the hot breath of Sam Adams, Garrison’s anger, each of us a pamphlet of rebellion as quickening as any by Tom Paine, our hero.” The Lynn Common and similar spaces in New England mill towns were lively intellectual agoras, in many ways more vibrant than Harvard Square. During the thirties Ferrini met his first poet, John Brooks Wheelwright, an aristocrat who dressed in a tuxedo, spouted revolutionary philosophy, and read “penny” poems from a soapbox in the Dartmouth–Beacon Street area of Boston. At this time Ferrini was moving into poetry on his own without any particular sense of active literary tradition or modern measure of practice. Wheelwright’s dramatic flair and radical commitment to bringing poetry to the street immediately appealed to him.9 “Wheelwright spoke in a common language that was loaded with sophistication. He published most of his stuff himself and he was on the street,” Ferrini recalled. In approaching Wheelwright, Ferrini told him he was writing poetry and living in Lynn with his Italian immigrant family. When Wheelwright became curious about the Italian spoken by his father, Ferrini invited him to visit their Lynn tenement to talk about Italy, opera, and poetry. The meeting with Wheelwright was a cordial one. Yet Ferrini remained cautious about showing him his earliest poems. Ferrini’s father sensed the class divide that separated his proletarian son from his aristocratic mentor. He recognized that his son’s choice of function was restricted. It was after Wheelwright’s visit that Ferrini’s father told him he was “from the wrong
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class” to be a poet. Ferrini’s relationship with Wheelwright was formative to his sense of himself as a student of poetry. In fact Wheelwright wrote the following inscription to Ferrini in Mirrors of Venus: A Novel in Sonnets, 1914–1938: “With his thanks to his best penny pupil from the author.” Over the course of his development, Ferrini would assimilate Wheelwright’s unusual combination of socialism and Christianity through deep passion for the face of suffering in this world. At age twenty-two Ferrini emerged as a poet under the nom de plume Vincent Ferrous. His first poem was published in the magazine Smoke in 1936, a year after the first Objectivist push, which included Basil Bunting, Lorinne Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky, had passed.10 In his primitivism and proletarianism, Ferrini contrasted markedly with these poets. Writing outside the Objectivist practice, he surfaced raw in the reality of emotion. Going to the English language already broken, he stood a pure Italian American product of class antagonism, economic shock, and ethnic prejudice. In the portrait poems of his first book, No Smoke, written in the late 1930s and published in 1941, he felt utterly compelled to communicate the realities of people who were struggling with dying industry to make a precarious living. There was heaviness to the burden Ferrini carried in the yoke of Lynn’s shoemaking. Early on he realized poems could express a concrete relation to a material and violent reality symbolized by words. In No Smoke he gathered the broken images and voices of Lynn to demand radical economic and social change. No Smoke is, first and foremost, a product of the age of industrial science turned deadly, reflecting the complex cross currents of the Great Depression, the menace of fascism, the Great Soviet Experiment, and New Deal liberalism. In retrospect the early poems of No Smoke offer today’s reader a second sight on the real social content and inflated collective urge that shaped the young poet in tense and uncertain times. At the Lynn Public Library, No Smoke was kept under lock and key; people had to sign a paper to read it. “The response by friends and readers,” Ferrini recalled later, “was quiet and hysterical, everybody was reading it, to find out if they were in it, happy and unhappy to be in it and not in it, it was a momentous time for me, my friends and the city.” Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Ferrini aligned himself with the revolutionary currents of the era. As a young man he stood in close relation to the working-class people of Lynn through his work in a shoe factory. His relation to these people changed, however, through his employment as a teacher in the Works Progress Administration. With “invisible credentials from the public library,” as he explains in Hermit of the Clouds, he was able to teach civics, xviii
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health, language, philosophy, and social studies. Despite his radical inclination to believe in the Great Soviet Experiment, he found himself employed through the liberalism of the New Deal. FDR threw Ferrini a lifeline never to be forgotten. Accordingly No Smoke arose from his experiences as a publicly supported teacher living in the world of social display and emotion, a world that emerged with the Great Depression and New Deal. As a poet Ferrini realized, moreover, that the payoff from his federal job was the accumulation of life stories transmitted to him by his very effort to attain the quota of students the WPA program demanded from its teachers. There was no pay for a teacher without students. In order to make contacts with prospective students, he visited the city’s ethnic clubs and fraternities. He found many subjects for No Smoke among the Armenian, Greek, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian fraternities. Looking further he went to the city dumps and found people looking for bottles, metals, and rags. These were the people he could see, touch, and smell in the emotional and social complex of the New Deal. Particular points about distinctive lives were jotted down on the job in a notebook or stored in memory for later consideration. Ferrini’s creative process is always centered in the struggle for a new humanity. Along this line, No Smoke is a passionate cry for unionism in the darkness of struggle for existence. In the mystery of Ferrini’s industrial religion, the union is the vital élan. No Smoke does not say that the fire of the Holy Spirit cannot be imagined without access to the factory floor, but rather suggests where there is no smoke there is no fire. So the only spirit taking hold of the biological and economic factors that drive the projections of No Smoke is fashioned according to the mythic appeal of Marxist-Leninist success at firing up the factories in the Soviet Union. Yet hidden in the somber materialist vision of No Smoke is the fundamental Judeo-Christian projection of the Fall and Salvation. At the opening of No Smoke the working city under capitalism is, paradoxically, recalled as a paradise of plenty. A miracle of industry is imagined in “The City”: “160 factories hummed a song of joy. / Jobs were so plentiful you tripped over them. / And our families had happiness.” The humming factory constitutes an ideal garden of tools. The relationship between city and factories, economy and machine is harmonious. Toil is happiness, not suffering. The Factory of Life stands in No Smoke, where the Tree of Life stands in sacred magic. Families live in happy union with machines awhirl in the Factory of Life. No Smoke’s allegorical thrust is clearly projected from the Book of Genesis. Only this fall from paradise is not connected with a garden but rather with a factory. In “The City” man has fallen from toil into death. “Today the city is a graveyard of factories— / Monumental tombstones accusing with broken
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eyes.” Greed results in the alienation of human nature from industrial nature. “The Boss grabbed his shop and settled out of the state / Leaving 1700 families stranded.” No Smoke reveals the whole domain of the Fall extending from fallen man in nature to fallen man in industry. The fall from toil damages the eyes. Without work the outer world is darker. Man is without mechanism in the thick of matter. His state of consciousness is agitated and agitating. For he must pass through “A jungle of death pregnant with another life.” At issue in No Smoke is the organ of sight. The endangered life of Lynn’s soul—astral, psychic, human—is displayed in the eyes of sickness and suffering. In “Jeffery Tallcott” the blinding chemical of industrial work becomes part of the primal factory drama. “Dupont gave me / The only hundred dollars I ever had / When I lost my eyes mixing paints for him.” The fall from toil changes the entire emotional complex of the family. “Saturday music of dimes, pennies and nickels / Dropping in my tin can / Is the only happiness I know,” says Tallcott. In blindness happiness is just an illusion. Tallcott’s perception is loosed from spiritual sense. He is cut off from the inner eye. What he seizes of reality is but the veil of soft metal covering the heart. Without the fruit of work this beggar is reduced to the Tin Man, crying: “I am a corpse with a can on my chest.” This beggar is also without heart. He is without solidarity in his will to advance at the expense of other beggars. “Why don’t those other beggars die? / They’ll only queer my territory.” Hence the destructive function of this beggar’s will to the greatest share is opposed to the transforming function of the workers’ union. When this beggar says “The hot sun is like my wife’s love,” Ferrini wisely suggests that with tin cup Tallcott is living in the head, divided from his wife, his heart, his sun, and his center of gravity. Blindness became a major theme in No Smoke, whose poems were written around the years 1935 to 1941, at a time when Stalin’s Great Terror had arrested and sent three and one half million people to the gulag. Thus the horizontal strategies of the Great Soviet Experiment combined with the young poet’s will to power to, as he now expresses it, blind Ferrini to the vertical sphere of the Holy Spirit. No Smoke belongs therefore to the domain of time, occupying the horizontal axis of history. This alignment explains why Ferrini was blinded by the effects of Stalin’s world of compulsory labor to the symbolism of revelation, which only after moving to the fishing village of Gloucester in 1948 would penetrate his work with typological memory. Hence No Smoke promulgates a mythic cycle of labor without Sabbath, of toil without Messiah. Along the horizontal axis of history, then, Ferrini sees “with broken eyes” into the indignation of his own disinherited class. xx
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In No Smoke objectivity of perception is blocked—not only by the inflated collective urge of the times but also by the presumption Ferrini grafts from his own soul onto that of another. Revealed in “Peter Joyce,” for example, is the subjective side of Ferrini’s own fear and resentment at people centered in Christ. All that Ferrini sees in “Peter Joyce” is that the believer “talks to Christ / Because he’s scared of death.” In view of the liberating function of revolution, Ferrini bears hostility toward those with faith in the spiritual world. In No Smoke, his eyes are not open completely to the vertical penetration by the Christ archetype, which eventually would constitute his cross and the awakening of his psychic organ in Gloucester. For all this, the blindness, sickness, and suffering in No Smoke mark the purgatory in Ferrini’s opus, and the poetry has a driving, expansive vision that sets it apart from the usual political screeds of its time. In this respect, his work is similar to the mural paintings of Ralph Fasanella, which incorporate vast panoramas of factories, parks, and parades, along with symbolic elements derived from religion.11 A tension thus runs through No Smoke, reflecting Ferrini’s early struggle over the means of redemption. Ferrini yearns for the transformation of crucified bodies and aspires to a resurrection but not that born of Christ. He proposes that redemption can be gained through the union rather than through the Christ the church claims as its groom. Hence the reintegration of the fallen world of Lynn will take place in “The Factories,” where the revolutionary spirits are lodged. By the end of No Smoke the image of the broken eyes returns in “The Factories,” which begins: “Sunsets splash blood in our broken eyes.” The factories promise to “glow with the jagged electricity.” Here the occult power of the electrical current is suggested along with a perception of the invisible and spiritual dimensions at work in the material world. Hence the factories call to the people to effect a rite of resurrection: “Workers, resurrect us— / Put life back into our hollow bodies!” In a sense the factories are suffused with the psychic residue of dead labor. Inside them the memory of workers is alive, calling for the revolutionary attunement of self and society. It is thus that the lives of factory workers are called to participate in the occult working of economic material reality. Ferrini’s life is a radical engagement with primitive mythology and proletarian conditioning. From 1941 to 1950, he worked as a bench hand at the vast General Electric complex in Lynn, where war production had brought employment to thousands. Even in high school Ferrini was, as he says, “good at the manual arts,” winning a prize for excellence. At “the GE” he worked as a polisher and as a collector of scrap wire (which he sometimes took home and made into sculptures). His poems in Injunction (1943) addressed his bleak sit-
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uation as factory laborer. Even while war had furnished jobs, there was still mass poverty. During this period his work expresses the dynamism of the factory, its noise and energetic chaos. But oppression continued, sometimes inflicted on workers by themselves, as in “Termites in the Floor,” a poem about a mentally slow man who became the butt of constant jokes. During World War II Ferrini participated in the tradition of the poet laboring for the Allies, with a feeling reminiscent of the pride expressed by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who worked in the war industries of Glasgow’s Clydeside.12 All through these years Ferrini was never processed out of his proletarian roots. As the poet and anthologist Walter Lowenfels declared to Ferrini in a letter written more than forty years ago: “You are the last surviving Proletarian Poet.” In Blood of the Tenement (1944) Ferrini wrote personal and political poems about raising a family as a working man. He had married a high school teacher, Margaret Duffy (Peg), in 1941 and they soon had three children: Sheila, Owen, and Deirdre. In an autobiographical essay, Ferrini wrote of his wife: “Peg taught English and French and drama at the Wenham / Hamilton Regional High School. She was the ideal teacher, greatly loved by the students, and a Guru at theatre. The Auditorium was named for her.” They would divorce in 1963. In a 1946 chapbook entitled Tidal Wave: Poems of the Great Strikes, Ferrini hailed the outbreak of factory and plant shutdowns by workers who insisted on a truly New Deal after the chaos and mayhem of World War II. The auto sit-down strikes of the late 1930s at Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere are relatively well known to historians. The post–World War II events were almost as extensive, if not so successful, due to the McCarthyite anti-Communist wave that prevailed in the country. Ferrini’s old friend and comrade Truman Nelson also worked at GE, serving as a shop steward in the United Electrical Workers union (UE). The UE was known to be a “Left-led” union, that is, it often had Communists like Nelson as stewards and officers. As the cold war heated up, the UE became the target of the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as raids and expulsion from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Even within the small and beleaguered Left that persisted, there were tensions among writers and poets. A young midwestern radical poet named Tom McGrath published a review of Ferrini’s chapbook in New Masses, acknowledging his talent but stating that the book was artistically deficient.13 In another small Left magazine, Alexander Manderal replied in Ferrini’s defense, charging that McGrath was guilty of “moral strikebreaking.”14 So there were fissures within the community of worker writers that weakened the movement even while it was coming under fierce attacks from the Right. Ferrini’s political views have always been radical. Around the time of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact signed on August 23, 1939, he began to quesxxii
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tion the influence of Stalinist methods. “Something was vitally wrong, Truman could see that I was disturbed, and when each time the line was brought to us, I had my doubts but was fearful of bringing them up,” he recalled recently. “Our friendship held but a shadow crept into Truman’s vision of me, and that was when in his wry humor he said ‘when the Revolution comes we will put you up against the wall and shoot you’ and he gave his haw, haw, not long after that I dropped out.” Ferrini abandoned what he calls “The Church of Politics.” For the rest of his life, his instincts and personality would fight against the constraints of party and any dogmatic theories of political economy and social relations.15 In 1948, Ferrini moved with his family to Gloucester, a few miles up the coast from Lynn. As the town was America’s greatest fishing village, he was soon attracted to the livelihood of its people. “Fishcutters,” one of his first poems written there, evokes “the old love that anchors / them to the innumerable fish.” For two years he commuted to the GE factory in Lynn, but he finally left that to go out on his own. In addition to the fishing industry, there was a creative community in Gloucester that Ferrini found more nurturing than any in Lynn. Drawing on his skills in the manual arts, he started a small frame shop, which supplied his material wants for the next several decades. He recalled that it was “12 16 feet, no heating, no insulation, a plain wooden shell.” But it sufficed for the purposes of the life and the mind: “I live from frame to frame, customer by customer, each in the midst of the poem, not in some book to come, nor the distant future I will meet myself in, but right now as close as my blood and these shopwalls . . . my worktable a slab of granite above the tides.” Ferrini’s imagination was energized by Gloucester’s rough proletarian fishermen, as well as by its artists and art patrons. Since the days of Fitz Hugh Lane in the nineteenth century, the town had become a sort of creative colony for the Boston metropolitan area.16 “Almost all my customers,” he remembers, “are women, women with time on their hands, sensitive seekers, embellishing their attributes, neophyte dabblers in art, skirting the menopause, women with money, liberated before their up-coming sisters raised the banner of their oppressed sex.” In time, and increasingly, Ferrini would celebrate what Goethe called “The Eternal Feminine.” Jung was another discovery. In the late 1940s, Jung’s works were being published in English translation, and Ferrini was drawn to their exploration of archetypes, symbols, and alchemy. Endorsing Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s view that the mental functions of primitives were different from the logical thinking of modern Westerners, Jung developed the concept of the “Participation Mystique,” which operates through a pre-logical substrate of the psyche that substitutes for the law of causality.17 This focus corresponded to Ferrini’s newly
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urgent impulse to become grounded in inner realities. Accordingly, his poetry largely abandoned, for a time, the “social radicalism” of the thirties. His poems were shorter, sometimes elliptical and even fragmentary, but they did represent a new direction that was to prove fruitful. Ferrini now included the haiku and other Asian verse forms in his repertory. In 1950 Ferrini met Charles Olson, who visited his home on 3 Liberty Street to compliment him on “This House,” which had been published in the little magazine Imagi. Out of this meeting there emerged one of the most painful and perplexing friendships in American poetry.18 Olson, with his own Gloucester epic in mind, needed to size up Ferrini, whose No Smoke already had demonstrated the existence of a poet with a vision of the city as poem. While he had grown up in Worcester, the son of a Swedish immigrant father and an Irish-American mother, Olson had summered in Gloucester as a lad. Though like Ferrini, Olson had strictly blue-collar origins, he seemed to equivocate between pride in the native vigor of the working class and a need to escape from any kind of drudgery. After college at Wesleyan University, graduate school at Harvard (not a very happy time), and work in the Office of War Information, Olson was somewhat at loose ends. In Gloucester, Olson soon discovered that his place, poem, and psyche were somehow connected intimately with Ferrini, who now stood an object of friendship and resistance. They began to share poems, ideas, and creative impulses. All the subjects and lore of anthropology, astrology, mythology, psychology, and religion were energized through the contacts and discussions of the two men. What Olson had found in Gloucester was the brother, the rival, the twin, who could take him out of space and make him a symbol of time. Ferrini’s emotional stance, which would allow him to achieve his particular bond with the community, had come to occupy Gloucester; it provoked Olson to overpower the memory of childhood that could reduce him to sentimentality. The time-factored poetic task of expounding the myth of twins had fallen to these two poets whose object of desire was nothing less than the fishing village they would struggle in life and death to inhabit together. Olson was ambitious, driven by a desire to produce complex, substantial poems. Thus it was that the first “letter” of Olson’s Maximus Poems was written to Ferrini and “I Maximus (Letter 2)” appeared in Four Winds, a small magazine that Ferrini helped edit. From the outset, it was clear that the Maximus project would attempt to encompass geography, nautical history, historical facts, and whatever digressions Olson wanted to pursue enroute. Influenced by Ezra Pound, whom Olson had met in Washington, D.C., The Maximus Poems would come to constitute Olson’s major creative achievement.19 Olson inscribed Ferrini in The Maximus Poems as the necessary figure, the xxiv
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scapegoat without whom Maximus could not speak. An unfortunate consequence is that the reader who is impressed with Olson’s Gloucester epic, but might be inclined to consider an alternative, is repelled by the ridiculed figure of Ferrini. As a result, Ferrini’s work is sometimes ignored for reasons having little to do with his true status as proletarian and mystical poet. Ferrini was badly scalded by the “hot metal from boiling water” that spilled from The Maximus Poems. As a result of his editorial association with Four Winds, Ferrini became for Olson the perpetual sacrifice that fueled the raging animus of the early Maximus poems. In “Letter 5,” Olson derided Four Winds as paltry and misguided: “You have had a broken trip, Mr. Ferrini. And you should go hide in your cellar.” Olson undertook a kind of initiatory murder in “Letter 5,” which Ferrini says “triggered emotions most intensely involved and disturbed.”20 Ferrini received, within the emotional upheaval of his response, the gift of identification with “the face of Christ on the cross.” As Ferrini explains, it was shortly after reading “Letter 5,” while working in his frame shop, that the image of the suffering Christ seized his hand. “My hand operating by itself,” says Ferrini, recalling an intensity of power that compelled him to paint on cream-colored paper with black, blue, and red inks his Self-Portrait of Jesus Christ, which later became the cover for Magdalene Silences. Ferrini’s image of Christ is strikingly similar to the epic depiction of him brandishing an axe and raising a fist of defiance over the cross he has just hacked down, in Orozco’s mural series at Dartmouth College.21 In this same company of radical visionaries is the English poet and painter William Blake, who, like Ferrini and Orozco, saw Christ as a revolutionary, unalterably opposed to injustice and suffering. Like Blake, Ferrini attained a fiery synthesis of aboriginal and even occult symbolism and resolute political purpose. It is crucial to note that Ferrini’s relationship with Christ is not so much based on the working-class Roman Catholicism he shares with Olson, but rather on Christian gnosis, described by Arthur Versluis in Gnosis and Literature as “direct experiential insight into the divine.”22 The archetype of Christ is, perhaps more than any objections to literary form and practice, a determinative factor behind Olson’s difficulty with Ferrini. Olson, who was steeped in both the terrestrial plane and the symbol set of the tarot, could easily discern that Ferrini’s nature could drift into ethereal domains where facts and forms are easily divested. Ferrini’s psyche, activated by its voluntary reception of the living word of Christ in the Lynn Public Library during the hard times of the depression, was thus a major stumbling block for Olson, who chastised him in “Letter 5” for “the Steiner mystique.” Olson’s reference to the occultist Rudolph Steiner arraigns Ferrini, who in 1950 had published a poem in the anthroposophical journal Proteus Quarterly, for placing his work in the ser-
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vice of mystical speculations on the ethereal coming of Christ in modern times.23 Coincidentally it was the image of Christ that was ignited again for Ferrini in his frame shop after reading “Letter 5.” When Olson saw Ferrini’s Self-Portrait of Jesus Christ upon his return from the Yucatan, he said to Ferrini, “I found the thigh bone of Quetzalcoatl,” as if to declare himself in possession of a more highly powered occult transmitter. Olson’s fixation on occult, aboriginal, and chthonic lore was undoubtedly a powerful imaginative stimulus not only for himself, but also for Ferrini. In retrospect, however, it seems clear that Olson wanted to assert his primacy over Ferrini, in a manner similar to a shaman’s challenging the power of another shaman, whom he views as a competitor. Physically a big man, Olson thought he should naturally tower over Ferrini in imaginative achievements as well. One way a shaman damages another is by taking away his magic, by impugning his reputation. Yet Ferrini chose to respond not through combat but through patience, and a realization that Olson was the way he was. Having resisted the impulse to retaliate as many of his friends urged him to do, Ferrini took a wiser course. For years he dreamed about Olson and the circle of those around them both. “It was only after Charles Olson was dead eight years,” Ferrini recalls, “that I could start on my big Gloucester poem, when his shadow had completely melted into the ocean of the ground and he was safely asleep and his eyes were no longer on my neck.” Differentiating between their natures is now easy. At the Charles Olson Festival held on August 12, 1995, Ferrini remarked on their natures: “He called me his twin and said we were co-kings. His astronomical signature is ‘Climb the Highest Mountain’; mine is ‘Mermaid.’ He’s of the head and I’m of the heart, exchanging them. He’s Capricorn; I’m a Cancer. This is the Tale of the Big Kid and the Little Kid.”24 Ferrini and Olson are like the fishes of Pisces, swimming in opposite directions, yet bound together through their mouths. Like Hawthorne and Melville, they extend in metaphor the dialogue of head and heart. Ferrini is a poet of the heart. His rhythmical system, particularly expressed in “Da Songs,” is antithetical to Olson’s cerebral system. The thinking qualities of the head, which Ferrini had not integrated, were projected onto Olson. In a similar vein, the feeling qualities of the heart, which Olson had not yet integrated, were projected onto Ferrini. Ferrini’s Selected Poems, edited by George Butterick, appeared in 1976, and this volume, as Ferrini says, “introduced me to the world of literature.” The “big Gloucester poem” was to be Know Fish, the first sections of which were published in 1979. Finally extending to seven volumes, this massive work is the
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poet’s masterpiece, for in it he attained the syntheses of art and society, of spirit and body that he had long sought. Dante’s Divine Comedy is often recommended to anyone who wishes to gain knowledge of the “inner life” of the Middle Ages. Similarly, Know Fish is an encyclopedic record of Gloucester in the late twentieth century. Like Dante’s masterpiece, it has a scope that, while “local,” aspires to the infinite. From The Infinite People to Know Fish, Ferrini’s attempts to reconcile the finite and the infinite call to mind the concepts of Nicholas of Cusa, the fourteenth-century metaphysician and mystical philosopher, who wrote on the coincidence of opposites in relationship to infinity. Although it was Cusa who proposed that extraordinary things happen whenever figures are raised to infinity, the idea of raising people to infinity had a resonance for Ferrini.25 Giordano Bruno, who had proposed that the universe was infinite and therefore was executed in 1600 as a heretic, is another intellectual ancestor. The soaring (and sometimes bitter) images of Dante, and the brilliant speculations of Cusa and Bruno, form a context for Ferrini’s own impulsive swerve into the European metaphysical and mystical tradition. With this background in mind, Ferrini aims, in spite of all the obstacles, to create a renaissance in America today. Know Fish called for the “eyes” in Olson’s “polis” to look again with the open eyes of mysticism. Like No Smoke, Know Fish included verse portraits of actual citizens of Gloucester, though now they generally appeared under their real names. In other poems, Ferrini produced radiant panoramas of the harbor, of the marshes, and pungent accounts of political disputes at the city council. The vision sparkles with love for the community, past, present, and future. Ferrini calls the visionary method he arrived at during this period “concrete visualization.” By this he means he “works in the head and the heart to propel a concept of vision and practice into the community.” A good example is to be found in “The Flood Time of Fishing,” the first poem of Know Fish, with its evocation of the whole world of the fishing industry in its prime: “Ask anyone who is alive and remembers how it was then.” And the memorable line: “god how the salmon leapt in the bedrooms.” The vitality of social life also found intimate expression in the joy of human reproduction. “The thrust of the whole work,” Ferrini wrote in his introduction, “is in the title, knowing fishes, in men, women, and the sea. The pitch is that only when we connect with the interior fishes are we discovering and extending life by the innate rules of the Earth, and thereby saving the self, the family, the city, and the planet.” That Ferrini’s views were literally prophetic is demonstrated by the sharp decline, almost to the point of extinction, of the once vast schools of fish off
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the New England coast. Small-scale boats gave way to huge corporate fishing and processing operations, producing results similar to those of the industrialization of the shoe industry in Lynn many decades previously. By the 1990s, full-scale government intervention became necessary to save whole species. And far beyond Gloucester, there was widespread concern among biologists that due to massive corporate practices, the fish of the planet were now at risk.26 By living in a world of mystical participation, Ferrini connects easily to the collective representations and magical reciprocities of the shoe city Lynn and the fishing city Gloucester. In Ferrini’s world, shoes and fish not only possess power but act as receptacles of power. His cities are haunted with phenomena connected to the movement of economic action at a distance. Because apparitions persist long after the money has left town, his poetry inclines toward supernormal manifestations of people, animals, objects, and spirits. Hence the poet’s mission is fused with that of the shaman, who bears ultimate responsibility for confronting threats to survival, and for healing individuals and communities. The significance of fishing as a human and divine activity is fundamental to Ferrini’s covenant, which has come to expression under the waters of Neptune, in the age of Pisces. Ever since moving to Gloucester, he has been advancing an apocalyptic awareness “that the scales of the dawn” over his beloved city are fast approaching the great cosmic year of the transformational mystery. So writing in a time of fish symbolism shaped by the fixing of revelations in the written word, he binds the watery poetic existence of Gloucester’s people to an exegesis of the miracle of creation. In recent years, Ferrini has continued to produce books of poetry, often with increasingly intense mythopoeic content. His prowess is like that of Verdi, who composed Othello when he was in his seventies. And his range is astonishing, as all cultures however remote are brought near to our consciousness. Ferrini’s old friend Truman Nelson used to talk about “world men,” saying for instance that W. E. B. Du Bois was a “world man.” Ferrini has long been such a world man. Ferrini closed up his frame shop in 1976. Presently he exists on a modest Social Security pension. Yet for all his penury, he has not suffered from cold neglect. He has been an honored guest at cultural gatherings around the New England region, and around the country as far away as Missouri and Oregon. His work has been translated into Italian, Russian, and Japanese. For over fifty years, as both citizen and poet, Ferrini has been truly responsive to the plight of Gloucester, her people and natural resources. Named Gloucester’s poet laureate in 1998, Ferrini has long recognized that the preservation of his city’s essence depends on an informed citizenship and a lively sense of xxviii Introduction
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personal responsibility concerning matters of conscience that lie hidden at the edge of an ocean nearly fished out. In the epic cycle Know Fish he has anticipated the Age of Aquarius with particular concern for the fish enmeshed in visionary democracy and threatened by apocalyptic crisis in the seas. As the earth’s pole tilts in the direction of the new zodiac, he has written not just hundreds of poems to the readers of poetry but hundreds of letters to the common readers of his city’s newspaper, the Gloucester Daily Times, whose former editor he considered his muse. It can truly be said that he expressed the economic and psychological crisis of the depletion of the fisheries, just as he came to terms with the suffering of the workers in Lynn during the Great Depression. Ferrini appears inexhaustible in his capacity for communicating the direct intuition of transcendent living to citizens of Gloucester and all inhabitants of the planet. He remains not only as a “surviving Proletarian Poet,” but also as the preeminent mystical poet whose destiny is written large in a precious fishing village under the Aion of Pisces. Here and now, with a voice of particular creativity, he apprehends the mystery of being, not as concept but as life and poem. Time and time again, he does so by seizing on the ancient mystery of fish and ocean and by calling attention to his city’s struggle to retain its essence. With the visionary spirit of a great ocean navigator, he discovers “the new creation” in both life and the poem.
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Notes 1. Hermit of the Clouds (Gloucester: Ten Pound Light Book Co., 1988), 7. 2. For details on this aspect of the city’s history, see Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), and Life and Times in Shoe City: The Shoe Workers of Lynn (Salem: Essex Institute, 1979), issued as a separate book and as the institute’s Historical Collections 115, no. 4. The latter volume is mostly scholarly essays. Somewhat confusingly, the catalog of an exhibition at the Essex Institute was published by the institute under the same title, and with the same year of publication, with text by Keith Melder. This volume consists of historical photographs of worker districts of Lynn and reprints VF’s poem “The City.” 3. Herbert B. Ehrmann’s The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston: Little Brown, 1969) is written from the author’s experience as one of the defendants’ attorneys. The most comprehensive recent study of the case, focusing on their anarchist connections, is Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 4. This and otherwise unreferenced details of Ferrini’s personal history draw on correspondence and interviews with the editors of this volume. 5. Interview with KW, December 16, 1999, citing undated newspaper clipping.
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6. A useful collection and guide to Nelson’s life and work is The Truman Nelson Reader, ed. William J. Schafer (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). 7. “Ann Burlak,” in A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, ed. Jan Heller Levi (New York: Norton, 1995), 61–65. For a photograph of “The Red Flame” addressing a group of workers, see Paul Buhle, Scott Molloy, and Gail Sansbury, eds., A History of Rhode Island Working People (Providence: Regine Printing Co., 1983), 48. Timpson died on July 9, 2002; obituary in People’s Weekly World, July 20, 2002. 8. Highlights of a Fighting History: Sixty Years of the Communist Party USA (New York: International Publishers, 1979) provides contemporary documents on the CP. Among general histories for the period of VF’s membership are Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), and Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 9. Wheelwright’s poems are readily accessible in Collected Poems, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, with an introduction by Austin Warren (New York: New Directions, 1972). See also Alan M. Wald, The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 10. For discussion of the Objectivists, see Rachel Blau du Plessis and Peter Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). 11. See Fasanella’s City: The Paintings of Ralph Fasanella, with the story of his life and art by Patrick Watson (New York: Knopf, 1973). Fasanella died in 1997 at the age of eighty-three; obituary in the New York Times, December 18, 1997. 12. Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet (London: Methuen, 1943; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), xxxiii. 13. See Thomas McGrath, “Poetry: Form and Content,” New Masses, July 16, 1946. 14. Alexander Manderal, “Mr. McGrath—For and at the People,” Great Concord Tide (February–March 1947), 13–16, 33–34. The quote is on p. 13. 15. The formative cross currents of radical culture in Ferrini’s territory, including religion and “infidelism,” are explored in Henry F. Bedford, Socialism and the Workers in Massachusetts, 1886–1912 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966). 16. The visionary paintings of the Gloucester artist Fitz Hugh Lane are documented in American Light, ed. John Wilmerding (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1980). To this day, Gloucester remains a center of creative arts in many genres. 17. See especially “Archaic Man,” in Jung’s Civilization in Transition (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 64–67. 18. A useful source on Olson, including his complex relationship with VF, is Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (New York: Norton, 1991). 19. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (London: Jargon/Corinth, 1960). 20. A useful resource is George F. Butterick, A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 21. An important retrospective on the Dartmouth murals is provided by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes, eds., José Clemente Orozco in the United States,
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1927–1934 (Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2002). See also Grace Glueck, “A Fire Born of the Mexican Revolution,” New York Times, August 16, 2002. 22. Arthur Versluis, Gnosis and Literature (Saint Paul: Grail, 1996), 11. 23. Rudolph Steiner (1861–1925) was an occult philosopher and author of more than 350 volumes on agriculture, art, Christology, cosmology, economics, education, evolution, philosophy, and science. His metaphysical teachings include elements of theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Plato, Goethe, and Christianity. As a clairvoyant, Steiner claimed that his spiritual teachings were based on his ability to read the Akaskic Record and see past events imprinted on the cosmic aether. Steiner professes the Etheric Christ, which entered into the Earth in the “Mystery of Golgotha” and will become visible in modern times, at first to clairvoyants, and then, over the next three thousand years, to more and more people. See Steiner’s Etherisation of the Blood, trans. Arnold Freeman and D. S. Osmond (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1985). A useful overview of Steiner by Robert A. McDermott is available in The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 14. 24. For the full text of Ferrini’s remarks, see Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 145–47. 25. For philosophical insight into the Neo-Platonic and mystical tradition that informs Ferrini’s thinking about infinity, see Nicholas of Cusa, Selected Writings, trans. and intro. H. Lawrence Bond (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1997). Section three of Bond’s introduction provides a context for understanding Ferrini’s mystical impulse in relation to Olson’s ridicule of his work. 26. For details of the world crisis in fisheries, see Paul Brown, “The Rich Have Inherited the Oceans,” Guardian Weekly, October 25, 1998, and Tim Weiner, “In Mexico, Greed Kills Fish by the Seaful,” New York Times, April 10, 2002.
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Shoe City
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Previous page: Ferrini signature with lobster claw, by Vincent Ferrini
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The City
15 years ago this city was the shoe hub of the world. 160 factories hummed a song of joy. Jobs were so plentiful you tripped over them. And our families had happiness. Today the city is a graveyard of factories— Monumental tombstones accusing with broken eyes. A jungle of death pregnant with another life. And we shoeworkers Idly mushroom the union halls arguing. Skeptical of the future, we talk of the past: Of the crowded union meetings, The honest speeches inspiring guts to sacrifice, The monster demonstrations and the unbreakable strikes. 6 months ago the last giant factory Said “Accept a 20% cut.” The Union answered “NO!” The Boss grabbed his shop and settled out of the state Leaving 1700 families stranded. The Union caved in. At dawn busses and cars carry shoeworkers to far-away open shop towns. And we thousands remaining Huddled in tenements Starve in the shadows of dead factories.
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Jeffery Tallcott
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These eyesores are soft and lazy and wholly lacking in ambition. —Jonathan Ernew
Each morning my wife guides me Through a black city to Union Street. I tune my old violin and my wife Returns home with the case. My tapping stick is my eyes. I play and sing to the people buzzing and bumping into me. I love my clay pipe. Every hour I shake my tin can to hear If we’ll have enough to eat. It rains and I sing by a doorway. The look in my eyes begging is an unknown story. Mid-afternoon and the tinkle of one nickel. Dupont gave me The only hundred dollars I ever had When I lost my eyes mixing paints for him. My face pleading these many years is a sculptured torture. The hot sun is like my wife’s love. My voice tires and I play a jig. The dust of the street fills the wrinkles in my cheeks. Why don’t those other beggars die? They’ll only queer my territory. Day after day I strain to hear a tinkle. All they see is blotches of blood on the face I shaved at And holes in my pants. Saturday music of dimes, pennies and nickels Dropping in my tin can Is the only happiness I know. The snow and ice and whipping wind
4
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Freeze my feet, my fingers, and my voice And I am a corpse with a can on my chest. When the streets quiet and death Is punctured by the click of shoes And ripped by the swish of automobiles My wife comes to take me home.
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Peter Joyce
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Never wears a hat. Fishscaled with money, He talks to Christ Because he’s scared of death. Taxis drive him to Mass at 6 o’clock each morning. Holy crucifixes, Beads and medals Protect his chest. Takes mumbo jumbo notes at football games He doesn’t understand. And walks the streets praying for the next life.
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Tanney Bronson
Everything his protean brain touches he breathes to life. Rooted in the revolution of 1776. Palms calloused by pick and shovel On the pulse of the people Are fists full of liberty. Poetry spills from his lips And his consciousness is a sleepless eye. When he imitates people your stomach knots with laughter. His criticisms cut the legs under you. Hammers the time as it happens into songs for workers’ ears. Old clothes need him. His head is a faun’s. Friend to square pegs in round holes. Honest as the sting of truth And suffers for it. In his house there is free speech. Wherever he is the air blossoms, Exciting you with a drama of stories, Unending jokes and anecdotes. His rooms are splashed with paintings. You are reborn when you hear him freeing music And around his fireplace you chew a bit of greatness. With him you become an explorer, The dormant universe electrified within you. His blood throbs with the untaught American past, Bringing it back to the people.
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Nora Omen
A 10 cent wedding ring tied the nuptial knot. Their bed is the Welfare And their rooms rest on quicksand. Her hatchet nose defies all enemies And eyes spit fire, Blunt as a sledge blow on fingers. Organizes mothers on her street to strike for low rent, And committees to cut the price of milk and bread; They never knew how before and it works, And they love her for it. Visits them bringing gifts of leaflets and pamphlets with answers. She sails into offices of the Powers That Be And rocks the roof of their smugness. Get smart with her and your head’s in pincers. Quickest time to get results is a straight line of attack. Persistent as a flood, Her words and manners punch you in the nose. Offers no excuse And changes her tactics. Loses herself and evolves New ways of living. Loving this life fiercely for what it must become.
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William McCarthy
Weaving the silk of his life in the cocoon of the Catholic Church Nothing troubled him. Then what the priests feared happened: Coiled in the net of thinking people The lightning of analysis pierced the fog of his brain With reverberations of pelting doubt And he became Columbus. Consumed leaflets, pamphlets and fireside chats And came back for more. Stopped going to church. Sailing in an uncharted ocean He pocketed pearls of thought. Saw why things happen as they do. Reserves fell one by one. He bubbled into a strange happiness And finally landed at the shores of the USSR. His soul having broken through the prison of his old life A new self throbs in his heart and he is afraid. His bridges are burned. In chrysalis His nights are a battle of fear, sweat and struggle In a torture of indecision.
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The Factories
Sunsets splash blood in our broken eyes And the moon splinters. Dead, we are huge and ugly With derelict canyons between. Our floors empty as Sunday, Abandoned by the Bosses And a few abusing us. Our skeleton teeth locked on the sky. Workers, It is not our fault you starve Idle without purpose. Workers, resurrect us— Put life back into our hollow bodies! Let us breathe again And the word “fired” be a nightmare that died with the past And for the first time own your jobs! The Union to operate us for the good of the people And the profits divided among you To build a city of love! Fill us with the bubble of bustle: Your tools clicking a chorus of work Stitching leather into shoes for the feet of the people, Laughter splitting the air! Human voices warm with intimate happiness Exciting our veins and arteries and cold floors! We’ll feel we are wanted! We’ll drink your singing at the machines, Wait for your coming daily! And glow with the jagged electricity of seasonal picnics! We won’t hurt you with accidents! No more speed-up torturing the nerves and the bottled anger! And no Bosses cracking the whip of low prices! 10
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Patch us up and air-condition our lungs! Shoes you make will be your own And you’ll love them like works of beauty! And the reality of the 5 hour day! Invented machines ending drudgery And pouring leisure into your laps! And the wages will buy you your own homes! Your example will be a fuse leading to coffin cities and ghost towns, Igniting the people to possession—to free America! Think! Believe it! You’ve got nothing to lose but your poverty And the creative life that should be yours will begin! Time rots us and buries you. O workers, we are yours for the taking. For what are you waiting?
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Fluoroscope of Evening
Telephone wires are secret The streets dry rivers A few old men support the corners And taverns have the look of deserted women The newsboy’s voice is a lunatic screeching against the stars The ice-cream parlor has one light on The lampposts have bandages on their eyes No automobile horn calls for a girl Poolroom tables are half awake Those not out are sleeping for the next day’s work Some windows tell you how it is You never noticed so many strangers before
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They have all gone but the memory The city is a ghost house with many corridors.
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Workshops in Labor
Who what who what who what mmmmm what sings the boring mill Sput sput sput drrrrr the pneumatic drill Shattering nerves and losing clothes Swish wish swish ssss quick brush off of the air hose The hammers on steel ring Independence bells Mee ow mee ow mee ow Ah Ooooo Ah ooooo and the yells Of the workers’ eyes caressing the girls zzzzzzz of the lathe shedding curls Thud thud thud of stock Sudden machine burst and the shock Telephones rattle persistent as babies bawling Steam pipes are express trains mauling Metal sheets clang Presses click and bang bang Sewers smoking Elevators croaking Fingers in motors drone And belts moan Boilers quaking ears Caskets of casings like biers Fog horn mooing for help And sprinkler showering the hollow of rubber kelp Gears are wailing women at a funeral Stab of the lunch whistles stall the tempo Immediately the grind wheels race on a dry track And machine guns crack At every minute The hum is a front at the rear and we’re in it Signals exploding blood cells Electric saws in aluminum splitting atoms of the air Hornet buzz of coils and care
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Heels and mallets pound foundry soot soft as moonlight Coal smudges on bodies spoon bright Blue pain of the acetylene torch tearing the flesh. The hands whiz like flies in a mesh Castings thrown in basins like breaking bottles The blast of furnace throttles Ovens with hot angry tongues of the captured sun Zoom at goggles and sweat and everyone A perpetual feud or a grudge Like the rumpus after the sentence of a judge Sandpapers scratch the brain Jokes grow like grain bring thunder and hidden rain Workers are metronomes almost without breath And if machines stop the silence is death
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The City with Empty Closets
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The sidewalks are the ribs of a skeleton A new people are everywhere The shadow of the bridge lengthens And a crow stabs at the autumn twilight The Security Trust is a closed temple Movies gulp women A chill wind and the streets become alien The tide is full with the unknown future Dried blood of leaves are the nails of dogs running on concrete. The draft has picked the city clean as a chicken bone.
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Letter to My Brother
The umbilical cord connects us both to Ma and America The front your bayonet sticks into is secret And what you suffer are pins in my imagination As my fingers sharpen the animus of superchargers. Like fanatics the others sweat the machines Silent with the same thoughts Or probably scarred. Weeks melt into months And the months are moving in the second year And for you too it is a long time Must we wait till their gun butts break down our doors Lindo there are enemies in our midst Their paws on the buttons of power With monkeywrenches in production and unity Plotting against you and the common people O let them beware the whirlwinds of our anger Lindo let hate be your science And spit at the gargoyles of danger Those who reach us with their eggs Like gnarled trees We’ll thrust our hands into the sky And bash their pregnant bodies together For the weapons we send you And your bayonet Will anneal the People’s Revolutions And you come back to a country where Ma and our kids won’t ever go to the Welfare again.
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Forge Plant
Insects with antlers And iron shoes Their eyes peer out of asbestos boxes Pushing 2 ton stock Red as sunrise Out of yellow volcanoes of furnaces To be cut and shaped by 9 ton electric hammers Black workers White workers Looking alike with dirt and oil And the women in amber rooms polishing cutting filing And the fussy jobs of grinders at the edge of the storm Look how they feed the hot metal into mighty intestines Pounding them into moulds In a shower of stars Kneading thunder And lightning and the strength and secrets of the universe! Like gods at the bins of forges Wetting the birdfeet with swab By the trigger thud thud thud thud O workers nothing is impossible for you Pounders of the tongues of ships The guts of holocaust! Unconscious O workers of your genius And now wielding your power and grasp like giants! Energies paid by War Why have you never worked like this in Peace time?
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Termites in the Floor
They pick on him as if at the drying scab of a sore Monday morning they stick on his back I Am A Jerk They know he is sensitive as a cloud He doesn’t agree with them Or talk their language On winter days open the window on his neck He is slight and his chest fertilizes pneumonia O if my father had trained me to use my fists Sweat beads his forehead And his heart churns hatred Someone stole a wrench from Joe’s tool kit And the owner blames him If he broke someone’s face They would respect him But he’s not built that way One day they shoved him in a box and nailed the top on And his head boiled for weeks and is still seething If only his thoughts could become poisoned arrows Or his body a stick of dynamite He’d invite them to a feast and then light the powder, The Japanese attack California And his brother fights them on the Solomons, They gave him a week or two And then they paint the seat behind him. This never happened before Slowly his heart turns to ice His mouth has lost the strength for words
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And work is a bitter pill He swallows every day in order to live
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There are enemy agents here “Go on he can’t take it.”
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Ignorance Escapes from the Tomb
Foul wind whirlpools in simple ears Snake fangs of rumors poison the unknowing Pigmies of mind reach for answers And plunge stilettos in the backs of jews The lice of Hitler sneak into eyelids History is a sewer erupting under skins He is born out of the womb squalling With 2 eyes 2 hands 2 legs a mouth He starves too He works when he gets it And his name is a stone around his neck And hate like the past to hound him all the days of his living Shall you do here What Hitler has done to them in Europe
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Always they are the goat of crumbling empires The beasts of rabies lurk in the veins The bloodsuckers the few Lick their chops At this sowing tornado Setting the millions against each other This hatred a snowball Rolling down the mountain fattens With a hundred other hatreds Till the world becomes a Purgatory
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And always the people suffer As the few have heaven
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Workers clean these buildings of vampires cobwebs and whispers Weakening the iron of purpose Remember how America was made Bring the sunlight of tolerance to this age of murder Let democracy disinfect the air of horror
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Under the Heel
Nails are in the palms of his hands Fear rooted in the blood And his face behind a veil O America You have hammered spikes into his soul The scavengers of death are over us Free these prisoners Shall the Southern Lords forever own the air Open wide the closed gates of the plants De-atomize the reign of prejudice Free these millions of pollen Struggling in the pit of hell for a chance Blot out this wall of acid In the army navy and aircorps
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O America Give the flower of equal work and equal pay A race of dammed greatness Pulling at the fingers on their wind pipes Waiting waiting waiting O America Release the beauty that is ours to give birth to Lincoln wanders the streets of America With a noose around his neck Put him to rest in the grave With peace on his forehead.
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Live Cemeteries
I Autumn leaves flee like mice Before the ice of winter, Time sits like a nightmare On the corner This late afternoon Staring with the forgotten look of the past.
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Scribbles hieroglyph the desolate hallways Old rags and junk clutter the gaps of the skull The smell sticks beneath the nails The dank walls blind as despair are garbage pails These and bent women’s stockings hanging at death Groove the cranium. I am neither here nor there You aren’t, The skeleton arms of the birch Are rigid as a vein in quartz And the twilight burns a hole in my mind; My skin shrinks with memory of childhood Under the sidewalks taut as the tightrope of the present And my shadows are sweatshops tied to my ankles.
II The need for bread seized ore from the marrow And no grass wounds the eyes But experience, Corners of fears like aging flesh, Landscapes of youth, And parents’ blood on kitchen floors.
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Joints become warped as trees, Arrows stuck in throats stayed there. Understanding like miracles of new light Lit the forehead. That was yesterday Not so long ago as a beetle’s life. Time hides a backyard of scars, Exposes fever heat of war Lowering more caskets out of these days Into the graveyard Bound to this history In the volcano’s belly Consuming the corpuscles Leaving the changed streets A different look on the tenements And new faces out of the old.
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Night leaks out of these rat holes And feet return at night.
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The Reign of Beasts
A pigeon’s song drops on the threshold And bleeds for three floors The flesh of this house Is a drum with quivering strings inside Your resignation chips like seashells on the rocks And the tide pounds your heart The parasitic rich and their stool lackeys Suck our bloodstream The room is violet And bereft of air Your face broken dishes
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In the coalmine of my look This tenement is caught in the gullet of earthquake.
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Photograph of Starved Child Dumped in a Burial Cart
No one recognizes you Who can know you now Child without name Flesh once elastic and human Born without being born Stitch in the quilt of the dead and dying covering the earth Bones sharp as the points of stars Shriek of the bombed blood Look for your mother In the stones that do not see this picture news
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Sleep Target of the goose step and the ostriches Child of man Cinder bedded in the eyeball of the world
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Fishtown
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Fishcutters
the scales of the dawn stick to the skin of the cutters ankle deep in fisheyes white bony skeletons sleep with them and follow them back to these wharfs wet with the smell of old love that anchors them to the innumerable fish that come forth
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perpetually and is their breathing
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Folksong
I pass by day and night no one has seen me
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If you ever want to find me and know me leave behind yourself and enter the caves of other people there you will find me who is yourself
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A Little Autobiography
a dog ran down the night with my left hand I asked the lamppost where the dog had gone the lamppost hung its head it had no tongue I hunted the dogtrack down the endless night
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and on a hill I saw the dog burying the bone of my left hand in the moon
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This House
This house is holier than a temple it is where I live and have my being this house of bone and blood molded by the weathers of experience is all I have
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this house after this house which is me only is dust I will be in your house
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Excerpts from “In the Arriving” this poem is addressed to Charles Olson whose drive, insight & perception are the mark of the maker, the Poet with a voice most original, provocative & contagious
IN the Arriving prebirth
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. . . . . . of fishtown (or any) as it is to become from us in this shape now singled out to . . . . the streets & houses of sleep, work, landgripped & the water roads ancestor bound to moon searchings we rise wet to our souls gnarled by the meanderings & i roots of our bones moonwhite heart-stemmed make known to you ourselves
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of the bench, garbage truck, store counter, the wheel the booming drag of need & the variegated others pushing thru ..... everyone ..... those who slip down in a tangle of choking named in the logbook the death column & coming back to our plates we eating them & becoming more of us, replenishing the grails of ourselves ....
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this our living & the sorrows we bleed by beads where they went & go we are to you steering the night on stone tower aiming outwardly in your searchlight thru cloudjammed windpacked peoplesnarled atmosphere or the hold of a widow’s eye guiding us in this
34
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time of each waking us or checking the lucky found lone lighthouse of love looking for us (in owner & hired man murderer & spy) what in yourself is & more ..... in Thou the Creation .... us
1 that beginning night the moon came over from the damp sky to liberty street I
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took you as you were as I still do today taking you as you are & what my dreams tell me in green mornings the full man as he is round, tall & many dimensioned imperfect
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& of the heart rooting up sky down-in-earth a mantree with its unforeseen tributaries stretching for room to unravel in halting whomever & whatever with this is my many me & this is the key I use
2
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(how we argued in that night-rain thundering scratched lightning for our smokes heard the dead singing & rising in the sap! then deciphering signs fishermen & the others by living days left on the hulls half in sand & seagardens) aye, beating yr fists on the tight skulls & invoking the first voices unheard as the flesh
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Homer’s beard graised our ears in that pandora deep ((cloistered as you are removed from this full seacity (dying on land the boats pulling away from the police grip of wharfs or flaming on horizons)) going down in a past that is
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more alive than the present Brush the fog off, you ghostly sails & loosen that barque from the Maid’s arm to recover meaning & set us off on our own again that we may eat the bread of our womenfolk we un-named ones the oracle who go down unfound. sing yourself up from our deaths in the living rise in us refuel yourself with anyone of us now
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(O Thou above the Crow’s nest Northstar!
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burning contagion of love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Excerpts from “The Square Root of In”
I announce the Advent of the Ear and the Reign of the Beloved the white steeple from the black forest has the Infinite in its catch
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Found: the birth of peace in the whorl of the blizzard— the psalm unfolding as the bark contains the tree by holding the sky good shelters evil Night is always thus, prehistoric chunk of iron seen— then, the waiting
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communion in the chapels of the moon and sun— the hallowed forest The Word germinates inherent phenomena— ear has no bottom I dont hear myself only those phrases that drop stones in my earpools
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listen, the whistling from the flaming wood, it’s a cavebird being fed
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The Other Side For Betty Olson
Bury the women on their backs for the God of the skies the men face down, the neither, standing— and those who rise from death have the surprise of three worlds within them, commanding the earth is the center of the cosmos with two visions, fact and the hidden disclosing the unmanifest by losses predetermined and left with gains forbidden not knowing how we want it, anyway it comes, the pith of it, hurt and be hurt embody dis-similar natures, assay that sparrow fluttering in and out of the dirt
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beloved earth and ethereal look laid out for the praisings of this quickening brook
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The Garden of the Apocalypse
The black man has no premium on color and enslavement neither has the yellow man, nor the white nor the brown skinned each person carries a civil war within him who wedding the contraries in himself already is on his way pioneering the new civilization flags are obsolete and so are countries and creeds we are witnesses and participants ending an interregnum
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tomorrow, no, today Earth is the begetter of the universe and Love, the only kingdom which is not by fiat a man is in it outside it or approaching the gates
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The Gold
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The suddenness flowers have startles the air with their fire and ether as we do with what is ours because we are the gardeners of each other
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Spades
He rose like a golden phoenix His destiny was hot upon his back O He was chosen and He knew it what beckoned Him, He was whirling from the vortex of His own solar dominion and a girl, for the girls He had a wild grace and He had speed beyond the human and the wicked Zebra he was master of, what a glowing they drew toward them those who could see went after the god He had for anyone who swept in His rays was made the same and special He could straddle the Moon and ride anywhere in Heaven ah, how the other planets envied Him
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He circuited the under-voyeurworld and His spurs had diamond static He had a secret the core of girls yearned for He had tapped the firebox of the Almighty and stolen His thunder and lightning nobody knew except the girls and some freaks His stride was more exciting than walking Space and nothing was possible to stop Him but the splash of an atomic brick Evangel of His Epoch, He ended beside a dead girl, His best friend blew taps on His old harmonica— the mini-skirts, O they cried their hearts out, who had Him most 44
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Aria on confronting the death of my daughter
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Ah, not in the body but in everything seen! Then the fullness of the smallest and the largest give themselves unstintingly and the whole world is in one! This is the other side, where death is, it, too, is alive with an unheard singing issuing through one, and bringing the dark unity out, one is all about!
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The Theia Mania of Charles Olson
The torch went out and it is Dawning in his night the pillar that made the Matrix gave breath up becoming the very Road itself taking back the fountainhead of ecstacy and above pathfinders to origins to the more we are ourselves the more we give breaking the darkness through to this juncture: The Feast of the Resurrection! (who will ever forget Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
that crack in the sky that heralding sunset of January 10th) the eddies that his fist held slid away and some are pools of aqua vitae in the woods of skulls
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O Earth, receive him he, who loved Thee with such outgoing and such a penetration fierce as devotion to principle (as so few treaders of this planet) for reaching out to get that inmost prize you hide Receive, dear Earth against the despoilers this Quickener of Thee and Thine this central human figure! and His rhythms of creation To be alive as he! by tasting the ichor of his
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Presence
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In the Wake of Night I Beheld the Generations my sons, Suns!
I Horses arc full of winged wonder gathering each other in and staying as they are as celestial earthlings rejoicing as they do and possessing them! Each woman has within her a stallion and a mare and she will know which horse you are unable to steer
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you also have two horses within you a mare and a stallion the woman who sees that mare within you will be driving her own stallion spiking all tender loam for weeds in a field-time your race of people has been ruled by the Mare the stallion is the head the mare the heart for her the stallion is her Will
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to master that animal within you is what your life is all about you determine this by your vigilance upon yourself your survey and interpenetrations if she is on her stallion know it dont become the mare to a mating of contraries in the Crucible of the Unseen for the taming of the two Within because the meaning is mastery
II Be wary of this mare within you the Heart let it not have the reins or her stallion will mount you face this god and controlling
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be doubled! as originals and the not you for her the not she for you women mistaking gentleness for weakness have their black steed thriving on fire and smoke trampling upon the mare within them when you have lost your iron upon it and reacting ruins of relationships accompany the days and years ahead and behind has a life of its own
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(the light of her your flame) watch the flood-tides of the heart they sweep over seeing beaches and stout marshlands and blinding waterglow prevails women whose stallion is their innermost nature saddle a man-mare estranging both and a plague invades the household— ah the lesson of cuneiforms on the chromosomes with their urgings not for you/ itself the spoken each hears differently be a friend to this mare within you but let it not lead you (the dark of you operating in the other)
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though the heart and head are engaged in a contest and the hidden near a serpent eye inlaid with cunning your power is your heart-mind hers, her mind-heart her sex and your head dovetail her head and your sex remember your hands and stirrups the tenderness in them bringing her for each of you
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never forget this unruly pair who and where they are/ testing the Within and the outcome with time we learn some late some soon some never and beaten back to dust— and each generation appearing for the trial with these Four Horses of the Apocalypse
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fortunate are they who make with a mate the invisible Body between them
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Dialogue with Thoreau
“They made a Society of me— no one told me to beware of lampreys like this other saint who long before he’s underground has a host of them sucking vigorously at his vitals to replenish their lack.” The mammalian in him eating and being eaten “Quite a few burrowing after what I never put down.” The real school is steering through what people keep silent about
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“Like we two you in three places I, in one, and another.” How do you like sitting beside Prometheus? “And to think I wrote mostly for myself so that I might get closer to the Meaning— the Mystery and myself we were constantly seeking each other and the few times we met!” Beaten into joining the opposites as a preparation for death 52
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“Strange, I’m keeping company with this ancient Greek he was as near to what we have here as anyone except Lao Tzu and he doesn’t go back.” Then you could have burnt all those papers you left behind “I should have but my happiness was capturing the insights before they slipped from my ken— O, I rode high on them but I wanted a few riders to share them with me.” No one is a monologist— it’s another ear a man must have or his life is a Waiting for someone to engage it “Each one sees what he wishes to and does what he is driven by— few really hear.” And the sound never seen the same
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“I was an echo too perhaps another recording shadow” The wind has taken away “Oh, no, the Mystery is the rhythm of beholding even as I am now among so many names.” Thinking of you I grasp more “For as long as you can hold onto anything.”
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Moon Soliloquy
Back from my journeyings in your Empyrean & your Underworlds I appraise you now outside me up there Queen of Constellations and Changes behind the veils of your witchering the you I did not know safe in your Upper and Lower Antiquity when first I raised my searchings skyward and uttered ah Moon and saw the enthroned in my heart!
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omnipotent among your shifting continents and communications and in the black of me where you held your swayings I did your biddings I wallowed in the honey melon juices and desert viands of your phases your fullness flooding me how often I was up there with you as I am this moment in your silken bed of clouds and all this Space between us when for a lifetime there was none!
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I do not forget the domiciles, demarcations, daguerreotypes you pulled up and set floating in mid-air ,
my groin beating wildly at your Earth landings! I, your lover and audience we, a trinity of satellites two seen and one invisible Rainbow Goddess, between us we swing the Oceans! Thou vanishing close as time ahead is behind and minding the undertows— the Poem recording Most alluring orb I still revere Thee but I am among the Druids and now we are
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equal (they delude themselves who reckon only by your talcum, you can stand the scrutiny the invasions of your ethereal Chamber) as we, immaculate One, secure our sacraments
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Know Fish The Theory of Poetry The air is an organic farm
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for the practitioners of Paradise
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Book I: The Lady of Misbegotten Voyages
The Flood Time of Fishing
once there were so many ships in the harbor you couldnt see the Ocean one family had 25 today they run a junky another combine controlled 40 and more now they unload from Foreign vessels morgue fishes there were so many masts you couldnt see the houses nor the skies sailing home over the round horizon— ah the still glowing eyes of those fishermen in bars and taverns oil skins and rubber gear dominating the water, the boxed in fears, the chain songs the lamprey Company Union even the streets were slimy with scales!
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It was a City of mammoth barrels with quicksilver bullion! holy smoke & christ’s tears money flew on laughing brooks and so did the wobblers on the water tenements had some excess and limousines the City tipped against a lamppost, drunk! you heard about the wise fishes that swam backwards the kids grew up on private sagas spellbound in any recalling the hungry for details!
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The pride of the finest kind you were hot with tragedies the world gawked at in envy at those survivors of the Almighty Deeps What wrecks and uprisings on the floor all around this Stage of Spoken Writ and they ate the fishes the lost overboard fed coral genealogies to what new human dig down and find a half in sand mast at any doorstep mourning was a badge that sang a death that had a strange triumph when you heard the silences in that household here was the inmost dalliance of the far out ghost you woke up with the hulls creaking against foreboding weather you went to sleep and came through charmed you were in several places all the time even the stars crackled on the tops of those swaying spines! For the unplumbed had no limits and the coasts were yours then! spools of nets on the shaky boards like army barracks waiting for the plunge fish eyes staring into your sleep
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salt cod drying under the Sun the flake yards of ocean bottoms the last leviathan fish house on Parker Street abandoned and crushed by gargoyle Progress those who never got the smell out of their flesh or clothes the wives stained with it the kids went to school with scales under their fingernails and on their eyeballs o never question the means of the ownership the faithful continued by the gulls with the whole of the harbor under their wings even as the made widows had it 60
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400 ships and each full of autobiographies the shacks climbing the stonehills for out peerings and who’s returning stuck to their anxieties on their decks of peril not even the ghosts of the processes are around because they need the fertile recording personal weathers in extremis the coopers of smoked halibut rolled in the boatbuilders and lollied on high liners the loud angelus of the other world revile, persecute, vandalize & then make a hero of— the farce continuum men of small optics the stink in the pores & the roped to life & death situations real sails on boats the sleepers are the loaded to the gills— shacks of their isolate bodies blessed are the expendable resources blessed, the hands’ lamps
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ruptured communications of what survivors ah the Captain Widows on landseas! the heart’s bell weathers & the clanging— tubs in the shrinking horizons— far off city sardines in a snowy can static no radios full are the seas to the caretakers thereof interruptions that salt crises & the child born in the maelstrom of the blood ports the exclamations of Twin Lights at the long absences & is the harbor ever too far away from the Ocean’s seductions
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from 3 sides of the Compass the odors tugged at nostrils and hung over the Journeys sprung animal traps or saddle the wind on the mad Seas between the hammer and the anvil and the hands of the sailmakers ripped off the glue factory held the spars the fishes remember rounding a creed of nature the long hours in the stuck leisure of Labor the fishermen’s cemetery is a relic of advents centuried anchors rust in a fake life the railroad the jugular of this inlook the alien tongues seeping thru today the steel factories park at the wharves our footpaths clogged with rotting pilings concrete platforms bulldogging the thinning brine Ya, there is work for the fishcutters packers and lumpers but ask anyone who is alive and remembers how it was then! god how the salmon leapt in the bedrooms a Fishtown between famine and a feast always O salt sea air of the finest kind
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the glowing parlors of the generous gals bourbon skinners, the flaky landlubbers on whiskey streets It was the Age when gorton-pew owned the City lock and key
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A Song of Rage
(Do not think that I am the only one in wrath) Consult the fishes the plankton the tough remaining sea-grasses the ruminating Creek the dunes whispering (The Atlantic is on a rampage thump pounding Good Harbor Beach away Appease Our Father Neptune yank out that Shopping Plague and bring the Marshes back
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How many mistakes do you think the Elements are going to allow us) Hear the footprints’ wandering the silk broodings the sand-bar weeping the wraith lagoon Salt Island questioning
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Council Meeting
Who will ever forget that Night the Councillors saw themselves as we do naked their own words a mirror they did not believe in That was the Night we shook the City exercising with That Night the Speakers of Pro & Con for a blazing two hours became a Dialogue & a Synthesis over diehards grappling with their Moons That Night Jehovah winked at each Deliverer and checked the clocks of the 2 hour Potentates
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A hired Innocent lost his manhood Status Quo fell, defeated by Ridicule Platitudes were limp firecrackers That was the Night the Blessed Damsel strode in on her flaming mustang the Night of the pitchforks under the seats of the Uninformed Who was that Madonna of Afflictions, Annealings, and boding islands & Cleopatra’s parasol unable to cross the street pleading with the Gavel in White Armor Lady Aquarius plying her unctions and omens That was the Night Shakespeare threw his bishop in & a band of bottomless Characters
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That was the Night the Voters felt a Power welling up with the Cante Hondo of Basso Profundo undressing the Last Supperers as the barred from the chicken coop Rooster stung our middle ears and on the sidelines Cinderella and her mother in distress That was the Night the Duke gave Uroboros to paupers when the Recording Angel blessed all who listen as He does and acts therefrom That was the Night Democracy swung Fear & Hatred & Greed to the tarantella of our stomping biting City sleepers off their stupor
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There’s a phosphorescence in the Air of Gloucester some Lamplighters are abroad
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The Bulldozers Get the Fishermen’s Institute
By their votes theyve made of themselves an Unholy Six of the styx and a megalith of parking lots a fix theyll never squirm out of these shamballas of history the tearer downers terroristes in reverse or tax dollar oraculars
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these are the rug pullers the teredos in the City pilings the barnacles the vessels are heir to— by citizen default the cause of fishes fleeing
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Pharaoh Otto Bosselman
He aint dead enough and he can hear the old fandango of Hi Priest, this deceased How he hates you wipe my ass I wipe yours this always pass the horselaugh dont give up the belly’s jangling He was pigheaded and kept his distance saw immediately and was resistant
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he loves Isis tomb this Pharaoh of his never touch a drop of fire water, his silk securable Deeds, of they try to stamp out his Acts, even now he persists in his incurable His lips are stitched and visible, in his vest is the diary of letters to the Foundling Fathers, o how his reputation for breaking fetters is the real Flag, for he’s our risen power!
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Mural of the Harbor
It was the hour before the final sleep the half hour before being born the flood tide of blue gold with Emily at tea among tall marshes the hour when lover and beloved meet racing past each other and Whitman hacking for mussels and conches among the mudflats of anchored twilight an August of Fitz Hugh Lane’s odyssey and St Mary had a sweat of spider dust slid straight in a denouement’s taboo that the treasury has no price tag
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It was the chill in the shoes of long ago waiting for the chartreuse of Something Else when the Creek’s current and the Atlantic had between them a cosmic intercourse a strange skytime and people couldnt stay indoors when Veronica’s tear fell into Emily’s chinese cup and a crow became the other Mayflower persona the street-walkers a memory of Conant’s Fault It was the sense of rust the cleavage of classes heavy as a pyramid and has in it a star’s writing when octogenarian consulted the crystal egg on the Ocean’s desert and the elite clung to their velvet insurances that hour Portogee Hill street ran over Eastern Point and their dogs groaned helplessly thru the horned Moon when the Angelus of sunken schooners prayed to Our Lady and spilled their coffers at her feet
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it was and then it wasnt ever again when the light struck all the people dumb with an ennui and they saw the Fiery Angel of Death where Life is and they beheld it for the first time
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sunrise and moonset, dawns and sunfalls all mixing together and the suspense of it hung the City inside as the whistle of a single yarrow stalk has Saint’s melody, but an insane laughter cries in the marrow
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Angel of Death
Humankind gangrenes in the head as fast as fishes do and some sooner— these biped who vaunt their superior intelligence and grovel in want
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Fishes came first and succumbed to the give me, the belly, and the profiteers who scrape the Nadir of the Ocean dry— the spectre of Hunger appears at Bankers’ night-games as the workers in the pan of no solution, fry
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Blacklisted
Days are nights and nights are days no more sites for you to praise ah this shit list has your skin on file only for a short while are you missed for one fateful accident you are black-balled and was it meant to be, o never recalled?
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You are split between half alive and half dead trapped in a real scene surviving on ghostly bread
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Blessing of the Gasoline Tankers
From nowhere on the Horizon Gargantuans of engine juice and oil muds out of place and loud as Armageddon the bitten fleet tied to the Holy Days stay out of the way of this evil on insecure platforms net menders crocheting the Wind lean on doomsday humors these iron flotillas are bad omens for the birds and fishes and men
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who hear the glob glob clobbing the fishing beds bathe in nightsweating rumors
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Book II: Da Songs
Cativo
Once upon a toolin wen I was a boy da poor were mama mia n just t b was a joy now I’ma granfadda n granson n da poor r many more eets da same ole story dat went on before
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once upon da eye meetin make Who Am I gleam I who come frum Chinky macaroni chasin down da scheme before Eden Jerusalem n Moscow Washington is an up startas— waves ov da sing song in dis Azylum ov Martyrs once upon da udda side dose 2 places not aroun r on dis islan waitin t b foun we r da bambini ov irritashuns wit n witout suppa— in da Rebel is da Noble upsettin da setuppa
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Ballad ov da Cut
Some nevva get ova da Cut wat a butt! becauz ov It we relish wit n breathe wen da foreigners depart, den back t her’s uddas ain gonna leave dis cloth n weave all on account ov dis Cut dat hates a rut a profushun ov highs midnight baseball n seashell tighs da farma, da toolmaka, n da sleek craft angle here, n draw da straight n da daft
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dis runnel ov desire absorbin da last throes ov da Empire da hip n da bearded conquer da secret streets camp n zonker dis wounded forum ov our novus ordo secolorum
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Torch Moynahan
We have a man who canna b bought who is worth belief in hees word— heesa wrought ov pure heart a doubled headed n devout soul dis new coal! O corn ov wata He comes wen Hope is bamboozled tested in da theurgy ov truth— heesa Ex-lax fa da social constipashun— God all da sheet bubblin uppa n ova white hairs n angry youth Wheat ov feeshas Once he make a Cross ov 2 cuttins ov cheese bitin an arm by arm n legs n swallow da centre dis warrior goes afta unfinished bizness n is armed by affecshun fa da City children easily enta Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
ah da seers! Afta four leopard years ahead n in arrears n hounded by doubt ain evva gonna leave da bout
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Fort Defiance
Is da same please no change strangas come, stay, no go thru dis Ocean grange fa us dis is home n tutti once was Irish, Frenchy den Italian now potato salad pasta vazula n clenchy da bambini boats n da fish plants unda da windas ov deese elevashuns deese rich poor doan sell one inch or a foot have pooblic bathtub, n 14 stashuns
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ova head is da Axe n deadlines ov Urban Bulldoza in da oily dolla da shadow ov Condo is punch drunk in dere tink tanks n stuck dere, canna swalla so is one day or a year a mamaduke see da faces ov da boats, souls ov oystas driftin tides wash n renew da faith ov deese tenements ov Catholic cloistas more Glozta is dis Palisades poora den da imigrant n da hippy is anarcky replantin a rapscallion english go like cat, be rocky, go flippery!
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Rag Picca: Trowaways
Ah paisan, we meet agin baptism, weddins n funerals t catch uppa on da riva as eet hurries t da falls da faces r half dere dere r gaps in faraway smiles— some r questshun marks n we rub arms at da end ov miles in one room r da birdwomen passin da booze t da hi light n bent quakin da parla down da long drawn night
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he looks betta in dat box den he eva deed in life n dat skirtman is happy but not da corna wife da Chiesa go crooked inta Heaven or fast t Hell a festival ov black appraisals cats slink offa, dogs howl! eveyone no look at who’sa next da next looks at da look— afta da dirt hits da bronze da crows zoom offa wit da spook!
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Da Summa Creche: Da Castagnaccis
T whom duz dis house belong da wizard winegrowa or da incomin rowa da son bustin wit his conga chong— you play I hear I hear you play da house ov Folly has many doors da Fadda has keys t n da son has a lease t both r uptight n da anga roars— you go I stay you stay I go
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dis is da cradle dey both built da winegrowa drank in da son gagged n stank in n wit one blow someting was killt— yea son, tis done you stay I go Fadda is free n so is da son fa a new vineyard n each a kin bard fa da grapes ov a dual resurrecshun— hey vino divino volley Folly!
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Duntouchables
Ah deese gears ov da Money Machine in schoolrooms, caboozes, hook n laddas letta siftas, meter clockas, ova clean deese r da obsolete pipple manufacturin cans ov da same ole brain matta agains da Red ya see how dere soshaleezim expands in contradikshun, ya, dey have paid air n wen deese bulwarks cry fa raise da polatishuns give, n da tax payas boil in dere undawear! As fa da throwaway poor, n da ova da hillas, da dumps fa dem n doan faget da udda honecomb zivil zervas da Zacrosanct, da Ka Ka ov Baal Shem ah yes, bless deese zervants ov Citizens leave room t become millyonaire n zupastar dis is da liberty we live fa, n fa crooks, divi-dends!
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Zee, immediately, believe Fort Knox is ours! Da treadmill or Chances on da Unexpected no, den livin coffins, denatured meals, n plastic flowas
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Da Loss ov da Capt Cosmos: Cosmos Marcantonio, John Burnham, Benjamin Interrante, Salvatore Grover, Vito Misuraca, Jerome Pallazola
One day a rubba boot, a cap will show up or a tighbone in a tuna’s belly perhaps da whole boat’s lyin on da black sands or unda da hood ov a jumbo jelly fish rememba da Gudrun eet too diappeared witout a nail frum eet n dat was 30 years ago almos an eon da 6 r on da winds now restless n quiet like soul’s weatha da rock people agree on
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eets da lot ov seafarin n da element ov timin how like love intuishun is da pilot screen agin we r left wit holes in homes ocean is continually fillin wit d unseen
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Divinin Rod
Breathe on dis place ov o solo tutti, love unlock da prisona doves plug inta undagroun juices fa all dere psychic uses all da vegetals n minerals ov dis keg ov rock all ways awready fa spigot talk— is a regenerata generata n real bank free fa all, O tap dis spirit tank
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all healin’s here, banish fear thru da root ov da Ear!
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Patty Welch’s Dream & Mimi Dreamin
Ages ago she tells her sista “We are all in the Fountain’s care and you are forever young” but Mimi said “I’ve been dead for a long time” in da backyard hoein da garden Mimi uncovers da head ov a Kupie doll nunda da wall she finds da torso in anudda place da feet she sews dem tagedda eet heal complete fa lightin uppa da language n wanderin still
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digs up a penny medallyun 190 years distillin da like ov dis udda world band drinkin words fa undastandin dis dreamin land her elfin mouth rewards da Fair View hous n guards eet how da silence reads da secrets dis spectral menage is fulla keeds creatin dere holy freedom becaus ov One fadda mudda angel n rudda
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The Navigators
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Previous page: Cover drawing for Know Fish, volume 1, by Vincent Ferrini
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One —Primordium
A rock point of shifting athanasia in a galaxy of fishes Milkweed mistress mother wife beloved friend the spume of the Moon the Wingaersheek of our Solitudes always a flesh of white sands and a lineage of hot echoes now proverbs
A ((as the Ocean never seen two days)
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B When I first laid eyes on Thee & Thine my heart’s glow took in cod, hake, flounder, mackerel heavens dear granite glances, whippoorwill iris, branched backbones & adoring instincts going in any direction siphoning the lore & returning it
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Holy the hills, holy the sea holy the air all is Mana & innocence spacing Time seeing as gravemarkers as canoes, bronzed faces do with second sight the first is wrought of I, a singing once inhabited guiding galactic energies
C As somewhere perhaps a fish eyed people & this pilot for a continent are the turners over, Tlamatinimes rare frequencies with nothing to lose seizing the Language against the Elite & their Elected Flunkeys undoing the 13 Houses))
D
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The stain of Pluto is upon the air & sea we are tales others hear clearly Look, the unity of MATTER
E Indian power is Here stirring the stone sleepers
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on the roads to the abalone Temple one by Fishes the other by Dreams create yourself out of yourself out of the oppressing polar deaths this is the true work actions from that emerging straight to the Juggler Thee O mix the chemicals of Imagination & History the nodes of material existence herein hide, uncover the facts the thesaurus calling what light flecks off that pedestal always by a contrary the focusing pitchblende
F The raging Jehovah hey, unexpected, how many cards? None
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In front the Vacuum is a sucking blastfurnace Love is the Measurer of the Materials night’s load speech driven as the other Root & equally fired
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The Dreams/or out of the body travelling with Maximus & some others
December 26, 1969
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Charles O was reading me sections of the last part of his Epic of place, there were some humorous asides because people were giggling and savoring them, as he came to the ending I saw a special Sea: it was made of human eyes, each particular light sucked at me, I knew we had stumbled on the answers to the three Death questions, “what is it,” “what is it for,” and “what does it mean.” Voices I had heard were breathing hard, then a cloud of contemplation fell over all of us.
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January 23, 1970
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I was in an inspiring religious building, it reminded me of the original Temple of Solomon. The life mask of Olson led me thru strangely draped rooms, where an archaic rabbi and first century scholars presided, hippies were going and coming in. The mask took me to a room where no one was around, I was down to barrels of scrolls and among them I saw a silken bound book, 5 by 5 inches, a green jade cover, and it had a title of three Jewish letters, I knew it was a new Bible of the old world for the future, and I tucked it under my coat. I was afraid I’d be caught, but the gatekeeper did not frisk me, I was protected by the mask, who said, “you will know”
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September 3, 1970
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Is there a life better than life, and the waves of my hatred for this cut throat society swelled me in its ache, and he was sitting, the American Budda, I told Him I believed in the Second Coming, I saw his lips move but I could not hear him, I went closer and I read his lips and the awful pain in his visage of a triple sadness, they said, “do not speak to me again, go, there is only the one first Child” I turned around and left him, his grim voice uneasy in the pit of my being, haunting me and him.
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September 29th of the lost year
Betty & Charles come to visit me in a city of untold realities, & I tell him about a discovery I made, he looks far away, and cheated, and I say, Yes, there is nothing to talk about, you have written it all out, they quickly fade, I regret the sudden departure, Time is a rupture
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I am building a precarious wall with slabs of marble, loose stones and cement, I climb to the top to survey what is on the other side but I need a string that a young woman is weaving with, she hesitates, then refuses me, she is living with her mother and is afraid of me, she likes me and I desire her, but I cannot reach her, then I know she is hiding something about herself, and I see an angel and wild beast back to back, exchanging vibrations, I go to grab the string from her, and her head snaps back into an angry cat’s, I am terrified of her teeth, beholding 7 dead men in black coats and stove pipe hats in a boat coming to visit Life
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August 5th, another lost year
“The Big Oral Kid” Socrates, he has no use for him. Ah, himself. Charles dived, the bulk of him fell flat on the granulated thick water, and he swam with his face down, I worried about it, how did he manage it without breathing, as he went out to Sea. Then he is naked, and old, the patriarch, surrounded by a clutch of kids, several of them kissing his prick, he lying down like a Potentate, but his life seems finished. He is showing stacks of Mss and portfolios of paintings, no one knew he had done them, I am astounded at the amount of this unexpected production, that no one had even dreamt about, the places moved me, I could not believe it, I had been let into his closet.
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Dayle Stanley, “The Social Dike,” a miscalculation of his perceptions. I am clutching her body length and she is stuck fast to me as I am to her, I had never experienced such a stuck condition before, I could not let go, neither could she, we so much wanted to be joined together as one 2 bodied person. Then she has her back to me and we are embracing each other as each is absorbed by the other. He is showing me a portion of a long poem he is working on, and I let him peruse a page of a big poem I am at. He is pleased, and invites me to a reading he is going to. We have front row seats.
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3 persons come on the stage, then a fourth, an Englishman, about 40, begins reading in Indian from the Mahabharata, I cannot follow him but I am enchanted, suddenly Indians in long robes in one color of the rainbow, each different, gather around him. And I wonder is this the way they do it in India. I feel left out, the Mahabharata is the rim of the circle. I turn to Charles, the seat is empty.
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August 7, 1976
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Charles O is convalescing and surrounded with a lot of old people and students, but he is really dying and is angry that some persons think so, he is that fucked Mountain, and I am attending to him, wanting him to kick the bucket, he is lecturing and yakking from a bedchair, in his white toga, and I am impatient with his sense of continuance, he is pissed off at me for the same thought, anyway he desires to take up somewhere special, and I can’t figure why he’s so active, and plunging ahead, he is in my ear, and we are nearing my new altar, he backs the car into my driveway and succeeds looking forward, as he turns and winks at me.
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November 3/1977 Night of the 2 Dead Men
I meet Charles somewhere in a Cameo, and he is wearing that hat in the Photo at O’Neill’s bookshop in Cambridge, he is regal and stately and I glance back on the whole experience and enjoy every morsel left I am on the outside, and the future unfolding is almost as I planned it, and he says, Remember I told you your time will come and we will look back and forward together, only I am ahead of you, but not really since you are in my dream as I am in yours.
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Then I see my father, reading a manuscript of mine, and he is trying to grasp the contents, he raises his head, and queries me about sections and phrases, and is pleased, “You have ten poems that will last” as he turns pale, sad, and sorry he has not been more open to my madness.
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Gloucester A.D. 1973
we are in an amphitheatre, this other poet who is my shadow, and as I am his, we are having a contest with lines that come out of our bellies with strings of words 3500 years knocked out by Istorin splintering the windows of one eye the other sucked the Light in we find out that we cannot do it alone barber’s crunch the Lady does not think he had one He who had balls rich as the Buddha’s at Half Moon Beach Across all Space & Time
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the Wheel is double crossed Force at the South Station Orpheus kneels to the Sacrifice Maximus eats the victim Linda Parker could become the Prioress the First Real War since Achilles & Hector This is the Matter
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(and above us is the airplane shadow of Charles O as a bridge of truth)
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some of these words the ghost of another poem spoke into my left ear
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Charley Olson the son
A burnt house among others, rebuilding it with this own hands, & with the help of a few friends lifted it upon a ground cloud at the Head of the Harbor, for his far site deep in living! The Father of him self! The Mother of his new land fishing the two ends of a genealogy at home! His palms’ palimpsest, the designer’s fusion of perception & instinct as the mark of his private dig the City’s feel is in his ore, & the original make of it fired by the communal fuel
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Born alone, & attending to the core’s delineation, hewing at his cares
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The Ghost of Rocky Neck Jack Clarke
The poem is bareass & a wave of stratosphere daring Love to be, or flash dreams gutter out as dead mills have lost their solar fire & lack of shelter is the local goiter this Mona Lisa man, living both ends at once, a Venus on the half shell of the harvest song, the action of Id’s genii, this warrior without a shield! Being in many places as a hub is all the spoken stay at periphery & center few have the wheel whirring as he does, even when loyalists go awry
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the wraith of our harbor peninsula watching how naked words & seedlings lay!
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The Community of Self we are born sleepworking & die to wake
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up
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At the Brink
Madam Chair, Councillors, & Fellow Citizens, we are at the brink. Fishing is our core life and the waterfront is our original signature. So we guard against a wildfire Greed that will destroy this harbor of the working class, and we all know what kind of a storm this is. Will Property Owners resist the seductions of Megabucks and save their birthrights and the Community’s. Beware of becoming Barracudas. It’s one Ocean. I say it is not only fishing you will kill but Christ Himself, the fisher of souls in ourselves. Fishing’s high and low tides are in our solitary hearts, some boats go down, but most continue arriving loaded to the gills, though we still have to reckon with scarcities and quotas, the Canadians and the breeding grounds, fishing carries on in spite of these tragedies and comedies we are heir to. Will the homeowners and processors around the harbor sell out to the Developers for a quick fortune, betraying Howard Blackburn, Centennial Johnson, the valiant captains, every drowned fisherman, Charley Lowe, Gordon Thomas, Charles Olson, Phil Weld, & others. Do you think the steel of the Gloucester fishers are a thing of the past only? Think again.
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This gutting the Genius of Gloucester for a Condo City? I say we must not permit the death of our city as it has been known for over 350 years, and as we know it personally, we must fight with Imagination, with all our resources, our dedication and courage to protect tomorrow’s today by keeping the acute senses of fishing alive! Remember one drop of sea-water is the whole of it, the whole of it one drop. All things are loaned to us. Private Liberty is exercised by Community Responsibility. We are a new fisherpeople, the sum of social individuals, an Intelligence of the other Ocean. February 26, 1985, and entered into the minutes of the Council meeting.
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footnote: we are Spirit warriors or cogs in the money machine, is the stink of dead fishes a permanent cloud over us has the temptation of the nouveau riche infected the waters, the oxygen, the landscape, the skyscape, the soulscape, the lanes & byways, the boats & wharves, the fishplants & swept us under its tidal waves are we in a state of decay is our disintegration irreversible each person is the community and the community each person each for the community and the community for each as the goal of living
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A Preface to the Art of Fishing
We are all fishermen and fisherwomen. Christ was one of the biggest and most famous, because He is still a great mind-cleaver, and He lived and lives where it counts, in His flesh, He speaks in parables and tall stories, and He died because He upset human fixtures. Daniel Berrigan is another deep-sea fisherman, a Jesuit priest and a shaker of routines, he and his committed fisher people, who spilled mortal blood on the cone of an atomic warhead, are in the docket for Judgment for their act.
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Olson is another fisherman, on the lonely ocean and under the deep waters, hard driven by his quest and obsessions. Then there are the fisherpeople who go out daily for a week or two and come back loaded with a good catch or a poor one, some ahead some behind. We eat bread and fishes, so do we eat words and ideas that reflect every drop of sea-water. The issues still are how do words and actions, fishes and bread, reason and emotion, dovetail, making something vital that moves us into areas we’d never dream of.
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Like democracy isn’t given, it is dealt with daily, fishing for the correct solution, each one receiving what is proffered, more or less, and less brings all the abuses of bought power. How do we throw our lines out for what is missing, and we have to, since we are fishing, and this is our real occupation. More so, it is our art. As a plumber fishing for himself, or the carpenter, the lumper, the teacher, the pot hole filler, the executive, the streetshopper, the banker, the parent, the city employee, the child in school, the politician, all fishing for life and more life. Like the person wanting to be seen, felt, heard, understood, recognized, eating the heart out because of the lack when there’s plenty for each one on his and her own terms. What is interfering with this fishing? Stinginess of self or non-participation, sticking your neck out because giving is equal to receiving and the risk is the reward. Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
The examples are the real fishes. But what has that to do with earning a living, being unemployed, stuck in unsolvable problems, when so much of this heady stuff flies over our hair in words, words so far out we can’t measure them without a dictionary strapped to our elbow?
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The whole shebang. Because it is all connected, even the dictionary as part of the arm that goes fishing for the meaning of whatever is said, how it is spoken, when and for what and where does it go, can’t you say what you have to in simple words? Too easy, in one ear and out the other, if you don’t hook in or engage, your line has no bait, there’s nothing to catch, either of the Other or yourself, it is so common under-evaluating whatever is ongoing and thereby losing the senses of the game. It’s the pitch at which you have your life that counts, unless someone else has it, for when you get it, you pass it on.
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So you dive deep into the ocean for the treasury of the personal unknown, or clutch the ground of being and swaying as a limb does, happy as the treetrunk singing with all the leaves. The words you use are you, and you experience the creative and the destructive by who you speak to, don’t speak, listening to the Other, learning who says what and why and what for till you defuse projections, disarming the opposition in the Other and yourself, establishing a love for openness, as I am impregnating the language, risking the old for the new. Knowing where the two weathers are, and why the fisherwomen are exercizing the voices of their seas.
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Delving for words and the techniques for synthesizing experience, discovering sounds as a short cut and the exhilarating ways to get said what anyone is low or high in, most akin to the music in the bloodstream, using the Facts that are full of the poems never on paper. The ocean belongs to everybody, no one owns it. We know what the fish is we eat. And where the light comes from.
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In the face of the Inexplicable, words sometimes are the only means of capturing or revealing the Mastery momentarily, somehow it is caught, mostly it slips away, and then it swallows the Fisher on a special date for looking with the Dark.
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We Are the Wildflowers
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I was over my head at the Feminist Rally to Take Back the Woods, sinking in the cage of my ribs at the split between the private and the public, listening to the pledges of the speakers, and on the side lines feeling with the husband of the victim, who was disappointed at the politics of the protest. Caught in these two separated places as I am sure many sitting on the grass, standing, leaning to learn what to do, were also in that chasm, which is the source of violences in the family, and in society, that the public and the private are opposite sides of the penny that stare away meeting here. So was I on the rim of that coin with the others, and in that whole metal, uniting the opposites, feeling in my gut like that audience and the speakers, knowing that the husband and the assembled had had enough, I could not raise myself to read the following, so I am calling it to the attention of the private public at large.
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The Winter of Ideologies
As a long line of Time, the one wheel bicycle of whose name is God’s seeing eye dog for the blindman a century’s will rolling off the leader & the led a seance space-clowns around a conference table mix realities throwing them to the winds & waiting with questions & answers Jefferson & Marx divide between them & Hitler’s watt is on the wheel reaping itself the Earth’s rememberings, the hauntings in flip sayings & marriages to Death’s evens, but the odds & stars are happy life is banking her insights the Cosmos is Magdalen’s eye, Copyright © 2004. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
fulfilling Being’s becoming & everything else on loan
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Sea Medicine
A session is a decade, two hours a lifetime, I was on the slab of your temple a hierophant under your houri hands, as you entered my rainbow tenement & led me to the crystal oracle that told me you know my chameleon desires— that we dont need words as we coil together for the one body of 2 seers!
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Herbal Priestess, you are mute & hearing as you press upon each of my musical keys, balancing with your currents, interfacing a hoard we are given through this divine intercourse— I am in your black sea as you heal me on your tablet for a Song of the Whole!
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Stale Supper
brotherhood is boring & sisterhood is narcissus be grateful Death is a crock of surprises the invisibles are insideout the atmosphere’s a fall-out of ennui Sovietski’s a green coconut among the sunrise nations the Almighty made America first Religion’s bread is mouldy the Word goes begging in the marketring Faith has no partner will this solar system be sucked into the Black Hole Sex is the seminal commodity property’s the real Bank
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kneel to the dictates of Chief Near Sight blessed are the wide-awake sleepers
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The Holiest of Holies
the community breaking bread with morning noon & evening the feast of selves in the Self
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no one is excluded we have yet to celebrate this interior revolution the city is pregnant with
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The Olson Strain
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He handed me for my birthday his tiny ivory boat as light as a fingernail his father had given him when he was a kid I placed in the belly of my silver fish
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The Salt Marshes of Our Lady
I asked you to take me to where your thoughts go your eyes went inward & I lost you on an evening of your twilight soul I saw you rowing your moonskiff on the creek & the houselights trying to stop you the shadows of your mind tugged at the haunt of desire as your tendrils playing in the blue marshes of the committee
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the cranes & ducks attending your figure even as the currents caressed the yellow grasses of the crab’s & witch’s netstockings onto nooks & inlets of the tall tremblings the no trespassing said come in as hummings swam to your fountainheads the wet muck of the grasslands waited as your habit is & the ruminations that come & leave we devotees wear in another time & the secluded private the thick oozes of generation stir me as your beatitudes when we are asleep
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the red marshes are full of the hour of departure I am on my knees my head in your meadows You are my Mosque & your seasons enchant me your surprises break into my recesses I am startled by cries of creatures & the mounting tides of your definitions inundating my waitings here between the cloudland & housetops between rainstorms & lush murmurings the creek is a blood story the two of us inherit & pass on the first rising star is a stone of myself in your trip & tarry as you roll me over & heat me to a jewel between your meanderings of all the blessedness you proffer this is the most secret & sacred here you are the looked on & the look as I am the horn of the loon
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without you the Void is the black mud under the creek & here too is the peace of reverence we have abandoned ourselves to the breath of the leaves is a wind we are & the minnows of curiosity the silk sands of your skin is our wealth because we are sharers only the escaped moments are the grains of starlight for the stalls in the mudbanks & listening is the bread & grace of our illusive communion refinding our undulating progenies on the belly flats & bushes the farms of your salt water wilderness & the shock of your blazing hair 116
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the wet colony remote of our meetings lolling at your shoals & capillaries of our Atlantic channel all this on the back of the pearlsky you pick up a shard from nowhere & it’s a ticket to BC or a swirl of opposing creations is a magi rink for our nuptials as a qua bird hides so can a hut or a second home where no roads are one of your ways there is no sign for none know of, a hunch surfacing going under the color as shifting as one of your moods & the duet envelopes me your iris has the salt marshes at sunset as you travel in veils of imminent changes once in the clinch of darkness & the fabric of this interweaving our one fish became a comet for unending explorations
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your wholeness is far away as the bay, the inlet, & the creek is calling as close as before birth & after & these marshes of your breath I have only begun to give to offer the seeds of this looking buried as these flowers are in this creek of our benediction why is Orion at the midnight gate with the holy book of the Ocean as common as the public landing is the first step & keeper of words that a footpath is a way to the water’s lip you smile, the Sun’s retreating the hush between us is a state of Spirit things
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Book V: The Illuminations
Mount Ann
This is the height of our Alleluia fruit of the holy leisure, feast! O Aum of Ann! Dock & port of the singing fishes! Thy expanses consume & liberate the uptight joys! Ah the freedom of not owning anything equal to your plenty! The beaches are your muscular coves the sands of your diamonds, the foam of your kisses Daily the nighthold & the underseas as you lay at our feet a city inside your chambered nautilus I am beside myself because of you each moment you show me a you I’d never seen before
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& I go about as an idiot in awe at this united self you are, the broodings & disharmonies we are actors in the theatre of your living flesh & the action is forever surprising & exchanging second sight drawing to us the languages of intriguing cultures who take us with them wherever they go the streets are the gold leaf, stocks & bonds of your ways your houses are comedy sapphire, oyster amethyst, & pearl tragedies clove tongues, honey whispers, myrrh blizzards & pure oxygen one Moon spine & solar backbone
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from your generosities, friendship is the excess of equals we have chosen you as you have elected us the mysteries of your nature is my faith I know your Scriptures by heart, and the oracles in taverns you sit on a constellation, & your bed is the earth surveying ourselves you increase the combinations of the night your brow is the Mount, your eyes the Divine Intelligence & the unspoken between us is inexhaustible
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for many have to lose you going through hells, searching for you
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The Date
You said “I’ll meet you an hour before dawn at the Pilgrim Cemetery or by twilight at Mt Adnah’s” we laid on the Civil War grasses as our Barque went back & forth on the underground river carrying the before & after people there’s no more room in the graveyards for the new dead we’re planting them on the Continental Shelf
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on the night of the white light apparitions righted the toppled headstones crept into the ears of our kid vandals & the mischief thieves with warnings the next morning when the Sun’s rays made our trysting an anointment you said “if there is no reverence for the living how can there be any left for the dead” the tall trees sang with the power our limbs gathered from our nightsea Journey with the pumping of our own hearts & the white sounding of the star bones
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we know how intimately the dead & the live are related by the invisible wall of time that all’s held together by spirit love
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for you are the whole body of earth & the uncanny relationships when we are the closest mixing into one the choir is over & under us
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Answers
You have as many names as I have fingers & hairs our apertures increase the metaphysics of One my thoughts on your piano keys need no words each of you multiplies each of me with a windfall our treasury is at large & we know how to spend it this is more than enough yet we crave the fructifying communal between how we think & act there is no wall
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there is no role or pigeon hole for you nor a category for me the clouds stop for you, even your tides test the limits of the law your posters light my caverns mine deck your pillars you make my connections thrive we disarm the power struggles you are in the Mayor’s machinery the City Council is aware of you at meetings
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even the clocks on City Hall have your hands Main Street is changing its mind because you are after something extra your sisters smitten by the trends end up mistaking your essence I am a haunting in their hearts for the soft bells of fine intuitions even the Banks are seeking news of your doings beloved Priestess female socialism is shacking up with male free enterprise did he ever let you get on top of him you nodded no you are nursing the children born of this sinning pair citizens discover what the Gospel’s for now they live whatever they desire you go for my divine energy I for your divine body.
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because you & I are the holy One we have an Earth of supreme bliss our games exchange following & leading the pleroma is present
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Wraith Reading
Who loved you more than life are underground & we are breathing them who held you dearer than fame & fortune have quiet signs we read by your visitations who trembled at the sight of your brow & the unspoken words on your lips are in our genes who saw the face of the Lord in your visage coupling with them shiver in us with the memory who lived to catch a piece of your eternity giving that moment back is searching again as we do
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who have you in them as you had & are nowhere around except as our skins remember they go as the bushes go or the trees who speak as you do becoming briefly again within us who are they who have no record & no creed but earned through you these intimations of the real as sudden as it came it was over letting their breath go who are pregnant stones to you 124
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The Big Question
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A storekeeper asked me a bartender & a lumper who you are & I said the Community of self & they said ah yes, never thought of it & a banker eavesdropping made a note of it in his ledger
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This Other Ocean
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Ellis Island Rediscovered
the bird the fish ferrini on the graffiti wall of the Examination Room of Ellis Island (the fish is drawn in blue chalk by the health inspector) 1907 when my parents came over on separate boats in 3rd class steerage the bird about to fly away to freedom here with the fish the Eye of the Pyramid taking in the Pilgrims,
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the Puritans, the on coming immigrants the foreign sounding minorities becoming the majority as we start again with the solitaire in the Church of the Fisherfolk & I, in the languages of shoes & fishes 6:15:86
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The Interrogation
Am I mad of course I am the daimon is in me I cannot see myself because I am a tongue
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in the service of the Divine Intelligence manifesting the divinity
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Visa
The Unknown & all its tales is the Divine Mind’s property egos & nations are fictions at cross purposes inspired words are gates to the secret harvest my left arm is Apollo & my right Dionysios Magdalena’s my left leg Aphrodite my right my body the Cosmos & Breath the holy ghost I am tuned in before the Beginning
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& after the Ending
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A Poem Is Made Of
bread loam fruit animal voices vegetables soul-thoughts blood dance the elements anything you want to add & all this for as long as the appetites are singing with the stuff of stardust whatever comes has its own reason stay with the evolving you that is all there is
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if you bank on words alone you have only half of it
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The Gas Poem
My informed friends told me that the poor of Central and South America survive on beans and rice, and that I could do the same. That staple has been my diet till it finally sidetracked the poet, Boy O Boy did the farting make itself known in unexpected places, thundering and auroral, or broadcasting the news. Bean starflares scrape my bones, kicking me out of an exploratory dream, and wide-eyed, still at me, taking no chances I call the Fire Department, their Ambulance unobtrusively sneaks me into the Castle of Healing, immediately the wise and lovely nurses strap and strip me of blood and hook me to a metal tree. They book and add me to their dark Archives. Do you have your own teeth? Of course! Well many dont, you are blessed.
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Blood from my wrists, my arms and my laughter, each day, morning and night, hey, that’s type O, poet’s blood, ichor! They lace me to the heart-machine, dont move a finger or toe, dont even blink. The Castle doktor’s verdict, and Indian guru on the graveyard shift, you have unsettled angina, I hear Uncharted Vagina, my Psyche’s exposed and vulnerable. I regale the nurses and a day doktor with tales of cherries for gout, copulation for bad backs, spinal creak, and stiffness, Bernie Siegel’s recipe for the lost and bewildered, and for short encores, epitaphs from the cemetery peeking in the Castle.
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And to the Cook, I’d not eaten so consecutively in years, he gives me whatever I ask for and then some, catered by the nonverbal Miss Morning Moonshine. The hierarchy here is wholesome and relaxed, ego’s behind the work, and the handy caretakers efficient as commercials. One sharp nurse peppers me with an unregistered doktor has a Fool for his patient. I throw out the second law of psychodynamics: physician, heal thyself, we embrace in midair. My personal doktor, a man of Open Mind and understanding, who had been skiing this weekend, catches me in the rest-room urinating. My ticker is singing arias. I repeat my story laying out the details, I had overdone it, with that 12 International Bean Soup Menu plus potatoes, onion, carrots, cabbage and mushrooms, lunch and supper, 4 straight days. Ya, daze alright. The bean pains wanted a home, they would not let me fart them out. Yearning as they had for a piece of my divine madness. My doktor renewed me; you are in a fine fettle for a race around the island, joggers I’m coming. Do you think this lowly Bean is a comedian only?
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Be on guard against its base music, and as for those 12 indigenes in one bag with different languages, watch out! Educate your palate, study the Earth for what is there, ask your life-maker in the sea, she will provide, do for yourself what the Cook did. The body is a battlefield of undigested experiences. One protein bean is enough, many shapes and shades are a tribal windsong in the unseen jungles. What a lesson this humble bean has given me.
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Hunger
Shawoman seeded me with food is female & valleys of vegetable velocities came a red sea road to the rituals of the Sublime! Food is a face to the Soul’s fascinations! Food is for the muscles of the Mind Food is the bloodtree of the Poem to the stories of the senses! a simple table or a cuisine circus— pigs of potency refuseniks & their rigors
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Food is the language lacing the sinews of the Split savoring the labials of looking! the blind—all seeing saliva mixing light & love the teeth dreaming, the lips & the tongue freeing the Spirit the world is all ways hungry for! Food is, tells us how we live— Without food the void is a famishing furor! Bread & onions & globes of fruit & grain Vitamins adding spice & a zest for including, against the shapes that go excluding— the Food Co-op is together as Poet Paul cauterizing cultures where the food comes from! He is the silent secret of sacred preserves where Plenty is waiting for new positionings!
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Blessed is the Common continually coming! Starvation is a restriction of surrendering! Food is the Poem that has no borders the cells are crazy collecting nectar & neologisms underearth! The summits of seasons & secretions! Adore the female foundations of feeling forever here & fleeting Adore her perceptions & the food the hands are for! When the 12 Houses of the Elements are full the selves go sharing Zodiacs!
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Adore the holy apertures food is the God for aligning the ills craving the lineaments of leisure & longing the laughters purifying bodies with bliss even feeding Death who rises alive from the Underworld!
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The Gold Miner George F. Butterick (1942–1988)
In the Barque of the Lady of Good Voyages you brought Maximus into Fishtown harbor with loose odds & ends & honey-heads completely tied into a pair of nebulae for the citizens to ponder & dig into though it cost you your lips, your teeth, your tongue & face in the last inning you hit a homerun with all the bases filled! a shower of tight images & memory stinging memory in the ball of a book we catch now for understanding
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You did not parade your genealogy or toot any credentials you did your homework at the roots of words! A lone exemplar among the bards gentle over details not missing the shadow of a nuance you could track an error in its genesis indifferent to the powers that reject or accept the finest kind of the working class a poem’s epiphany for any port no one excluded from boarding life & death companions together listening to each other
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you knew them intimately dearest brother of intuitions & our mind’s archangel! the loom of the complex & the artless at what syllables & pauses & round sounds are woven by words germinating print! maker of a whole University in a single person! you gave no degrees for raising pay levels or hooking into the system of rewards & benefits only a manner & a mode to go by cut down in midpassage
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a disciple of the image that captures liberating the subject enthroning the living Word nurturing the Queens of Corn & Broccoli & Curiosity O the soybean of Art is common as clouds are making the special one fish is a school as a cell in this immaculate design your ashes are seeds for the soil of Venus & oxygen to the coastal seas your sense of the Divine unifying Nature is allied to the Soul we are the forms of that eating & excreting are the songs of the body’s notice that you are on guard against Civilization’s ignorance that the marketplace is the sole reason we are made for the planet you were the willing Sacrifice the first antennae of Innocence that the instincts know the good of any organ for mating the opposites we are all an endangered species let alone the fishes & the oceans now you are earth, air, fire, & water the blessed keepers of humanity a music heard in memory when you walked as an oak on Dogtown of this island 138
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I gave you an exclamation mark of stoned light your palm held for passing on to another because Colette & George the Second & Aaron have you in them as entities on their own an extra awareness is around Colette’s copper nude hanging on the wall behind your last bed lacking ankles & feet because she was short of the metal with a bunch of crystals at her crotch & each for a tit gloriously alive over your umbilical head there Death changed your face as Love does when it is first awakened & I saw the profound silences of your core & that Peace overwhelmed me we are still as you are now We are the Mind of the Ocean & the waves are continually singing the News that is always here
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Death is ours as an unknown gift I had never seen Death looking at me as you did & grateful for it taking you under its wing as I did Death the Mystery I kept measuring as the Adversary— Death then was & is as seductive as the light lovers are overhead in that quality they are so close to as the One they make having the health Death is all ways offering who is the extra sense they give themselves to wholeheartedly no questions interfering— only Lovers are The Chosen People
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as Death is with its shadow Life— you were attached to the gut of it as I am its sidekick you are behind it it is in the middle & I tripping on my eyeballs before it in a troupe for the dread and circus of Divinities! I have stared Jehovah in the Face & here to tell it, George we have yet to adore Truth & Beauty as ourselves without which we are unwholesome figures you get what you project upon others if you give nothing nothing comes back O Gloucesterman with whatever was & is at hand you knew another fishing as an occupation when you dont go searching for it it comes to you neither you nor Maximus survived to embrace your Magnum Opus as new arrivals do Your light’s out & an aura surrounds your insites
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you dug up the globes of miracles the heart & the head
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July 4, 1776, Sign of Interdependencies
The intimate is a syringe, rape is cool, crooked money is lauded forsaken by Religion, Congress & the Declaration of the Calendar one’s own reality unowed a father & mother chosen by the child to work the One out of & themselves out of it the proverbs of justice are a scratched recording no box office to this mad theatre a people lost in Space & lacking Imagination but for the broken bread & the spilled wine Mind the Universe I will be back the next millennium
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we are at the threshold Holdfast is in charge the birth of the poem is not enough A birth of the wheel of day & night no boundaries the Crab’s everywhere shallow water is there are other dimensions give up the pitbull strategies such traumas are a terratango
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sensitivities are the bread and wine of a civilization perceptions for changing special effects are a sideshow & go begging us / the United States of the Earth for healing the planet the Anthem of the ocean by the ocean for the ocean Pisces: the twins of evolution & revolution
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the balls!
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Foreknowing
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We are the dreams the Divine Lovers are having locked in each other’s arms
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Magdalene Silences
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Journey to Raiano Raiano–Gloucester January 18, 1973
In the diamond black Tiresias masterminding Time Ancestral echoes have called me back to Raiano I have come from the holy fire to this paradise of Poverty At the valley of the montagnia glistening as this January Spring the door to your Night-room under American dirt
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The Three Virtues were not enough you could not eat them— dear Moonshade You lived for the materials I, for the poem We, who were born on the same day You, a Magnolia Noon
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I, a cuckoo bird You, a citizen of Death as I of Life’s We fought each other to the very Edge & always at the Chasm’s bottom the un-named Beasts Time stoppers their fall-out steam obscuring the rift part by part getting my body down for my mind’s crossings Your Sun, in the House for Synthesizing Mine, the 11th of the holy air
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& Dante Vittorio putting me onto the trolley’s ticket Rajano & the Greeks who settled this valley terrain & hybridizing called the Founding Altar di Jano you scowling at the Eleusinian music the relaxed tension of our race back under the Springfield grasses a cemetery you have not a friend in— as on the mountain side of the snows the ruins of La Chiesa di San Venanzio the icon of your dreams about the galloping flume this 18 year old Martyr you honored me with 148
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protecting the farms and the utensils oblong by oblong never uniting for any reason like the solar fishermen of my City You hankered for more of the Visible I, for the ground of the Invisible today reverses— forever interchangeable one everlistening body! Our birthstone at 27 via Garibaldi a snake-eye mine the other at Fishtown Robbed of your last years here among the amici but I represent you angling at cards from a bar table the losers paying for the debts the evenings squaring the ritual piazza
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Vittorio the lover of this town cluing me into the Quarternity of our Mediterranean and to his rite of the new— Born on the same day as his father Oreste and his mother’s mother with our name this young warrior pruning the Three Virtues as I at my harp of the 4 elements (my Dreamworld tenanted by a Child with circular expressions
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the hues of his cheeks recording the Deeps who comes as a faun’s mischief or transparent as the shell of the Sea Goddess shimmering with a light that lends a marvelous vigor to the eyes of the beholder and a message loud as thunder mountains and an underlying prescience— I have grown used to his strange behaviors distilling my sleep In a L’Aquila dream he reappears with a rapt recognition and I swing him onto my shoulders whirling a dervish for us on tables, museums, on cloud winds no boat upon any waters has such a buoyancy of sailing we are the Joy behind the veil of appearances— & in Sicily again his head round as the globe seen from the pure most blue celestial water saying to me “I am Immortal”)
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Pa, when did we ever agree neither of us able to turn around to see our face in the other! & each pregnant with Child Where did He come from who is the real Parent & the son of my son at 4 asking me “when are we going to be married”
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& I, we are already Tiresias are you Dante guiding me through this Comedy of Mysteries & benji again “are you going to sleep with us” Yes, among the moonshadows in the Bloodriver Oreste’s vault in the Cemeteria open for the new arrivals and no sign of the original seeders only a Greek air! Cousin Postiligione the anarchist of song under a one family slab a few earlier solitaires worn out but at home as I am in the cemeteries of Essex County ingesting the marshes
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A poet of twin myths how many faces are we Father & the Mother in me “many” Tale telling is preparing a Feast of the Alone June 24th for the hiding one surrounded by mirages & we are Janus confronting Phenomena One whole day at a time on the 7 Chimeras with our backs forward
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Love Song for the Jews
With my mother’s milk I drank your Scriptures the Hebrew letters doing Hasidic hoppings in my blood-vessels as the arms of Isaiah & the Baal-Shem swinging me for a new candelabra & the flames that never go out sit at the synagogue of my brain I was a student in the First Temple & a cantor I carry the remaining Wall of the Second Temple as a liturgy I hear throughout 5 millennia a Messiah is breathing beside me in my sleep both of us haunted by quarrels with the Lord & a lovefeast for Him & the women who in their silences are as profound a chanting as the deep looks of the Rabbis my first brothers & sister in exile unlike Job, I confront the Whirlwind’s shadow but the fire between Salome & Solomon is running in my veins the living water that fills the eyes of the Lord who is so alone He has problems except when He turns over & lies on the faithful begetting disciples who wake Him up among the lentil beds of His impeccable maxims Enoch & Lao Tzu led me into your thaumaturgies desiring questions, fondling, unravelling & devoting a life to an exegesis of a notion I, too, hound the bookshops for the Lord’s reflections for the villagers intoxicated with the sum of the inconceivable imaginings 152
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as glowing as a shawl the Stars of David drop for its mothers & daughters in the marketplaces for the rags of the Holy fanatics skipping on the jewels of a light that is penetrating Forever & coming back in pure moments of Joy suffusing the long black hair of the dreamt of & who has not been torn asunder by the blinding Beauty of the Beloved or the Lord as separate physical qualities some taking sides as I have settling for the Beloved the Lord is humbled by— I have seen Him take a back seat & the light in her eyes is His though He dethroned Lucifer & bumped him out of the show His twin is all ways with Him are the Jews nothing without Him whose intensities the Lord deflects from women for his own fulfillings O carriers of the Shekinah Yahweh is trumped at strip poker & dazzling, naked— your passion for placing a thought in an endless dramaturgy studying the mind of the Lord even as I do giving the Beloved my undivided attention what consumes you is my devotion too— for time is a word, so is space & the crotch of it is my religion that no word will ever capture the Lord nor the Beloved yet be a Song of— ah the music of Hebrew caligraphy for the eye & the ears— the Word began the tales O Divine bookworms— the artist is the act of the art—
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who can play shadows with your wisdom the Clown the Fool— you have a few of them for relief but not too many— for acute perception, the wailing & Hubris for the Lord’s sake— who can revel in happiness without a break— Sublime storytellers Zen is your companion magician— who has not sweat blood when the Lord strode between a lover & his lady out of your mouth the Lord came & you began another Creation of tribes— & worlds of people— you brought Word & Action together naming Eden, King David, Abraham, Joseph & Jesus one road was not enough you made a fork for 2 crying hallelujahs & masters for interpreters of the Ineffable— A chutzpah Imagination who shuffle centuries as a Tarot of Law & Love— who is like you only the quiet women who are the source of your amazing encounters & your endurance through holocausts— the women who are the foundation of the Lord— they await your beckoning who have half of the Lord she who is the flesh of the metaphysical earth and the Third Temple!
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Miriam
(the infertile woman speaks) Before the light came with the birth of the first person you were as you are immaculate as the Mind behind the power of emerging forms perfect as each named thing! Out of you
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the races of Humanity yet the Unseen conceived with you a Holy One seen thus and apart— you prepared you know the Divine Magdalene or divided from you all are bungled creatures These two who can look full on and not be torn apart by sight for nothing is split O Virgin Mother of whomever rises out of you everything is ready
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(the poor protesting Eunuchs floundering in a mockery not theirs who could be originals A weak pap who cannot raise the thunder to fertilize properly are trying to fool their Deity) In whose worlds upon forms exist for miracles in the Mind of the black hole wait, before I am you are! It is all ways half of you driving one to extremes and a truncation never together the Son & the Father interchanging in your genes— the solar barque hastening toward you the galactic Winds shoving them toward your vision!
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The never-still dancing in the center of each & the sublime combinations! Each outgrowing the Authority Figures renewing them with the Child or being slain by the Chimaera those who block her idiosyncrasies become I-balls for her rosary aha what encounters with this devouring Idol churches are built for! No beast can outwiggle her wits the precision of her adding machine or the cipher of those encompassings— love strangles in subtle seductions no law can ever catch up with until this Virgin is confronted at home the sides of her faces accepted the members of the family battling forever with Shadows ignorant of the machinations useless victims 156
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not even Pity can help against this Hydra nor succor them The suction of her silences the transient muscles of her robes the gospel protections are unassailable sequestered as she is among the armed angels of Jehovah & the brimstone sentences Nothing in any of the arts can duel with the magnificence of her sea’s lineaments when she is with a lover O gales or when she is pregnant the adorer, participating, sure that she is the treasury for the divinations as what can outweigh her Nature— and surpass her the offsprung who have this Virgin—One-at-a-Time within die to live within her split
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or united Death has no space * *
*
what ghost is in the tunnel O 9 months of uninterrupted touchings who is dreaming whom
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O womb of death blessed be thy habitat
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The Magi Image
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Excerpts from “IHS” 9 “The tears of Magdalene how shall I still them & all my sisters who are in Magdalene When shall the silence of the thundering unanswer let me go The vulture of my own tyrant self ripping bits of my heart out to feed me The unceasing moan at my feet at whatever turn I am the Spectacle & the Witness & they weep for me Ah to be done with this agony I am the root of
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I am their end & beginning but I am I, they are they O that one might come & hack me off this Cross & free them from this Wheel of me this inturning punishment people need me for up here dangling.”
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10 “Must it be until it is my own unself come back to undo 2000 years & unending O my sister with thy charity Forgive me for I know what I have done I stare down from this Darkening blotting out the sun in the churches I am the axle of & no one knowing what is going on inside me with that weeping put there I, in this black womb & they in their black tomb O deo, deo
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What art thou & where?”
11 That Man— They cut the sky up for & stained it with His Blood He wants the whole sky but He has a piece of it only each has his own window to see through to work himself out of
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into what it is He is for each man by the act of himself wipes off some of that Blood
12 When the wake is a Wake the dead leap out living but the mourning somnambulists are perpetually nailing the lid down
13 Don’t talk about anything— do it Did He know what & how they were going to erect His life, after ah, if He had guessed, it might have been different
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14 One counted the prayerbeads— fifty-four & stopped at Him what is He doing hanging here so he unhooded Him & threw the idol into the incinerator then was then now is now He, too, is grateful the beads & the praying are on their own.
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15 The wrong Christ— masticate it digest it & excrete it Arise, purified
16 When will the priests brick by brick start taking the churches apart to get at the cornerstone
17 The walking church of Christ & not so named is that one who hammered out the spikes took Him down from that Cross broke it
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kissed the wounds away & let Him go
18 The new Fish has the moon for an eye & the sun is the other
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19 See the lid of death sprung open Christ, O Christ is out & dancing for Himself with the risen
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who are the swirling
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Song of the Amaranth
In the shadow of the Poem the stone said I am a poet the rabbit said I am a poet & the man intoned I am the Poet the frog gurgled I am a poet the tree leaned over with I am a poet & the blades of grass each one for one of the dead & the poet said full of wondering I am sharing it with you the Song of me & we the Moon whispered to him I am the Night of the Poem the Sun said I am the Light of the Poem & the Poet my wisdom is speaking strict perceptions I am giving you the Key to the Word & the worlds within it I am imagination said the serpent the eagle I am the mind of the ground I am the power & long life of my Muse said the elephant & the whales hearing solo yea sayers if man is the crown of creation not taking things just as they are extinction is our lot the last of the whales broke wind in the oceans & tidal waves washed the pride out of each single mouth as the unseen Poem goes on breathing a rare air for everything & everyone
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The Rocks of Wisdom
In my straw sombrero with a belt of plugged nickels by a dead friend “I am alive with you, Captain Woman” & a wire of purple & gold stars appearing at Mass General Hospital, the Castle of Communion
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Because I ignored 3 chakras below my navel volcanic stones found a home in my kidneys interrupting aqua vitae— Dr. McDougal, the High Priest & Wit administered a sedative Mantra “this is not simple as a sprung line of verse” Laid out and rising from the peace of Eternity I rang the nurse from my cell I am pregnant with a poem I need pen & paper “make it a good one” said Ms. Anon rose lit (I’m deep breathing oxygenating my bladder) “the stones of philosophy” from the Wit he lucidates the details & the attendants in wedding lace stripped me of my successful front for the straitjacket
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Anesthesia Swanson took me under her wing with Dr. Hammer, her sidekick “we will not put you out for 2 weeks” what a shipwreck notion as he strung me to a liquid lunch-bag & the choir of mourning doves “Dream what you will” continued Hammer as I ducked under a tale with Ms. Anesthesia between surgery at the third rail at the Fort of the intruders’ expulsion (remembering my beloved & me interweaving morning & night unstopping) I am out /
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in the Underworld of Coitus a second or hours later surfacing on the brink of orgasm & my lady Venus faroff as the Green Mountains of Vermouth I asked the nearest nurse checking my engine to saddle me No is my Libido’s anathema she gave me a hard cheek & left me hanging on the leaf of it ready to soar to the only Eden I know of she grazed me with a grain of granite taking stock of this Unexpectedness— News Mass General had not stumbled onto— this reward from the blasted Invaders of my kingdom of penetration ah, these jewels, gifts of economic anxieties & a lack of genital juices from terminal Romances Maggie was shaken to the quick with my magdalene silences she is impaled by the book, a confidante in extremis & Denise belly-dancing around my bed
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10 of my planets are into Illuminations above the Horizon & 2 below in the Netherqueen’s territories & I was hooked into beastly realities as my arm & rooster were strapped to the metal tree my right hand seeking mischief (Linda missing one vein gets the jugular & typecasting my hologram for Judgment Data & the Verdict is with me) the Goddess is blessing my thermometer a line rises to my forehead Between Scylla & Carybdis the seafoaming laughter of sublime openings the midnight nurse “you have sky’s blood pressure” as she tucked a pink jelly under my tongue
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my organs unhinged & hystericaly irritable— If the Heart is the Center of this Community all the rest are in tune I wrote on the Mainstream Bulletin all the organs want to be loved & massaged as this Coliseum of Cure, Care & Community trembled with pleasure & triumph for Life is the finest aphrodisiac Healer Josie Rhodes of Fishtown & Sedona who saw my earthly body in the first, second & third chakras pulled out of me what I never could reveal to a soul extremely vulnerable my guard broken down I was navel deep in Death
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I worship my Physique & it is enamoured of me 4 cups of Chamomile Tea reversed the red brook flush with returning a Physician of Eros & Rosamond stretched out on the Moon naked the Love-energy is it
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all the rest are Illusions
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The Indweller
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The Alchemy of the Poem
Poets must become Alchemists of the Human Experience in its multifaceted situations to be effective in the deepest layers of Being
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The Self is fine and they are the deepsea divers of Emotion. As such they could live up to their Calling making and remaking what they are exposed to heightening and enlightening— They are the stirrers into action, lifting the words out of print and quickening Eyes & Ears for more life and more light. They must intoxicate the others with the mead they drink from the Holy Grail— Because they are the wordfinders they are the trunk of the tree each is special the branches laden with the fruit of their imaginings for the pickings! When readers eat, the food nourishes the isolated self. Among the devoted and among the gatherings of more, on the outside, desiring to be lifted and transfigured as each becomes so, they infect others— The fire of poetry is a subtle brew that can do better than hard whiskey or all shades of beer. The masses are waiting for this largesse and the deliveries are not forthcoming as many poets with the hot afflatus attached to the Machine through the belly button, and enslaved.
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where are the chrysanthemums of Testaments the perfumes against malodor, mud flowering enterprises? Does the Supreme Court listen to a poet? On any case that light energy carries— A rush of verses equal to that Ode to the West Wind ask any prisoner why repetition is a steam to Liturgy— As a sonata will, introducing a Bard sifting a bucket of nuggets, heating it with that breath raising the crystals therein and washing them with eyelight as the watchers rise in their coffin seats with resurrection chills. Arcane knowledge is on the loose, Lost Learnings are making a comeback among the millions with their belly buttons wide-open, inebriated on Information of the simple incredible— Generations are rungs on that suspended ladder— The Linchpin is song, coming from the heart of this ecstatic planet— Ignorance is powerful as lemmings Newcomers adding layers of extra visions to the Sacrosanct Documents of unacknowledged interpreters of inspiration
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The Deity I know is worshipping at the Altar between a woman’s thighs her ruminating fortress is the Music of the First Poem Words fluid as hungry water for dry farming And person as poortree or a poem in touch or out of the sense ostracized as alien creatures Art is a Shadowland of another living, coiled xeroxes, boxed in perpetuities— The Multitudes out of date, to be repeated, indefinitely, as a routine nightmare in variations of administration, when no Deed seizes the urgency alchemizing the Fixed, squared in a personal revelation secure as dreaming Death. Life passing by or arriving as a world whose dimensions are never plumbed— 174
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The blind waiting for extra stimulation in both worlds— The multifascinations of the minutia and the elusive solids— That Paradise is in the Cargo of Plenty and unable to see what it is and who and when are in it stingy with the gold affinities— Catching and loosing it, that who one was linked to the dead active in disguises— poi em, peer em, em pire em, en quire em for a quo rem or in spiring— as an example aiming for the 2 Houses of Congress, half women and half men, just for the breakthrough, savoring the outcomes— The Past is in the nerve-systems of the Present— The Fundamentalism of one Game, cops and robbers, the Gorgon behind it, the restricting medium— The plenipotentiary pollution is inescapable, the masses between its blinders— the earth rolling in the swamp of mortal matter— Voices suffocating with the engulfing Chaos blinking at the screen, eyes afire—
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Small minds ruling a celestial miracle, searching for any sign of a superior Ascension— against the insidious incentive underpinning Society— The showpieces crowning Success, a day, a decade, a thriving death— At Chess with Information, stationed at a table whose legs are tied to apparitions— The Prison of the Solar Plexus of the multiple Self— The cross currents between Mind & Emotion bringing on the itch of isolation— & a Dragon is dancing through the interstellar gases By the separation of unvoting, the killer helplessness is staring up from the Ocean slime as a ruby on the forehead of a universe of Water—
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A grain of awareness is a composition of light-speed backfiring on its findings— The bursting firmament of the uncommon Soul. The Dictatorship of the Media stuck in implosions whirling from the impetus that gave it Birth dragging the entire works floundering in the love of Doom it cannot get free from— By avoiding Politics of any metier Poetry dries up in Deserts of words all Scriptures shrink inward at the weight of the weather— Stars are a fiery enigma, kaleidoscopes, a poem spys through— Temples, Pyramids, Skyscrapers are a maelstrom defining frontiers— Only words bring states of Ineffable Being— The Alchemy of Words in Action, altering the natures of existence. The no stepping anywhere, on anything Emptiness is full of the lust for giving—
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The great perfect happiness The Beloved all this came from is going back into
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Rhapsody of the God Fish
Ah the Omnipresence of Eros Sultans had harems and still do Krishna had cowgirls and his favorite Radha Monarchs had Gymnasiums of Erotica Emperors had the exquisite bold Arts of Geishas Kings had Sacred Virgins Queens had stallions at call Clinton in his clandestine Reign Coronated X-rated ongoing movies of the Millennium in perpetuity A slave of his libido President of the mightiest Empire ever on Earth the Supreme Playboy blessing kneepadded worshippers at the Fountain of this Creation target of the Media and revengers the Frigid still at the spine of the Nation Nothing is above the irrepressible evangelical Dynamo of Sex Only Love understands and never judges! Commander in Chief a prisoner to lies the sin against this Social Crusader and the Dream of a United States of the Planet O the Rapture in the Eye of the God Fish!
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Beyond 9/11
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Previous page: Signature from back cover of Hermit of the Clouds, Vincent Ferrini’s autobiography
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The Whole Song
this is a Mirror of the True Real Cruelty & compassion are cripple Crossed Killing is Madness in Control The Polarized is the Blinding sun The Religion of Business has been on an Almighty binge Plenty & Poverty sleep on the same EarthBed The Military Atom Machines are the Visible Vampires the pebble is the Mountain one by one name by name
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The solo country view is passé on this Space-Ship Put godmoney to Work for the World Urgent for delivering a pregnant Humanity centuriesoverdue The Dot in the Circle is the wheel the firmament is rolling with being the whole song Now in Re Verse the Ecology of Potentials erasing T error ism life is temporary & complete in a State of Final Days godmoney wants to be used generating the Inherent
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Zest creating the dynamics this keystone Generosity is ongoing & contagious america the Future present is here show what miracle making is one super tyrant cannot boss this Universe’s home remember our origin that evolving Revolution is the Blueprint each one enjoying, thriving in responsibility from the deepest inside to the farthest out that are variations of interrelating all at once the whole song is had
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A footnote my car’s number plate 911 MXL Myths Xenogamy transfer of pollen plant to plant cross pollination Liberation & that’s the autonomy of love I’m in my feet are Neptune’s enchanting the oceans
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A Fact of No Time
Reading The Whole Song at the Remembrance of 911 a boy of 4 was playing with a long twig when he heard the line Killing is Madness in Control he snapped it in half
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told to me by his father
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Appendix: Onions & Bread—From a Rediscovered Manuscript
A Rediscovered Manuscript
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In 1998, reminded by Sal Salerno that a “lost” manuscript called “Onions & Bread” might still exist, Vincent Ferrini undertook a search of his house. “Cleaning out my frameshop,” Ferrini recalls, “for the working table to replace my bathroom window before the Winter slams down on this house—plowing through and discarding there was the MS between old newspapers, I was shocked and elated, cool as Karl Marx, in a Mess you would not believe. It is all intact, written 1936, as dated on the MS, 1935 I got a job with the WPA, 1936 assembled these poems that appeared in small magazines and tried some publishers with no luck. As the axiom goes the Last shall be First. You can imagine my surprise seeing that MS, my first unbaptized child.” The style and themes of this collection are contemporaneous with those of the poet’s first published book, No Smoke (1941). Instead of portraits of individuals, as is usually the case there, “Onions & Bread” presents photographic snapshots of typical Depression-era scenes. We supply some examples from a collection that merits publication in its entirety.
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Churches
No mind but the Church and God Inoculating the poor like a goad On this real earth. Seeing eyes, blind To the joy of being, suffer bondage. This life, a halo meaning more For some harvest heaven out of this nightmare. Every Sunday an obligation for this state, And closet services in medieval stint. Antique statues, candles, at small price. After, always gas-lamps, and unsupportable pay Nurture starved, distorted, unmade shapes From ditches, tanneries, sewers, and shops. Under mantle of ignorance led by many Voices of robed parasites talking money, Submission, and God, for the good of workers’ lives, Preach to them ancient lies. The poor, one by one, die at starvation’s calling; And a trail of mourning after coffins. Life is the Church and to suffer These short years for the Hereafter. And the only happiness within reach Fouled and poisoned by priestly tools of the rich.
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Schools
Rooms on numbered rooms where children grow, Taking years out of bodies, giving nothing, Day after day, grade after grade, hollow and gray. Love starved teachers and spinsters and wooden men Teaching the innocent the world out of textbooks Crammed with dust, moulding lives bare as the moon, Feeding dead Knowledge to rooms of receiving skulls, Steer unknown thousands into darkness; Appointed by crooked committees; leeching upon schools Of boys and girls. Puppets, afraid for their jobs, some knowing the truth. The unformed seeds of the earth in these buildings Perpetuating death: and in the Government we trust. Blackboards and smell of desks, offices, and halls, False instructors charged with rare souls, create us Without truth of this country, why the conflict in our homes, hills,
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And works. With almighty power unprepare our lives For another world while spineless teachers remain safe; In annual tides turn millions of us out into this land of lies.
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Negroes
In removed sections, quadroon shacks Furnitured by burdens of the chain: Outcast flesh from the white world; Learning how to fight out of pain. Beautiful as night and their genius leashed. A race bought and sold wherever they band: The present oppression inherited From the past still the blight of this land.
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Prohibited from living up North: Choked in slavery and lynched down South. But against this long suppressing lot, Light in black eyes, and words of action in the mouth.
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Bookshop
Network of factories, bridges, and stars; Manufacturers’ and newspapers’ power Own workers squelched in hovel bars: Against this world, the bookshop, hour by hour. Abysmal streets criss-cross and ragbag figures drop In and out, while elevators stitch death Upon skies. In this darkness a red searchlight; the disinherited stop, Look, and read, quickened with reviving breath,
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Those afraid shun windows that reveal the truth. Heavy hostile air surrounds the revolutionary store Visited by eyes of the unpensioned and the youth. In this vulturing system, our guiding door.
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Mass Meetings
Factories and public streets and merchant towers Owning us, wrought against us; nothing belongs to us But the weight of hunger and destroying hours. Here like helpless atoms under frozen skies Posted by determined workers, girls, and boys Speaking leaflet meetings, hope for homeward eyes. Few are afraid, “they’ll get us fired”; the cold Look in blind faces; beaten scarecrows; fear, Like deadly disease: empty streets, the young, the old. How we gather in halls paid with coins from our sweated skin: And courage, live strength against the made world; Ears hungry, eyes and hearts warm with the truth in Our active waking; gas twitched into skeletons picketing These killing avenues, gates and factories; Sharply alive, sacrificing blood for bargaining.
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Signs of us concentrate, in mind and bone A kneading unity of light that shall take this world From the poisoning clutch of the owners for our own. Under iron earth the hostile streets and icy moon We weld pattern of love wherever we meet; Netting together, in this bond of fate, no more alone.
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Notes to the Poems
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Shoe City Ferrini’s first book, No Smoke, was published in 1941. The following poems in this section are from that volume: “The City,” “Jeffery Tallcott,” “Peter Joyce,” “Tanney Bronson,” “Nora Omen,” “William McCarthy,” and “The Factories.” Following the example of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology of 1915, Ferrini produces verse “portraits” of individuals, drawn from life, though at the urging of his publisher the real names of persons were changed to fictitious ones. Thus the volume includes a disclaimer: “Any similarity in this book to the names of persons living or dead in coincidental.” Ferrini’s concentration here is on the turbulent social chaos of Depression-era Lynn, Massachusetts. A second group of poems is from Injunction, published in 1943. The following poems are from that volume: “Fluoroscope of Evening,” “Workshops in Labor,” “The City with Empty Closets,” “Letter to My Brother,” “Forge Plant,” and “Termites in the Floor,” “Ignorance Escapes from the Tomb,” and “Under the Heel.” By this point, Ferrini had found work at the General Electric factory complex in Lynn, vividly described in several poems. The title reflects the common use of court injunctions to prevent labor union strikes during World War II. As a result of a review by Mike Gold in the Daily Worker, the book had a second printing. Blood of the Tenement, published in 1945, is the source of “The Reign of Beasts” and “Live Cemeteries.” In spite of general wartime employment opportunities, much human existence in Lynn remained poverty-stricken to the point of desperation. There was a painting by Ferrini on the book’s cover, and the frontispiece had the words “With a knife in the head / dead before we are born.” “Photograph of Starved Child Dumped in a Burial Cart” is from a postwar volume, Plow in the Ruins, published in 1946. The publisher, James A. Decker, also issued books by Louis Zukofsky, Will Wharton, and Alan Swallow. The poem’s haunting image may be said to summarize Ferrini’s indictment of social conditions people faced during the depression and the war. “Tanney Bronson”
The subject of this poem is the writer and political activist Truman Nelson (1911–87). His published novels are Sin of the Prophet, The Passion by the Brook, The Surveyor, and The Old Man. An overview of his work is provided by The Truman Nelson Reader (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). See pages xvi–xvii in the introduction
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of the present volume for details of the cultural collective he assembled in Lynn during the 1930s. “The City with Empty Closets”
“The Security Trust”: The Security Trust Company was located at 66 Central Square, in Lynn, with a branch at 33 Market Square. “Letter to My Brother”
This poem is addressed to the poet’s younger brother, Lindo Ferrini (1921–2003). During World War II, Lindo Ferrini served in the United States Navy on the USS Cherokee, an ocean-going tugboat that towed destroyers on the Atlantic Ocean. “Under the Heel”
“Southern Lords”: Ferrini is referring to factory owners in the southern region of the United States.
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Fishtown Ferrini’s move from Lynn to Gloucester in January 1948 was marked by a significant transition in his poetry as well as in his personal life. Though he continued to commute to the General Electric factory in Lynn for two years, he began a decade-long internal and artistic quest, searching for new forms of expression beyond the proletarian vision of his earlier work. Among his motives was the failure of radical working-class (including Communist) politics, under the burden of its members’ own mistakes and widespread government repression. “Fishcutters” is from his first Gloucester-based book, Sea Sprung, of 1949. This begins the poet’s long fascination with the lives and work of fishermen, on whom Gloucester’s economy largely depended. Ferrini’s next collection was The Infinite People, published in 1950, which he says “clarified my inlook and outlook of social progress, and I was at liberty with the title, undictated to.” Great Concord, the publisher of the volume, was a group of artists and intellectuals, including Esther Fremont and Frank Volney, that grew out of the radical collectives of the 1930s and 1940s. “Folksong” is from this volume. The Fortune Press of London published The House of Time in 1952, which included “A Little Autobiography” and “This House.” The latter poem, which first appeared in the spring 1949 issue of Imagi, caught Charles Olson’s attention, leading to his first meeting with Ferrini. The press had no contract with Ferrini but sent him copies of the book, which he sold. Among Fortune’s other authors were Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, and Roy Fuller. “IN the Arriving: prebirth” was published by Heron Press in Liverpool, England, in 1954, in a volume entitled In the Arriving, and constitutes Ferrini’s answer to Olson’s attack in “Letter 5” of The Maximus Poems. In the dedication Ferrini states “this poem /
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is addressed to / Charles Olson / whose drive, insight & perception are the mark of the / maker, the / Poet / with a voice most original, provocative & / contagious.” According to Ferrini, Olson regarded “In the Arriving” as “Your anti-Maximus Poem” and told him “It’s the best thing you’ve written.” By 1957 Ferrini was writing increasingly under the influence of Japanese haiku. The Square Root of In of 1957, from which excerpts are given here, marks another shift in the poet’s attention and style. During this decade, Ferrini experimented with new verse forms, drawn from a wide range of cultures. The mid-1960s represented the beginning of a true aesthetic synthesis for Ferrini. “The Other Side,” “The Garden of the Apocalypse,” “The Gold,” “Spades,” and “Aria” are drawn from I Have the World, issued in 1967. The Hiding One, published in 1973, is the source of “Dialogue with Thoreau,” and “Moon Soliloquy.” The publication of Ferrini’s Selected Poems in 1976, edited by George F. Butterick, provided an overview of his work to that date, as well as the first publication of “The Theia Mania of Charles Olson,” and “In the Wake of Night I Beheld the Generations.” “Folksong”
First published under the title “Folk Inscription” in The Infinite People, this poem appeared two years later, without title and author noted, on the inside cover of the first issue of Four Winds: A Quarterly of Arts and Letters (Summer 1952). From 1952 to 1953 Ferrini edited numbers one through four of Four Winds with his wife, Margaret, David H. Meddaugh, Ilmi Meddaugh, and Mary Shore. The first issue of Four Winds also contained Charles Olson’s “I, Maximus (Letter 2),” later revised to “Maximus, to Gloucester” for The Maximus Poems (1960). Ferrini’s editorial gambit on Four Winds would adversely affect his reputation due to Olson’s stinging criticism of his enterprise published in “Letter 5” of The Maximus Poems.
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“IN the Arriving: prebirth”
“From us”: Ferrini and Olson “A mantree”: Ferrini uses the symbolism of the tree to suggest a human being connected to the life of the cosmos. “Homer’s beard”: Homer is the name given to the author(s) of The lliad and The Odyssey. Homer is, in Ferrini’s sense, an immortal poet whose “beard” awakens and initiates Ferrini and Olson to the life of the poem. “Crow’s nest”: The lookout spot on the mast of a sailing vessel. “Northstar”: The North Star is the pole star at the end of the handle on the Little Dipper. Ferrini implies that the North Star yields a spiritual essence, which is love, that must guide these poets in their struggle against the forces of darkness. “The Other Side”
Betty Olson, wife of the poet Charles Olson, died in an automobile accident near their
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Wyoming, New York, residence in March 1964. While teaching at the State University of New York in Buffalo, Olson resided in Wyoming, where Ferrini visited him after Betty’s death. Driving the countryside with Olson, Ferrini was inspired to speak in consolation the words that subsequently became the first lines of the poem. “The Garden of the Apocalypse”
Ferrini uses the term “Apocalypse,” which means uncovering, to convey a vision of a new day that pushes man beyond a history of persecution and suffering. “Aria”
In this poem Ferrini confronts the suffering of Deirdre Ferrini (1947–63), his youngest daughter, who died of leukemia at sixteen years of age on New Year’s Day. A chapter of Hermit of the Clouds, Ferrini’s 1988 autobiography, is devoted to her. “The Theia Mania of Charles Olson”
Ferrini coins this neologism to convey a sense of the poet’s connection to divine madness. Theia is the child of Uranus and Gaia, according to Greek mythology. In eulogizing Charles Olson, who died in 1970, Ferrini acknowledges the poet’s intense relationship to the earth’s terrestrial current. “In the Wake of Night I Beheld the Generations”
This poem is addressed to Ferrini’s son Owen, born August 11, 1944. “Four Horses of the Apocalypse”: Ferrini obtains through this loaded phrase a revelatory signal designed to inform his “sons” about powers of transformation. It is worth noting that the four men who ride horses toward destruction in the sixth chapter of the Book of Revelation are missing from the action in this poem. “Dialogue with Thoreau”
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“They made a Society of me”: The Thoreau Society, founded in 1941 by Walter Harding.
Know Fish The first two sections of Ferrini’s “long poem” Know Fish appeared in 1979 and comprised book 1, The Lady of Misbegotten Voyages, and book 2, Da Songs. The first section concentrated on locating Gloucester from a historical and mythological standpoint, while the second section, an innovation in his work, consisted of poems written in ItalianAmerican dialect. In a sense, Know Fish represents Ferrini’s extended response to Olson’s challenge to express the entire culture and geography of Gloucester. It also demonstrates his intense involvement with local politics, including the already apparent problems with overfishing and the potential collapse of the town’s economy. Like No Smoke of almost forty years previously, there are numerous vivid verse portraits of local individuals, in-
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cluding politicians, eccentric and memorable “characters,” and so on. However, unlike in the earlier book, this time people often appear under their own names. These and subsequent volumes of Know Fish were published by the University of Connecticut Library, through the encouragement and support of George F. Butterick. “The Flood Time of Fishing”
“Parker Street”: Located on the waterfront in Gloucester. “Gorton-Pew”: Founded in 1849, this leading seafood company is now known as Gorton’s of Gloucester. “Council Meeting”
“Cante Hondo of Basso Profundo”: Wordplay to suggest vocal sounds coming from the depths of Gloucester. “Uroboros”: Also spelled Ouroboros, for the snake biting its own tail. “Pharaoh Otto Bosselman”
Otto Bosselman (1890–1983) came to the United States from Denmark at age sixteen, taught English to immigrants in the WPA, was a security guard at Sylvania Electric Company, and was active in the Temperance Mission in Gloucester. Ferrini recalls him as “an overall Bill Collector, who carried history on his rounds, shoulder tipped, a warrior in the outdoor class of Sam Adams, alcohol was his Nemesis, this Swede imbued with a European intelligence, all ways on the high road of the human condition, who lived the life he dreamt of.”
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“Mural of the Harbor”
“Fritz Hugh Lane’s odyssey”: Fritz Hugh Lane (1804–65) was a Gloucester artist known for his paintings of Cape Ann coastal scenes. “Conant’s Fault”: Named for early Cape Ann settler Roger Conant, who died in 1679 at the age of eighty-seven. According to Tolland and Windham Counties, Connecticut Biographies (1903): “His reputation was that of a pious, sober and prudent gentleman and as he was more strongly Puritan than the people around him he was chosen to head the settlement at Cape Ann, near Stage Head, on the north side of what is now Gloucester.” “Portogee Hill”: An area in Gloucester behind Our Lady of Good Voyage Church where many people of Portuguese ancestry reside. “Cativo”
Ferrini adapts the Italian word cattivo to suggest the resistance of a bad man or bottom dog. “Torch Moynahan”
The subject of this poem is Stephan A. Moynahan, a former mayor of Gloucester.
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“Fort Defiance”
“Fort Defiance” is not a specific place in Gloucester, but rather represents an emotional stance that resists change in the city’s distinctive neighborhoods. “Rag Picca: Trowaways”
“Da Chiesa”: Italian word for church, meaning here also the Roman Catholic Church and its hierarchy. “Da Summa Creche: Da Castagnaccis”
This poem is about a father and son surnamed Castagnacci, who cannot continue living in the same house together. “Duntouchables”
“da Zacrosanct, da Ka Ka ov Baal Shem”: Baal Shem (1700–1760) was a Jewish mystic who founded the new Hasidism in the eighteenth century. “Da Loss Ov Da Capt Cosmos: Cosmos Marcantonio, John Burnham, Benjamin Interrante, Salvatore Grover, Vito Misuraca, Jerome Pallazola”
In this poem Ferrini acknowledges the dangers of the ocean and the mysterious lives of Gloucester’s fishermen. Because records at the Sawyer Free Public Library show that Jerome Pallazola (1906–89), a fishing skipper, died at home on March 22, 1989, it is unlikely these fishermen died together at sea prior to the poem’s publication in 1979. “Patty Welch’s Dream & Mimi Dreamin”
Ferrini met the Welch sisters through the marriage of his son Owen to Mimi Welch, who is now deceased.
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The Navigators The third volume of Know Fish, titled The Navigators, appeared in 1984. It expands the concept of navigation to include all sorts of arcane mythology and lore and continues Ferrini’s exploration of his relationship with Charles Olson in a striking series of dream encounters. “One”
“The Wingaersheek of our Solitudes”: Wingaersheek Beach is located on the north shore of Gloucester. “Tlamatinimes”: Aztec word for poets, priests, and shamans. “August 5th, another lost year”
“‘The Big Oral Kid’ Socrates”: Ferrini is referring to Olson’s qualification of Socrates.
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See Olson’s essays “Human Universe” and “The Gate and the Center,” in Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), for his estimation of what followed from Socrates and his readiness to generalize. “Dayle Stanley, ‘The Social Dike’”: Dayle Stanley, born June 12, 1939, was a female singer and songwriter who once resided in Gloucester. According to Ferrini, Olson once referred to her as “The Social Dike.” “Mahabharata”: The great Indian epic of 100,000 verses. “August 7, 1976”
“That some persons think so, he is that fucked Mountain”: Ferrini is referring to the final stanza of Olson’s poem entitled “Cashes,” in The Maximus Poems (London: Cape Golliard, 1968; reprint, edited by George F. Butterick [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]), 189. This stanza uses the material of legends concerning intercourse between a woman and “the spirit of that mountain.” For the source of Olson’s poem, see George F. Butterick, A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 271–72.
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“Gloucester A.D. 1973”
“3500 years knocked out by Istorin”: Ferrini is referring to Olson’s poem “A Later Note on Letter #15,” part of which reads: “& that concept of history (not Herodotus, / which was a verb, / to find out for yourself: // ’istorin, which makes any one’s acts a finding out for him or her/self” (in Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems, ed. Butterick, 249). “At Half Moon Beach”: Located off Stacy Boulevard in Gloucester. “Force at South Station”: South Station is a railway station located in Boston. “Linda Parker”: Linda Parker, a Gloucester healer and poet, was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, on November 16, 1945, and died in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on July 3, 2000. During the last year of Olson’s life, she resided briefly with him in his 28 Fort Square flat. For a discussion of Linda Parker and Charles Olson, see Charles Stein’s remarks in “Charles Stein & George Quasha in Vancouver,” Minutes of the Charles Olson Society 41 (April 2001): 10–11. Linda Parker later changed her name to Linda Crane. Ferrini composed a poem, “Shaman Crane,” in tribute to Linda, and it was published in the literary quarterly House Organ 33 (Winter 2001). “Charley Olson”
The subject of this poem is Charles Peter Olson, who was born May 12, 1955, to Betty Kaiser, a student at Black Mountain College, and Charles Olson. “The Ghost of Rocky Neck”
John Clarke (1933–92), poet, editor, and English professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is the subject of this poem. Clarke’s books include Gloucester Transla-
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tion, Blake: A Mask, Lots of Doom, Green Field, The End of This Side, From Feathers to Iron, and In the Analogy.
The Community of Self The University of Connecticut Library continued its publication of Know Fish with a volume of this title, issued in 1986. It consists of Book 4, The Community of Self, and Book 5, The Illuminations. “At the Brink”
“Quick fortune, betraying Howard Blackburn”: Howard Blackburn (1858–1932) is one of Gloucester’s most famous fishermen and sailors. Called “the fingerless fisherman,” Blackburn lost his fingers to a freeze while rowing a dory to safety in a storm. See Joseph Garland, Lone Voyager: The Extraordinary Adventures of Howard Blackburn, Hero Fisherman of Gloucester (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). “Centennial Johnson”: Alfred Johnson (1847–1930) was nicknamed Centennial after deciding to celebrate the U.S. centennial by sailing and rowing a dory across the Atlantic. Johnson’s dory left Gloucester on June 15, 1876. “Charley Lowe, Gordon Thomas”: Charley Lowe is a deceased photographer for the Gloucester Daily Times. Gordon Thomas (1906–83) is the author of Fast and Able: Life Stories of great Gloucester Fishing Vessels (Gloucester: W. G. Brown, 1952). “Charles Olson, Phil Weld, & others”: Philip S. Weld (1914–84) was publisher of the Gloucester Daily Times and author of Moxie: The American Challenge (1981). “We Are the Wildflowers”
“I was over my head at the Feminist Rally to / Take Back the Woods”: Ferrini is referring to an event precipitated by the murder of Anne Natti in the Dogtown area of Gloucester on June 25, 1984.
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“The Winter of Ideologies”
“The Cosmos is Magdalen’s eye”: Mary Magdalene was one of the inner circle of followers of Jesus in the Gospel narratives. “Stale Supper”
“Sovietski’s a green coconut among the sunrise nations”: “Sovietski” is a neologism for the Soviet Union. “The Salt Marshes of Our Lady”
In this poem, Ferrini offers “benediction” to the eternal feminine that abides with him in Gloucester’s marshes.
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“Mount Ann”
“O Aum of Ann!”: Ferrini is extending the most sacred symbol in Hinduism, “Aum,” to Cape Ann. “The Date”
“At the Pilgrim Cemetery”: Pilgrim Cemetery is located in Peabody, Massachusetts. “Or by twilight at Mt Adnah’s”: Mount Adnah Cemetery is located in Gloucester.
This Other Ocean The final sections of Know Fish were published in one volume by the University of Connecticut Library in 1991. Book 6 is entitled Shadows Talking and Book 7 is called This Other Ocean. “Ellis Island Rediscovered”
Ellis Island: located in New York Bay, southwest of Manhattan, served as an immigrant station of the United States from 1892 to 1943. “The Gold Miner”
George F. Butterick (1942–88), critic, editor, and poet, is the subject of this eulogy. Butterick edited and wrote an introduction for Ferrini’s Selected Poems (Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1976). He is also the author of A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (1980). The Collected Poems of George F. Butterick was published by The Poetry/Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, in 1988. “Because Colette & George the Second & Aaron have you in them”: Ferrini is referring to Butterick’s widow and two sons.
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“July 4, 1776, Sign of Interdependencies”
“The Crab’s everywhere shallow water is”: The sign of Cancer in the Zodiac is the Crab, under which the Declaration of Independence was signed and Ferrini was born. According to esoteric lore, Cancer is the sign through which spirit descends into matter.
Magdalene Silences This volume, issued by Igneus in 1992, is concerned with Ferrini’s trip to the part of Italy from which his family came, and with themes of “old world” culture in general. Igneus Press books were published by Peter Kidd who, says Ferrini, “is a family man, and makes his living as a gardener, as fine a person as any could hope to engage.” “Journey to Raiano”
Raiano is a village in Abruzzi, Italy, where the poet’s father, Giovanni Ferrini, was born
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on June 24, 1892. June 24 is also the day of Vincent Ferrini’s birth, the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, and the time of the summer solstice. “At the valley of the montagnia”: The Italian word for mountain is “montagna.” “& Dante Vittorio”: Ferrini’s cousin, who resides in Raiano. “Altar di Jano”: Italian for the Altar of Janus, the Roman god with two faces. Janus is the god of entries and beginnings. “You scowling at the Eleusinian music”: From the ancient religious rites celebrated at Eleusis in honor of Demeter. “In the ruins of La Chiesa di San Venanzio”: Italian for the Church of Saint Venanzio. Vincent Ferrini’s original name was Venanzio. “At 27 via Garibaldi”: Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82) was the Italian general and revolutionary whose capture of Sicily and Naples led to the formation of the modern nation of Italy. “Vittorio”: Another reference to Ferrini’s cousin in Raiano. “Oreste”: Oreste Ferrini is the father of Vittorio. “In a L’Aquila dream”: L’Aquila, meaning “eagle,” is the capital of the province of Abruzzi. “Oreste’s vault in the Cemeteria”: Italian word for cemetery. “Cousin Postiligione”: A cousin to Ferrini; he was a poet who immigrated to the United States and returned to Italy.
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“Love Song for the Jews”
“As the arms of Isaiah”: Isaiah is the first of the major prophets in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. “But the fire between Salome & Solomon”: Salome is the daughter of Herodias and Herod. In Matthew 14:1–12, she is the dancer who was rewarded with the head of John the Baptist on a platter. According to The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade ([New York: Macmillan, 1987], vol. 13, 408), Solomon is “the son of David and third king of Israel and Judah (c. 960–920 b.c.e.).” “Enoch & Lao Tzu led me into your thaumaturgies”: Enoch was the son of Jared and known for his 365-year walk with God before angels took him up to heaven (see Genesis 5:24). Lao Tzu was the author of Tao Te Ching and a founding figure of Taoism. “O carriers of the Shekinah”: Jewish theology describes the Shekinah as the visible manifestation of the divine presence. The Shekinah is understood in the Kabbalistic tradition as the female soul of God. “Miriam”
Miriam is the sister of Moses and Aaron. According to the Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993 ed., 520), Miriam “is called a prophet in Exodus 15:20, when she leads the women dancing with tambourines after the victory at the Sea of Reeds. Then in Exodus 15:21 she is said to sing the first verse of the song just attributed to Moses (15:1– 18).”
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The Magi Image The Magi were “wise men from the East” who, according to the Bible, presented gifts to the infant Jesus shortly after his birth. This collection, published by Igneus in 1995, continues Ferrini’s concentration on reinterpreting and vivifying stories from various sacred texts, including but not limited to the Bible. “IHS”
The title for this poem comes from a transliteration of the Greek letters iota, eta, and sigma, the first letters of the name Jesus. Sections of the poem are here excerpted from the complete text. “The Rocks of Wisdom”
“Dr. McDougal”: W. Scott McDougal, M.D., Walter S. Kerr Jr. Professor of Urology, Harvard Medical School, Chief of Urology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “& Denise belly-dancing around my bed”: Denise, a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, is known to Ferrini only by her first name. “10 of my planets are into Illuminations”: Ferrini is referring to the horoscope of his birth, which he considers a map of the self.
The Indweller With his recent work, Ferrini has entered a realm of ecstasy and revelation that is possible only after years of preparation and successful experimentation. Igneus published The Indweller in 2000. Its title suggests the poet’s security within the realm of the self, but in contact with all other life.
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Beyond 9/11 After the tragic events of September 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed four airplanes into New York City’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside, Ferrini like many others experienced a prolonged traumatic shock. A year later, the community of Gloucester held a commemorative exhibit at the North Shore Arts Association, at which Ferrini read “The Whole Song.” The “boy of 4” is Steven Christian Moody. Ferrini told the Gloucester Daily Times: “The poem is about life. September 11, that’s a part of it, but it’s only another phase of the hysteria of the world.” Times reporter Barbara Taormina observed: “Unlike other artists who have focused on America’s suffering and the country’s resilience, Ferrini uses his poem to consider the reasons behind Sept. 11.” Ferrini added: “America is the most powerful nation and it is hated and was attacked because of that power. We are a country with the ability to do so much good, and if we don’t do that good we’ll lose it.”
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Notes to the Poems
201
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Vincent Ferrini Bibliography
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Books of Poems No Smoke. Portland, Me.: Falmouth Publishing House, 1941. 2d ed., Gloucester, Mass.: Curious Traveller Press, 1999. Injunction. Lynn, Mass.: Sand Piper Publishers, 1943. 2d ed., 1944. Blood of the Tenement. Lynn, Mass.: Sand Piper Publishers, 1945. Tidal Wave: Poems of the Great Strikes. New York: Great-Concord Publishers, 1946. The Plow in the Ruins. Prairie City, Ill.: James A. Decker, 1946. Sea Sprung. Gloucester, Mass.: Cape Ann Press, 1949. The Infinite People. New York: Great Concord Publications, 1950. The House of Time. London: Fortune Press, 1953. In the Arriving. Liverpool, Eng.: Heron Press, 1954. Timeo Hominem Unius Mulieris. Liverpool, Eng., and Gloucester, Mass.: Heron Press, 1954. Mindscapes. Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Peter Pauper Press, 1955. The Square Root of In. Gloucester, Mass.: Heuretic Press, 1957. The Garden. Gloucester, Mass.: Heuretic Press, 1958. Book of One. Gloucester, Mass.: Heuretic Press, 1960. Mirandum. Tralee, Ire.: Heuretic Press, 1963. I Have the World. London: Fortune Press, 1967. The Hiding One. Brookline, Mass.: Me & Thee Press, 1973. Ten Pound Light. Gloucester, Mass.: Church Press, 1975. Selected Poems. Edited by George F. Butterick. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1976. Know Fish. Preface by Paul Metcalf. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1979. Includes Book 1: The Lady of Misbegotten Voyages, and Book 2: Da Songs. Know Fish. Book 3. The Navigators. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1984. Know Fish. Books 4 and 5. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1986. Includes Book 4, The Community of Self, and Book 5, The Illuminations. Know Fish. Books 6 and 7. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1991. Includes Book 6, Shadows Talking, and Book 7, This Other Ocean. A Tale of Psyche. Bedford, N.H.: Igneus Press, 1991. Magdalene Silences. Bedford: N.H.: Igneus Press, 1992. Deluxe Daring. Illustrated by Jane Robbins. Boston: Bliss Publications, 1994.
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The Magi Image. Bedford, N.H.: Igneus Press, 1995. Deus Ex Machina. San Francisco: 3300 Press, 1998. The Indweller: Emperor of Mars. Bedford, N.H.: Igneus Press, 2000. The Mysterium of Matter. Charlottesville, Va.: Anabasis/extant Press, 2002.
Plays Five Plays. London: Fortune Press, 1959. The Man His Father Knew. Mutiny 2, no. 2 (1959). War in Heaven. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1987. Undersea Bread. Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1989. Includes Nightsea Journey, Bedrock, and The Fisherwomen.
Autobiography Hermit of the Clouds. Gloucester, Mass.: Ten Pound Island Book Co., 1988. “Vincent Ferrini.” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Vol. 24. Detroit: Gale, 1996. “Featured Poet: Vincent Ferrini.” Italian Americana (Winter 2000): 67–69.
Edited by Ferrini Four Winds. Numbers 1–4. Gloucester, 1952–54. Ferrini & Others. Gloucester: Nessuno, 1953.
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Anthologies “Innermost I Land.” The Best Short Plays, 1952–1953. Edited by Margaret Mayorga. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953. “Telling of the North Star.” The Best Short Plays, 1953–1954. Edited by Margaret Mayorga. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954. Poets of Today. Edited by Walter Lowenfels. New York: International Publishers, 1964. America One. Edited by Steven P. Lillybeck. Ipswich, Mass.: America One, 1982.
Translations Italian American Poets. Translated by Ferdinand Alfonsi. Edited by A. Carello. Catanzaro, It.: Antonio Carello Editori, 1985 [in Italian and English]. We Believe in Humanity. Moscow: Raduga, 1986 [in Russian]. Hermit of the Clouds. Translated by Shingo Tajima. Tokyo: Japan UNI Agency, 1990 [in Japanese].
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Biography and Bibliography “Vincent Ferrini.” First Printings of American Authors. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1979. “Vincent Ferrini.” Contributed by George F. Butterick. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 48. Detroit: Gale, 1986. “Vincent Ferrini.” Contemporary Authors. Vol. 158. Detroit: Gale, 1998.
Audiotape The Trunk: Selected Poems and Commentary Read by Vincent Ferrini. Produced and edited by John Carden. Beverly, Mass.: Carden Productions, 1990.
Film Poem in Action. Produced and directed by Henry Ferrini. Gloucester, Mass.: Ferrini Productions, 1986. A documentary about VF.
Web Site Vincent Ferrini: Poet. .
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Homages Café Review 2, no. 10 (1991). Edited by Steve Luttrell and Mark Souders. Portland, Me. Includes poetry by VF and contributions by Peter Anastas, John Clarke, Cid Corman, Paul Cultrera, Larry Eigner, Michael Franco, Alan Golding, Paul Green, Raffael de Gruttola, Robert Kelly, Terry Kennedy, Peter Kidd, P. J. Laska, Steve Luttrell, Dorothy Shubow Nelson, Dan Raphael, Bill Shively, Bob Snyder, Thomas Taylor, Leon Tebbetts, and Joseph Torra. Split Shift 1 (1996). Edited by Roger Taus. Santa Monica, Calif. Includes poetry by VF and contributions by Bob Snyder, Peter Kidd, Shaun McNiff, Terry Kennedy, Alan Golding, Edward Kaplan, P. J. Laska, Alan Sawyer Jr., Jim Leftwich, Paul Sawyer, Kenneth Warren, and Peter Anastas. Munn, Jim. “Of Prophets, Past and Present.” Gloucester Daily Times, March 31, 1998. Cook, Greg. “The Oracle: Poet Vincent Ferrini Is Turning 90.” Gloucester Daily Times, May 31–June 1, 2003.
Selected Criticism Van Duyn, Mona. “Conscience: Personal, Political, Philosophical.” Poetry 66 (August 1945): 284–89. McGrath, Thomas. “Poetry: Form and Content.” New Masses, July 16, 1946, 20–22.
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Manderal, Alexander. “Mr. McGrath—For and at the People.” Great Concord Tide, February–March 1947, 13–16, 33–34. Peragallo, Olga. Italian-American Authors and Their Contribution to American Literature. Edited by Anita Peragallo. New York: S. F. Vanni, 1949. Ferrini entry, 99–100. Stuart, Dabney. “Seven Poets and a Playwright.” Poetry 104 (July 1964): 258–64. Miller, Wayne Charles. A Gathering of Ghetto Writers, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black, and Puerto Rican. New York: New York University Press, 1972. Ferrini entry, 200. Metcalf, Paul. “Driving through the Underbrush: A Survey of Small Press Poetry.” Parnassus Poetry in Review 7 (1978): 224–51. Robb, Christina. “Songs from a Fisher of Words.” Boston Globe, April 11, 1980. Laska, P. J. “The Dialectics of Poetry: Know Fish.” Minnesota Review (Fall 1980): 128–30. Golding, Alan. “Vincent Ferrini’s Know Fish.” Chicago Review 32 (Autumn 1980): 51–55. Kaplan, Edward. “Vincent Ferrini in Hell’s Kitchen: St. Clement’s Poetry Festival.” In Menu, 19–21. Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich.: Lunchroom Press, 1985. Whitehead, Fred. “Life Is the Poem!—A Tribute to Massachusetts’ Vincent Ferrini.” People’s Culture n.s. 31 (1996): 1–3. Butters, Chris. “Vincent Ferrini’s No Smoke.” People’s Weekly World, April 1, 2000. Reprinted in Political Affairs (April 2000): 26–28. Note: The library of the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester is the repository of Ferrini’s manuscripts, letters by and to him, drawings, monotypes, and artifacts, as well as books related to his life and art. The Special Collections Department at the University of Connecticut Library has a similar but more selective archive.
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Index of Titles
Alchemy of the Poem, The, 173 Angel of Death, 70 Answers, 122 Aria, 45 At the Brink, 103 August 5th, another lost year, 92 August 7, 1976, 94
Fishcutters, 29 Flood Time of Fishing, The, 59 Fluoroscope of Evening, 12 Folksong, 30 Foreknowing, 143 Forge Plant, 17 Fort Defiance, 76
Ballad ov da Cut, 74 Big Question, The, 125 Blacklisted, 71 Blessing of the Gasoline Tankers, 72 Bookshop, 189 Bulldozers Get the Fishermen’s Institute, The, 66
Garden of the Apocalypse, The, 42 Gas Poem, The, 133 Ghost of Rocky Neck, The, 99 Gloucester A.D. 1973, 96 Gold, The, 43 Gold Miner, The, 137
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Cativo, 73 Charley Olson, 98 Churches, 186 City, The, 3 City with Empty Closets, The, 15 Council Meeting, 64 Da Loss ov da Capt Cosmos, 80 Da Summa Creche: Da Castagnaccis, 78 Date, The, 120 December 26, 1969, 88 Dialogue with Thoreau, 52 Divinin Rod, 81 Duntouchables, 79 Ellis Island Rediscovered, 129 Fact of No Time, A, 183 Factories, The, 10
Holiest of Holies, The, 113 Hunger, 135 Ignorance Escapes from the Tomb, 20 IHS (excerpts), 161 Interrogation, The, 130 In the Arriving (excerpts), 33 In the Wake of Night I Beheld the Generations, 48 January 23, 1970, 89 Jeffery Tallcott, 4 Journey to Raiano, 147 July 4, 1776, Sign of Interdependencies, 141 Letter to My Brother, 16 Little Autobiography, A, 31 Live Cemeteries, 23 Love Song for the Jews, 152
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Mass Meetings, 190 Miriam, 155 Moon Soliloquy, 54 Mount Ann, 118 Mural of the Harbor, 68 Negroes, 188 Nora Omen, 8 November 3/1977, 95 Olson Strain, The, 114 One, 85 Other Side, The, 41 Patty Welch’s Dream & Mimi Dreamin, 82 Peter Joyce, 6 Pharaoh Otto Bosselman, 67 Photograph of Starved Child Dumped in a Burial Cart, 26 Poem Is Made of, A, 132 Preface to the Art of Fishing, A, 105 Rag Picca: Trowaways, 77 Reign of Beasts, The, 25 Rhapsody of the God Fish, 177 Rocks of Wisdom, The, 167
Sea Medicine, 111 September 3, 1970, 90 September 29th of the lost year, 91 Song of Rage, A, 63 Song of the Amaranth, 166 Spades, 44 Square Root of In, The (excerpts), 39 Stale Supper, 112 Tanney Bronson, 7 Termites in the Floor, 18 Theia Mania of Charles Olson, The, 46 This House, 32 Torch Moynahan, 75 Under the Heel, 22 Visa, 131 We are born sleepworking, 101 We Are the Wildflowers, 109 Whole Song, The, 181 William McCarthy, 9 Winter of Ideologies, The, 110 Workshops in Labor, 13 Wraith Reading, 124
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Salt Marshes of Our Lady, The, 115 Schools, 187
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Index of Titles
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Vincent Ferrini has published thirty books of poetry, several plays, and an autobiography. A people’s poet, he has written about class tensions, political exploitation, and institutionalized greed. Ferrini has resided in Gloucester, Massachusetts, since 1948. Kenneth A. Warren is the founder and editor of House Organ, a letter of poetry and prose. His own poems have been published in several books and broadsides, as well as in numerous journals. Warren is the director of the Lakewood Public Library, Lakewood, Ohio.
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Fred Whitehead writes and lectures about intellectual and cultural history. He is the editor and publisher of two scholarly newsletters, People’s Culture and Freethought History. He is the editor of Don Gordon’s Collected Poems.
The Whole Song : Selected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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The American Poetry Recovery Series
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Collected Poems Edwin Rolfe; edited by Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks Trees Became Torches: Selected Poems Edwin Rolfe; edited by Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt Edited and with an Introduction by Paula Bernat Bennett Black Moods: Collected Poems Frank Marshall Davis; edited by John Edgar Tidwell Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War Edited by Mark W. Van Wienen The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War Edited by Cary Nelson Collected Poems Don Gordon; edited and with an essay by Fred Whitehead Complete Poems Claude McKay; edited and with an introduction by William J. Maxwell The Whole Song: Selected Poems Vincent Ferrini; edited and with an introduction by Kenneth A. Warren and Fred Whitehead
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