'Fits of Dawn' (1965) and 'Wild Flowers Out of Gas' (1967) by Joseph Ceravolo.
I wrote this little appreciation in 1976 for the Poetry Project magazine The World. I’m pretty sure it was the second piece of prose about poetry I had ever done. This was a special issue (#30) of The World devoted to reviews, interviews, etc. For all the poetry written and published around The Project from the late ’60s through the mid-'70s, there was little interest in criticism or poetics, both of which smacked of the Establishment. I know that I absolutely loved the poems of Joe’s that I had seen, the three early collections plus a few in magazines like Locus Solus, Art and Literature, and Big Sky, and I remember wanting to do a lot of quoting.
Joe Ceravolo and I read together at the NYU Loeb Student Center in a Sunday afternoon series organized by Kenneth Koch. Joe read his poems over excerpts from Italian opera played on a small cassette player. I read from a long poem in progress, subsequently lost, that included snippets from that morning’s New York Times Book Review.
Joseph Ceravolo, 1967. Photo by Photo by Vito Giacalone.
I am going to center my reading of Joseph Ceravolo’s work on The Green Lake Is Awake, (Coffee House Press, 1994), which in all its modesty is the current extant selected of Ceravolo’s work. Readers of his poetry will welcome the imminent comprehensive collected, that’s for sure. In TheGreen Lake Is Awake, the lovely introduction by Kenneth Koch provides a graceful, incisive, and friendly opening to a complex poetry, but more readings and responses are way past due.
Joe Ceravolo in Washington Square Park, April 1964. Photo by Rosemary Ceravolo.
At the end of a thorough close reading of a Joe Ceravolo poem, which he identifies as “Migratory Moon,” Ron Silliman in his essay “Migratory Meaning,” apparently written “circa 1982,” provides a twist: “‘Migratory Moon’ is not the title of Ceravolo’s poem, but the result of a typographical error. The word in Transmigration Solo is ‘Noon.’ A single letter transforms the work.”[1]
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.
