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Beach huts, Berck, Pas de Calais, France: photo by Gzzz, 13 July 2012
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
Leopard gecko (Eublepharis macularius): photo by George Chernilevsky, 9 August 2009
Plebejus pylaon nichollae copulating (female right, male left) on a leaf of Astragalus, Mount Hermon, Israel/Syria: photo by Gideon Pisanty, June 22, 2012
Salvia pratensis (Meadow Clary, Meadow Sage), flower, Karlsruhe, Germany: photo by H. Zell, 16 June 2012
Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988): Lighthouse, from Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (1968)
"Published in 1968, Spring In This World of Poor Mutts contains the poems which remind me most of my father.
"His writings seem to reflect him being a man from 9-5, a fish on the weekend, and a summer lighthouse tourist in the warm sun.
"Perhaps these are simply the ways I remember him the most."
-- Jim Ceravolo
18 comments:
This is beautiful; a poem that could only have been written at leisure.
The magical indolence of beer breaking on lips, time to look and to feel.
Thanks WB, I had thought you might enjoy this one.
A quick word about the poet, who's not as well known as he ought to be.
Joe Ceravolo, son of Italian immigrants, born in Queens, a civil engineer and regular family guy, was living in New Jersey with his wife and kids at the time he began sending me his extraordinary poems, which were (and remain) like nobody else's. I gratefully put the haunting Stars of the Trees and Ponds in Paris Review #38 (Summer 1966), the amazing Ho Ho Ho Caribou in #44 (Fall 1968), and a number of other poems in my mimeo series Once.
So much is made of whatever in any epoch is thought "new". Later on, the new becomes the old. In most cases. But there are exceptions. Looking back at my review of Joe's 1965 book Fits of Dawn, I can tell that I had not yet caught up with this kind of newness. I still feel that way now.
"Motions of consciousness," I hazarded, "are caught abstractly as gestures, signs, like the cave paintings of primitive hunters that convey profound involvement not by likeness but by inventive strength of form..."
In case anybody's interested:
TC on Fits of Dawn, Poetry, CX, 2 (Summer 1966), pp. 110-11
Joe died much too early, of cancer.
Such undiluted poetic genius and imaginative generosity shall not come round again soon.
A couple of other Ceravolos:
Joseph Ceravolo: Dusk
Joseph Ceravolo: May
I like this very much ... the swinging between the small and the eventful...being both significant
Sandra,
Yes, I agree, that swinging between worlds... English is such a hard and "concrete" language, that sort of fluency is much more difficult to achieve (than in, for example, Spanish).
Ceravolo is a naïf writer in the best sense: he comes to the inextricably intertangled worlds of experience and dream with a child's awed openness and wonder, and brings back his visions without relying on the training-wheels of logic, "appearances" and judgment.
Curiously, there actually exist aw-shucks Yankee-literalist would-be poet types who feel confused, made uncomfortable, nay, even threatened by this sort of primal poetic magic!
Dear TC: Joe and I were supposed to read together at St. Mark's, and I was very much looking forward to meeting the author of INRI, Transmigration Solo, and Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, all of which I still have, of course. But about a month before, someone called me from the Church to tell me he had passed away unexpectedly. What a terrible loss. (He died in 1988, not '68.) I see that Wesleyan is bringing out a Collected Poems of Joe's in December.
Hey Terry, yes, the greatest loss.
And the greatest boon is the little help from one's friends with one's insomniac typos. (Fixed it now, thanks!)
very nice Tom...thanks!
"oak oak / like like"
has always rung in my head with my memory of JC's unique and vividly childlike poems first read in those '60s mimeos. You put it so well, Tom, as always, and this one is a lighthouse. I look forward to further flashes.
The moon breaks in little pieces
out on the lawn in the grass
by the hose where her tongue
hung out generously
she is
a dog that summer of cats
scratchy grass
and now when I contemplate using
grammatical drugs
like ellipses
I think of her with no crutches
but paws paws paws.
I did not know there was such a blue
in Karlsruhe
negative space
in the Meadow Sage
deer head outline
or the head of a mutt.
I borrow the words
look for the fence
to see if I trespass
but in Europe the laws
are different
anyone can walk past
your place
peer into windows
without asking.
Here
shotgun is ready
at the door
pit-bulls and bigger
bark with teeth.
A wonderful poem. The child/man remembers. Life is small things pieced together with love and attention.
Thanks much for this one, Tom!
You refer to "the nativity of speech" in your review, TC, and this is crucial. What Ceravolos does isn't some kind of tidy representation (telling the moment again). The scene is happening in language at the moment that we read, forever newborn. The words make the beach, the men and women, the wasp and the lighthouse happen; nothing laboured, just breaking in on us like tides and beer and beauty. Without discretion, nothing guarded, the poem is speaking always.
"Openness and wonder" is just right - a holy gift to have.
The "little heart" could be the heart of the poem, I think - something like a thrush's heart.
What can be caught
what catches (the poet's attention)
too many choices
and not each choice but
a blind telling
____pain
in lingering too long
on any one _____shelter
at the beach
that day in France
the blue violet in Karlsruhe
almost French
gecko's twisting crawl
like a mutt
the mix
friendlier than
the cruel surreal
nice to meet you here
Mr. Ceravolo
nicer
pastel.
Thought glimpsed
myself
that summer
close up like
cliff bowl
finally some feedback
sand
impression summarized
when I got up
a short shadow at first
and then a longer one
delicate person
boneless
spine and idea
sun not in one spot
the waves
Waimanalo
soupy ankles
finally dis-
covered
only it washed
back in
seaweed man o' war
stinging tails
from the Azores
filling station
tame area sleepy
by day
Tom,
"Where are you closer to everything?" -- in JC's "Lighthouse" it seems, thanks for bringing it to light here.
9.13
grey whiteness of fog against invisible
ridge, jay calling from branch in right
foreground, no sound of wave channel
do “figure in a few strokes,”
while these and there
sense of seeing which means
that, as such, action
grey white of fog against top of ridge,
circular green pine on tip of sandspit
"The 'little heart' could be the heart of the poem, I think - something like a thrush's heart."
A curiously affecting fancy that, WB.
And why not.
Thanks, Tom, for the links to your previous posts of Joe. "Ho ho ho caribou" brought back the most memories, but all are great little Homerics. I don't suppose there is any prose criticism by Joe; his poems stand alone. Berrigan comes to my mind before Koch. But I've always much to learn.
mammas, nourishing mammas, always
holding you as I
love you and am
revived inside you, but
die in you and am
never born again in
the same place; never
stop!
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