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On the Poetry of Joseph Ceravolo

by KENNETH KOCH

Modern poetry takes a large step in this poetry that has not yet really beeen followed by others. It is as if one could see the print of that step in the snow, and then a great beautiful snowy wilderness but no more tracks. In this respect it resembles the work of such poets as John Wheelwright or Gerard Manley Hopkins, its stylistic innovations so bound up with the expression of a particular sensibility as to be, even though inspiring, inimitable.

Ceravolo's poetic subject is often a moment, caught, as it were, off guard and open to all kinds of other moments and their sensations:

Then there is nothing    think!
the angular explanation
boom!     he was a parade
             with a gift
a question cable of
             thought
a thermos savage in
            the hotel
in vera cruz color
            sand the boat

This is not "just language" (no such remarkable description as that of a man as "a parade with a gift" could be that), but descriptive language arranged and disarranged in such a way as to keep the feelings and ideas fixed in it, fresh and shapr, every time the passage is read. What these lines say, in a prose way, doesn't make sense in an ordinary way - a human being is not (not without further explanation, in any case) a parade, a cable, or a thermos savage. But what the lines suggest (which is what they say if you take them on what might be termed "poetic faith") makes sense of a kind that is only found in poetry.

Another example of a Ceravolo "moment," from this same poem ("Water: How Weather Feels the Cotton Hotels)" has a more concentrated, almost microscopic intensity, while at the same time seeming quite large and open:

   earthenware
drawing its own
tonight on some
particular wasp

I knew Joseph Ceravolo and his poems for twenty-five years. He would send me a poem like "How Weather Feels the Cotton Hotels," and, every time, I'd gasp. It was wonderful and I didn't know how he had done it. It faded like the mirage of a gorgeous building: then, as soon as I reread it, it was there again. What was Ceravolo doing? Whatever it was, somehow in four lines he brought me intense, clear feelings of wasps on earthenware, of night, of feelings wasps must have, that clay pots might have. A new - or, rather, old but unlighted - part of my experience was given light. His poems were a sort of amazing perceptual archeology.

Rather than explaining ("Seeing this wasp landing...") or conventional poeticizing ("O wasp alighting!"), which risks making such moments banal or false, Ceravolo's method uses indirection, rapid transitions, disassociation, and other kinds of apparent "nonsense." These oddnesses are there not be resolved but to be given in to, so that the poem can have its say. If one can do that, it's certainly worth it.

There are, in this poetry pairs of seemingly unconnected words - "rice Spring", "Sail glooms", "boom autumn"; and seemingly unconnected phrases and lines - "As far as I look we are across A/boat crosses by. There is no monkey in me/left: Sleep." There are many odd usages, words put together in "incorrect" ways - "These are my clothes to a/boat" - and syntactically unfinished statements. 

Hold me
Tilly only,   these are my
clothes   I sit

These oddnesses take place in a context of simplicity, quietness, and directness. They aren't avant-garde explosions for their own sake, but occur when they are necessary to the difficult, exciting expressions of whatever has to be said.

There's nothing to love in this
rice Spring.
Collected something warm like friends.
Sail glooms are none...

One could sing this. One would know well enough what it meant.

Ceravolo was influenced by William Carlos Williams, sometimes, though his poetry goes elsewhere. In the work of both there is a blurring expansion of identity, a sort of giving oneself completely to a tree, an insect, flowers. Williams' aim, in such poems as "Daisy," "Queen Anne's Lace," and "The Young Sycamore," is usually accomplished in his merging with the thing observed so as to describe it more convincingly. Ceravolo has a tendency to go back and forth from one identity to another.

I am a dirty little bug
Plants!, because
I'm small  because there's no courage
in me    will you come home
with me? And
stay    With us on the bed

When Ceravolo, like Williams, is merely looking, he can be trusted to say what is right there, in the simplest, most direct manner - "man walking with his/shoulders haunched and tufts/of white duck hair in the back /of the head!"; when he goes beyond ordinary perceptions, this atmosphere of accuracy stays with him. It is a quality rare among poets, a combination of clear down-to-earthness with the sort of wild dreaminess of Lorca or Rimbaud, as in this passage from "May":

Morning oh May flower! oh
May exist. Built.
When will water stop
Cooling? Built, falling. Reeds. I am surprised...

After the excited, ambiguous invocation (of May), a number of profound ideas are suggested with surprising simplicity and speed: the notion that the month of May has been "Built"; the wondering if water will keep its qualities; the realization that water also has been built, and built, probably, so as to be falling (even falling things are built). After this there is a return to plain physical presence, a fact ("reeds") and plain everyday consciousness ("I am surprised"). Ceravolo's work is full of pleasures like these. Sometimes his sensations are expressed in language that seems as physical as the things he is talking about:

Oak oak! like like
it then
       cold some wild paddle
so sky then...

Even the most simply descriptive poems about something seen have a characteristic lift:

The fish are staying here
and eating. The plant is
thin and has very long leaves
like insects' legs, the way
they bend down.
Through the water
the plant breaks from the water:

the line of the water and the air.
Told!

The slowed-down, superimposed perceptions of lines 6, 7, and 8 are extraordinary and all Ceravolo's own.

To read these poems is to be refreshed and surprised. They are the real thing. Their audience may always be limited by one of their great qualities: they are aesthetically uncompromising, and make no gestures or appeals outside themselves. Anyone lucky enough to read them, however, will have one of the great true experiences of twentieth-century poetry.

Kenneth Koch was a poet and critic until his death in 2002. This essay is from the introduction to The Green Lake is Awake, which you can purchase here.

"Drunken Winter" - Joseph Ceravolo (mp3)

"Dangers of the Journey to the Happy Land" - Joseph Ceravolo (mp3)

"Autumn Time, Wind, and the Planet Pluto" - Joseph Ceravolo (mp3)

TRANSMIGRATION SOLO

See the black bird
in that tree
trying out the branches, puzzled.
I am up there with you
puzzled against the rain
blinking my eyes.