Review: Joseph Ceravolo, Collected Poems

Joseph Ceravolo. Collected Poems. Edited by Rosemary Ceravolo and Parker Smathers. Introduction by David Lehman. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. $35 hardcover. $16.99 eBook. xxxi + 560 pages.

Joseph Ceravolo (1934–1988) was a poet of the New York School’s second generation — whatever that means. (As the variousness of the poets grouped under that label becomes more recognizable, the label becomes little more than a quick note as to time and place.) Living and writing apart from po-biz, the institutional networks of favor (curried) and favors (traded), Ceravolo devoted his energies to his family, his poetry, and his work as a civil engineer. It seems that at some point he even took leave of the Lower East Side poetry community born of the New York School.

The appearance of the Collected Poems follows a pattern of publication that we’ve seen with the work of another second-generation New York School poet, Ted Berrigan: early aboveground publication, followed by fugitive books from small poet-run presses, a posthumous selected poems from a trade press, and a collected poems from a university press.¹ Ceravolo’s Collected includes six previously published books and a large number of unpublished poems, most notably the twelve-year accumulation of Mad Angels (1976–1988). The Collected roughly doubles what had been available of Ceravolo’s work.

The Ceravolo familiar to me is the maker of poems whose surfaces look something like these passages:

Arrange the geological brush, the wasp,
the part that makes it,
and out with a dog noise,
a night and the airplane lung.    (“Life of Freedom”)

flea you say
“geese geese” the boy
June of winter
of again
Oak sky    (“Drunken Winter”)

These surfaces are made largely of nouns and verbs and prepositions, parts of speech glued together, so to speak, to make wholes with no obvious contexts beyond themselves. Such poems suggest cubist miniatures, presenting everyday materials in new and unexpected ways. One of my favorite short Ceravolo poems in this vein is “I Like to Collapse”:

   Saturday night      I buy a soda
Someone’s hand opens    I hold it
It begins to rain
Avenue A    is near the river

So much to consider: notations of time, place, and weather; the parallel lines of street and waterway; and a moment of commerce — or is it intimacy? Is the hand waiting for payment, or to be held? Is the first “it” the hand, or the can? Are we following a lone pedestrian, a couple in love, or a parent and child on a schlep in the rain? Part of what’s needed to find pleasure in such poetry is a willingness to be happy with unanswered questions.

Reading through this volume, I now find such poems far from typical. Ceravolo was always the most oracular of New York School poets, with bursts of language that suggested the influence of Kenneth Koch (one of Ceravolo’s teachers):

Flare! prostrates! thirsty!
Undoing!    (Fits of Dawn)

O flower of water’s vent!    (“Passivation”)

But Ceravolo’s frequent “O” (twenty-two poems here begin with one) is no Kochian joke. The Collected Poems suggests that Ceravolo’s apostrophizing, exclamatory energy is deeply rooted (as is Koch’s) in the poetries of Romanticism, early and late. I hear William Blake:

with the performing angel
on the hill of paradise
already seen from a garden’s ray    (The Hellgate)

And Walt Whitman:

I’m far from a window.
Yet I am window and
feel the multicolored pushes
through open window self.    (“Floating Gardens”)

And Jack Kerouac:

ah chirp of seen
Bang my tide    (Fits of Dawn)

And in the title Mad Angels and in much else, Allen Ginsberg:

O holy mass, o holy waters
O holy woman, man, and rain    (untitled poem)

Romantic influences are everywhere in the later poetry, which is marked by a primal vocabulary — sun, grass, tree, wind, heart, dirt, body, blood — and greater plainness of statement. It is as if, after making beautiful, mosaic abstractions, Ceravolo has begun to sketch and paint and photograph. The poems of INRI (1979), twenty syllables apiece, are full of pith and wit:

This morning I could
walk and walk.
That’s freedom.
But I drink this coffee
before work.    (“Freedom”)

The last poems in this volume, gathered under the title Mad Angels, move toward greater expansiveness. Many contain observations from Ceravolo’s weekday commute from New Jersey to New York, as he notices fellow travelers and the urban scene:

           Elizabeth! Elizabeth!
What dreams the American spirit
had for you    (“Railway Box (Deo Te Salve)”)²

There are translations from Saint John of the Cross, poems that comment on events in the news, poems of love, sexual and familial, and moments of shining clarity:

A guitar of noon, a guitar
of lightning,
a guitar, aloft!    (“Guitar Ode”)

As a much younger reader, I was delighted to realize that it wasn’t contemporary poetry I disliked but one version of it: the genteel domesticity of the so-called workshop poem, the little anecdote dressed up in strained metaphors and similes. Ceravolo’s Collected Poems is an antidote to anecdote — a poetry of energy and invention that risks everything. Here is life and food for future years.³

¹ The relevant Berrigan publications: the Grove Press edition of The Sonnets (1967), the Penguin Selected Poems (1994), and the University of California Press Collected Poems (2005). Ceravolo’s Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (1968) was published by Columbia University Press. A selected poems, The Green Lake Is Awake (1994), was published by Coffeehouse Press.

² It helps to know that Elizabeth is a city in New Jersey.

³ This sentence adapts two partial lines from William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”: “in this moment there is life and food / For future years.”

[Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book. Cover image from the publisher’s website.]

Smith going backward

In Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor, who is not a doctor, speaks in mighty and fantastic monologues. A small sample:

“We say someone is pretty for instance, whereas, if the truth were known, they are probably as ugly as Smith going backward, but by our lie we have made that very party powerful, such is the power of the charlatan, the great strong! They drop on anything at any moment, and that sort of thing makes the mystic in the end, and,” he added, “it makes the great doctor.”

The simile “as ugly as Smith going backward” sounds as if it has vernacular authority, but try as I have, I find no source for it other than Barnes’s novel. Like the punchline “No soap, radio,” the simile sounds as if it means something, but what? I think it suggests someone who is so ugly that he does us a small favor by turning as he walks away.

I know of one other Smith going backward: an early chapbook by the poet Steve Carey owes its title to Barnes. (Does anyone else know that?)


[Steve Carey, Smith Going Backward. San Francisco: Cranium Press, 1968. Cover illustration by Peter Kanter. A long-ago used-book-store find.]

The book’s title poem seems to pay brief homage to Nightwood with the line “in moods strange as a fictional doctor.” I will guess that Carey was reading Nightwood and that the novel, like so much else — street sounds, weather, a cold sore, Oreos — found its way into his work.

Here are the beautiful last eight lines of another poem from Smith Going Backward, “Half a Western”:

When five and again when six comes
everybody just yells a name and
walks upstairs swinging keys
Myself, Buzz Sawyer, Beetle Bailey
we bother the breezes for the coat of RJ Reynolds

The mystery of me is mine
the book no one knows I’m writing
Times with all my heart I wish it showed

 
[Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) and Steve Carey (1945–1989). Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Rochelle Kraut. About “Half a Western”: Carey’s grandfather and father were Harry Carey and Harry Carey, Jr., actors with long careers in cowboy films and much else. Buz Sawyer (one z) was a comic strip. Beetle Bailey is one.]

DARE needs help

John McIntyre has put out the word that the Dictionary of American Regional English needs help.

Les Blank (1935–2013)

“He shot what he wanted, captured it beautifully, and those subjects are now gone. The homogenization of American culture has obliterated it”: director Taylor Hackford, quoted in the New York Times obituary for filmmaker Les Blank.

I can vouch for The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1970) and Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980). Neither is currently available from Netflix. The films are available from Blank’s website, and samples may be found in the usual place.

Repurposed

Other repurposings
Bakeware : Dish drainer : Doorstop : Tea tin

[For clarity: the first five came with the box.]

Rebecca Schuman on graduate study

Rebecca Schuman: “After four years of trying, I’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job — and if you go to graduate school, neither will you”: Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor (Slate).

Schuman’s narrative reminds me of the tale told in Chapter Sixteen of The Grapes of Wrath: “You goin’ out there — oh, Christ!” The tale’s anonymous, ragged teller is the man who’s been: he’s been to California, he’s seen what’s there, and he’s heading back home to starve. Nothing he says can persuade the Joads to turn around: they have nothing to go back to. Perhaps Rebecca Schuman’s account of grad school though will persuade some aspirant undergraduates to rethink their lives’ trajectories. There are, as Schuman concedes, jobs, but the odds are against you, whoever you are.

I remember being told as a prospective doctoral student that “There are, of course, no jobs.” I nodded and thought, “Well, I’ll somehow get one.” Delusional, yes? Back then the odds were about fifty-fifty, and I was lucky. Today, the odds are worse.

Teenaged multitasking

[“Teenager Pat Woodruff pondering homework while listening to radio in living room.” Photograph by Nina Leen. United States, 1944. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

This young lady appears to be the epitome of the tech-savvy analog native, digging the tunes and getting the homework done.

A related post
Studying alone, really alone

About machine-scoring

In the New York Times, a report on machine-scoring college writing:

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. . . .

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

It is worth asking: is this scheme meant to “free” professors for other tasks, or for unemployment? Machine-scoring seems to point toward a future in which the human presence is ever more superfluous for the work of teaching and learning.

Especially galling is the claim, from University of Akron professor Mark D. Shermis, that critics of machine-scoring tend to come from the nation’s elite schools, where human beings do a much better job than machines. “There seems to be,” he says, “a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.” Indeed. The great variety of institutional affiliations represented by the signers of the Human Readers petition against machine-scoring suggests that opposition to the practice extends well beyond elite schools. Thoughtful and helpful evaluations of student writing by what the Times article calls “human graders” can be found at all levels as well.

My mantra re: technology, which I will now repeat (because that’s what makes it a mantra): technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. And its converse: technology makes it possible not to do things, not necessary not to do them.

Roger Ebert (1942–2013)

From Life Itself: A Memoir (2012), quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times obituary:

I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Roger Ebert was a son of east-central Illinois. Champaign’s fifteenth Ebertfest takes place later this month.

A better Life Photo Archive search

Arjan den Boer has created a better tool to search Google’s Life Photo Archive: Better search for LIFE Photo Archive. I just tried it out:

A search for duke ellington : LPA: 34 results; Arjan’s search: 156 results.

A search for post office : LPA page: 38 results. Arjan’s search: 218 results.

A search for typewriter : LPA: 45 results; Arjan: 158 results.

Arjan’s search not only yields far more results; it presents those results in a legible uniform size, twenty to a page.

The Life Photo Archive is a wonderful place to get lost. It’s now easier than ever to get lost and stay there. Thanks for sharing your work, Arjan.

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March 12, 2014: As Arjan wrote in a comment, Google has a new way to search Life photos. Thanks for the memories, Arjan.