Joe Ceravolo (seated) with Rosemary Ceravolo and Ira Joel Haber, early 1970s. Photo by by John Perreault.
Why would it make sense to analyze select poems by a disparate group of younger poets working today via one particular poem by Joe Ceravolo? Wouldn’t it be better, if one wanted to make the case that Ceravolo is newly relevant, to take his entire oeuvre as a reference field? And even if his poetry might presage formally (through its informality) some things some poets today are doing, surely there are many other ways they are writing that have nothing or little to do with Ceravolo, or have much more to do with a wide range of poets from diverse periods.
What follows are excerpts from Poetry as Music: A Different Way of Thinking, a panel discussion organized by Vincent Katz and Tim Peterson as part of their Quips and Cranks series on poetry and poetics. This discussion took place at The School of Visual Arts, New York, March 17, 2011. The panelists were poet and critic Kimberly Lyons, poet and critic Anselm Berrigan, and painter and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail Phong Bui. Katz and Peterson were the moderators.
Lisa Jarnot. Photo on left by Joan Beard Photography, 2012.
Through my exploration of the poetic sentence and the prose poem, I have become fascinated by the work of American poet Lisa Jarnot, author of the trade poetry collections Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001/Salt Publishing, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003), and Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008).
Over the past decade, it has become increasingly common to hear poetry scholars devoting more attention to the phenomenon of the poetry reading in both its live and recorded formats.
