I think tonight I am beginning to understand some impulses
That a friend of mine Joe Ceravolo seems to have been having
And which others have certainly had
Which makes no difference
But which might make him seem terribly silly for a while
And which if I’m right I’m beginning to feel myself
About now and therefore sympathize with
It’s a cheap sympathy when you have to come about it like this
But who cares
Listen, Joe Ceravolo
You’re OK
-- Ron Padgett
'Joseph Ceravolo (a civil engineer who was born in Queens and lived much of his life in New Jersey) emerged in the late-1960s as a promising, in-the-wings figure of the hip, art-connected New York School poetry scene. But the attention from his first full-length book—the brilliant Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (Columbia University Press, 1968), winner of the first Frank O’Hara Award for Poetry—eventually began to wane. By the time he published his masterpiece in 1978—Transmigration Solo (Toothpaste Press), a small-press collection mostly written 18 years earlier while spending a gloriously-inspired autumn in the outskirts of Mexico City—Ceravolo was no longer in poetry’s spotlight. His admirers, though fervent, were mostly reduced to fellow New York School veterans. A decade later, Ceravolo died of cancer; he was only 54, and left behind just a handful of small-run, out-of-print collections.
'But Ceravolo’s poems have remained vibrant and compelling enough to be passed on between generations of poets like a secret—like the hidden location of some remote, only-reachable-in-negative-tides mystical coastal cave. Stylistically, Ceravolo’s singular poetry is, on the surface, primarily cubist and insistently abstract. His strongest poems are typically short, no longer than a page: bursts of pure sensory aesthetic and graceful motion wound around a fearlessly-probing, celestially-agog voice. His best work is an inseparable mesh of boiled-to-the-bone wonder and fear, where every moment seems to come at you unexpectedly.
'Beneath Ceravolo’s obvious abstraction and from-all-angles, quicksilver imagery, his poems have a subtle, but firm narrative and linguistic architecture that holds everything together. His are not the random, stir-the-pot-&-let-the-synapses-fire, pop-culture or obtusely-personal snippets of imagery and phraseology that are the hallmark of post-modern poetic descendants like the LANGUAGE school. It is, in fact, Ceravolo’s commitment to an undercurrent of continuity and progression (both within and between poems) in collections like the gorgeous Transmigration Solo that gives his work its depth and allows him to coherently explore complex and larger themes despite the linguistically, syntactically and imagistically fragmented nature of the individual pieces.
'The results of Ceravolo’s constantly opposing poles are poems that seem to hover at the border of visibility, flickering between states of solidity and abstraction—merging the earth-bound with the ephemeral in a way that reflects our mind’s inexact fusion of senses and thoughts. In addition to his intricate inter-poem structures, Ceravolo’s collections create a strong intra-poem architecture that unites and expands the scope of the work as a whole. Both a linguistic economist and an intertwiner, Ceravolo weaves throughout his collections repeated images and language that become his poetry’s own mythology. These elements build and evolve as the poems unfold, each reappearance drawing new lines in the collection’s archeological sediment.' -- R. Salvador Reyes, Tottenville Review
_____
Extras
Literature Book Summary: Collected Poems
The Elkcloner 'Crossfire' (lyrics by Joseph Ceravolo)
Stephen Emmerson covers Joseph Ceravolo
______
Further
Joseph Ceravolo Website
The Joseph Ceravolo Project
Audio: Joseph Ceravolo reading his poetry @ PennSound
JC @ The Project for Innovative Poetry
Joseph Ceravolo @ Goodreads
Jerome Sala on JC @ espressobongo
Three poems by JC @ American Poetry Review
'Reading Joe Ceravolo's 'Migratory Noon' with Ron Silliman'
'Poetry as music: A different way of thinking'
Buy 'Collected Poems'
_______________________
Letter to David Shapiro, 6/29/65
Dear David,
I was so glad to get your letter. We never did meet at Weequahic Park for lunch but they’ll be other times for that. I used to go to the park every day and write. Each day I’d write a few lines of what I thought was a complete poem. Then I put them all together and called it The Green Lake Is Awake.
Anita is crying now. Paul is sleeping and Rosemary is getting ready for bed. She has it pretty rough being with them all day long. We seldom get out. Sunday we went to the movies of 8th St. N.Y. and saw The Red Desert by Antonioni. It’s a beautiful film about a woman or women in general, and how they are so confused in this world or the anti-nature world that man trys [sic] to make for himself. Sometimes it’s such an unnatural world where none of his real feelings come through. On the way out of the movie we met Ted Berrigan going in. He is publishing my long poem and it will probably be out next month. Rosemary made a beautiful cover for it. It’s called FITS OF DAWN. I’m starting to get nervous and excited about it.
I read your poems a number of times. Of the three little ones I liked “What do you say, bank named for a cripple” etc. best. Of the long one part I I liked better than part II. In fact I found something nice in all of them but sometimes a line or word brought me down and I couldn’t get with the reality that you must have felt. What I mean is at the sacrifice of making it a sure poem, you may have taken something from it. What I felt most was Part I.
I think I’m obsessed with reality, I don’t mean realism but that sense of reality, like “I’m really here and I feel it” even though I can’t explain it. Something like that. Which everyone feels and you recognize it when you see it in a poem.
As for my own poetry, I haven’t been writing much at all. Maybe it’s working inside me but who knows. Sometimes I think maybe I’ve done the best I could and everything [cut off in photocopy] through my head. I go to the clinic at 9:00 pm on tuesday night and talk to my psychiatrist for an hour. Many unsettled things. Who wants to transmit my neurosis to my children? or hold back love to my wife? I’ve had needed to go for a long time and finally I’ve done it.
I just can’t wait for my vacation. We are going down the shore. The Jersey shore is so beautiful. We went to North Wildwood last year and that water and sand and us playing in the sand is on my brain.
Tell me about where you are. Is Julie with you? I hope she’s all right. That was a pretty big experience she went through; and you too.
A Music & art form. It sounds great. Or is it — not as good as it sounds. That word I obliterated was “boring.” I didn’t want to give you any ideas. But I can’t really imagine it.
NEWS ITEMS
1. Newark reservoirs are very low. Everyone is walking around dirty.
2. Paul is always dirty but gets a bath every night and a shower.
3. Every time the weather is really hot the fish in the lake keep jumping out and you think you saw something but it was real.
4. Rosemary is almost finished with therapy. Her husband is just starting.
5. No amount of wisdom or learning can make a person live in the present. He just has to live.
6. The west does not understand the east.
7. Nor does the east “ the west.
8. They are both the same — naked.
9. Poetry is a flock of geese flying out of formation being in formation.
10. This news is bullshit. But it was real?
Regards to Julie. Love from Rosemary.
Joe
____
Book
Joseph Ceravolo Collected PoemsWesleyan University Press
'Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo’s aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and Dante, William Blake and St. John of the Cross, this collection shows how Ceravolo’s poetry takes on a direct, quiet lyricism: intensely dedicated to the natural and spiritual life of the individual. As Ron Silliman notes, Ceravolo’s later work reveals him to be “one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation.” Many new pieces, including the masterful long poem “The Hellgate,” are published here for the first time. This volume is a landmark edition for American poetry, and includes an introduction by David Lehman.' -- WUP
_______
Excerpts
Lighthouse
All this summer fun.
The big waves, and waiting
(the moon is broken)
for the moon to come out
and revive the water. You look
and you want to watch as
men feel the beer breaking
on their lips, and women seem like
the sun on your little back.
Where are you closer to everything?
in the plants? on the photograph or
the little heart that's not
used to beating like the waves' foam?
A wasp is
looking for a hole in the screen.
No. There's no man in the lighthouse.
There's no woman there, but there is
a light there; it's a bulb.
And I think how complete you are
in its light. Flash......... Flash.....
....................................
And I think of how our own room
will smell; You lying on one bed
and we in the other,
facing the... flash.....
.....................Flash
Love Song
Like a punch in the face
planetary lights and stars,
do I see Spring.
The ground is frozen.
Dawn like the colors of an old fire
illuminates the south-east.
The ground is frozen solid,
yet not to permafrost,
yet not to this inner core
which glows like coals for you.
Overcast comes, overcast goes
the ground is frozen but not the core,
but not your eyes
which glow like coals
but not to permafrost.
Where Abstract Starts
I sit here it is 4:00
Should I say it?
Death occurred to me
And the fit over bounded
My physical thought
As I lie here
Great Plains
What, no one here? No one
around here? No buffalo?
Like sleeping on the toilet bowl...
Drifting toward love...
The dogs are out this morning
jumping on top of each other
Is there a real release with them?
But, no one here.
There's no buffalo, only dogs,
this morning, where dawn
and a wild wild bird fly away.
Autumn Torches
Monday morning in the Americas
cloudy bright, cloudy bright,
cloudy bright, clouds to bright.
The earth people going to work.
So this is what it’s like
to be in a trance awakened by the fires
and silence in the cold
with soft voices disappearing.
The day coming on like an intoxication
with no control on the watery shore
of struggle in autumn.
Monday morning
the screech of my eyes
opening into dawn
My eyes speeding to the woman
standing over me;
In my ear
a mother and father returning
for an instant, the bread and coffee
on the hot stones
in the next room dream.
I have turned in my sleep.
Do I enter the deep?
Monday morning creation ascending
to celestial paradigm
in the conflagration
of dumped computers
and magnetic erasure of world data.
The coffee staining
the arms straining,
a ladle pouring
ingots in the noise.
The strength returning
to the center of the crossed body
Another kiss another sigh
Monday morning:
in the sky
a bird’s cry.
Nothing
Nothing exists that does no empty.
Who are you feeling?
Who do you bite in the morning?
Our health?
when we're sick
is the body coming.
Our love,
a mountain fuming
in the ocean
like a graceful race such as
black. When the shores overtake
in the continent.
When the heroes are phony,
and our house less than rubble
will there be a bite, a memory still left?
*
p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Hope the new Suede lives up to the billing for you. That 'hearts being in it this time' thing has been the press release squib that cried wolf too many times for me to take it at heart's value. Really strange about evil youtube. How would that work? I don't know anything about that techy kind of stuff. Log off? The new Bowie isn't growing on me like I'd hoped. Nice things here and there, though. For me, the new Wire album, which I'm getting today, is the excitement point du jour. ** S., There is top secret important stuff on cassettes. At least on the ones in my LA pad. Yeah, sounds like you need a change. Canada? Why not? Where there? Paris is good, I think. Let me think. Yeah, it's good. I'm spiritually good and physically trying. ** Paul Curran, Thank you, Paul! Yeah, what's with the hostage-taking, long haul illnesses going around right now? Mine too is taking forever to breathe its last. ** MANCY, Thanks a ton buddy! ** Paradigm, Hi, Scott! Yeah, I was happy to find that MacKaye photo, as you could tell. Me too, on my novel. Logic says I'll figure something out. Next week is when I'll dig in and concentrate and find out, I hope. I hope your projects give you some give. Sometimes there's just nothing your consciousness can do, as you said. So weird. But lack of inspiration/ focus makes for a vague and ultimately flimsy enemy at least. What's the new music you're imbibing? ** Cobaltfram, Thanks for the Boulez link. 'IJ' has my 'one of the best' seal. I think inching laboriously toward health stability would be more accurate. Better than nothing. I can't imagine getting through 'AK'. I think I tried once. I guess I just don't believe in what books like that believe in so much. Admiring salute to you for doing so. Yury did mention something about that. Cool. Oh, yeah? Nicholson Baker said that, did he? Barring the unforeseen, yes, my great friend Zac and I will be going to Japan for about three weeks in June. Mega-excited about that! ** David Ehrenstein, That back-up singer doc sounds fun, yes. ** Steevee, At last! Everyone, go over to Slate and read the superb Steevee aka Steven Erickson's no doubt fantastic article on 'Badlands' and serial killer films -- 'How to Shoot a Serial Killer'. That does sound like you went through the wringer. Back when I was an Editor at Spin and wrote for them constantly, they changed Editor in Chiefs at some point, and a piece I wrote ended up having maybe two paragraphs that were actually written by me in it, and that was the end of working with them for me. So excited to see 'Spring Breakers', more than ever. ** Toniok, Hi, Tonio! Thank you kindly. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Thank you a lot, man. Yeah, I didn't set out to make it re: my novel and its problems, but it ended being useful, and its shape was ultimately dedicated. Mm, I would say 'To the Wonder' is more connected to what Malick was doing in 'ToL' than being some giant leap. They're different kinds of films, but, like I think I maybe said, he's furthering the kind of editing and short shots that he was working with in 'ToL' into a continual strategy, and the inter-character dialogue is even more extremely minimal. He's working with imbuing speed with the contemplative and a quality of gradualness. It's very intricate stylistically, and the decisions feel more intuitive than before maybe. Yeah, you should definitely see it. I thought it was stunning. ** Alan, Hey! Weird, yeah, I saw your comment, but then my eye must have made some kind of leap due to scrolling around or something when I was in the responding phase, very sorry. I will take that recommendation, and thank you very much! ** Un Cœur Blanc, Oh, thank you, my friend! Thank you so much! ** Sypha, Actually, there were two Harry Styles things in there. Ugh, so, are you getting a doctor to try something else or upping your dosage or something? Nice length on that short story. I like that length. Well, that news is very cool anyway. ** That seems to be it. Joseph Ceravolo has been a very underrated 'New York School' poet for ages, and now his stuff has been collected and made available at last, and I thought that was an occasion to celebrate, and there you go. See you tomorrow.