Searching for Joe Ceravolo

I was introduced to the work of Joseph Ceravolo (1964–1988) in the summer of 94. The American Poetry Review reprinted a generous selection of poems, along with an introduction by Kenneth Koch, from the then forthcoming The Green Lake Is Awake: Selected Poems. Although I had only been reading poetry for little more than two years at that point, I did have some experience with avant-garde poetries,* primarily via Rothenberg's Revolution of the Word, Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, Sulfur, New American Writing, O!!Zone, and Exquisite Corpse. Still I had never come across any poems quite like Ceravolo's before. Poems with language so familiar, so often simple, it was actually child-like, yet that still managed to render everyday emotions in their true complexity. A poet of “Everyday Life” in all of its extraordinariness—if we would just slow down to see it. Which is one of the things Ceravolo's poetry does best: slow us down.

      Why does light diffuse
      As earth turns away from the sun?

      I want to give my food
      To a stranger. I want
      to be taken.
      What kind of a face do

      I have while leaving?
      I'm thinking of my friend.

      (from "The Wind Is Blowing West"
      in The Green Lake Is Awake)

Now, ten years after the publication of The Green Lake, Ceravolo's work is again receiving deserved attention. This time it comes from Fence magazine (Spring/Summer 2004), where six poems are reprinted along with a short "appreciation" by Anthony Hawley. It's a significant event because Ceravolo is on the verge of being lost. As Hawley explains, it's nearly impossible to track down Ceravolo's books. The Fence selections come from two "VERY hard to come by" volumes, Wildflowers Out of Gas (1967) and Millennium Dust(1982). Though generally not up to the level of The Green Lake poems, they do have the same energy. An energy derived largely from a clipped/Cubistic syntax ("He played with / He put canoe in river, strong eyes // like a rainbow / declines to go play"). Also present are Ceravolo's almost trademark interrogatives, which Clayton Eshleman once described as, “fall[ing] somewhere between ‘koans’ and maddening 4-year-old questions,” such as "Can I ever fade people?" and "Does a fly need to be / ugly?" These poems left me with that old familiar feeling of wanting more.

A few months passed after my “discovery” of Ceravolo until, in the fall of 94, I found more of his work in John Bernard Myers' The Poets of the New York School and Padgett and Shapiro's Anthology of New York Poets. Soon after, I picked up The Green Lake, but that was it for a while.

One poem I had expected to see in The Green Lake, but did not appear, was "Wounded Deer" which ends: "In what hungry woods / should I be walking to get hit / and killed? To be born / like a fire that went out." It's perfect really. Read aloud, the lines sound of staggering, which reinforces the imagery, and the use of the interrogative helps C approach material that could easily be sentimental. Also, the paradoxical last line, which I dare say would scalp ol' Emily D., besides offering a new take on the life-death continuum, echoes Tu Fu: "Borne headlong.../// Life whirls past like drunken wildfire (from "Winter Dawn", trans. Rexroth).

A couple years later, working for a bookstore, I noticed that Transmigration Solo could still be ordered. Surpirsed, I gave it a shot, not wholly confident it would arrive, as other listed books I'd tried to order by Ted Berrigan and Sotère Torregian were no-gos. But, in a couple weeks, I had received not just any copy, but a numbered and signed copy. Not usually the kind of person who gets excited about signed paraphenalia, I have to admit I thought this one was pretty cool. But in the years since, there's not much else of C's that I've been able to find, just Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, which I had already read through interlibrary loan (but found at a book sale for a dollar!), and o•blek 5.

In the spring of 1989, o•blēk printed posthumously seven poems by Ceravolo. The pieces are presented as “from Mad Angels,” which to my knowledge has never been published. For all I know it was never completed, but this is some of the best work not to find it's way into The Green Lake. These poems, like the ones in Fence, force the question: When will there be a collected poems? If we're getting Berrigan’s in 2005, could C’s be far behind? Yeah, unfortunately, it could. Rather than clumsily comment, as I have above, on the poems from Mad Angels, I will simply post one. Tomorrow or the next day.

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* There's no right word for what I mean here. "Alerntaive" and "otherstream" marginalize themsleves and yield ground to official verse culture. "Postmodern" is sloppy from overuse, and anyway wouldn't really fit the Rothenberg anthology. "Post-avant" also would be historically inaccurate here. And as far as "experimental," for which I have much sympathy as shorthand, it really doesn't say much if we follow Stevens's lead (to paraphrase): every poem is an experiment. So I stick with the loose-fitting "avant-garde"—at least for the above instance.