EXTENDED SHORTAGES
I must remind you how serious I’ve become,
Almost grave (though still immensely likeable).
Love threatens to carry me off
Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.
Counterweight! I need a counterweight.
I read history late into the night,
A scavenger, loading up
On high deeds and disillusionment,
Treachery and hope, until I am unable
To hop over a footnote.
An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon,
A scotch and soda atop the King James,
Eventually a whiff of pity comes my way,
Not for me but for that sad Titan,
The dim-witted one who has to bear
The weight of heaven and earth*
Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.
Then I can snooze, snicker at my own
Grief and shortcomings and snooze.
When I wake and rise and slowly dress
With dust motes whirling madly around me
In that lovely solemn light, I do not risk
Even thinking about you until I feel
The weight of all I recall sink to my feet
And then in a bow to Philetus,**
I reach for my shoes.
-Paul Violi (First published in Mississippi Review's Poets of the New York School issue, 2003)
*Thirteen trillion trillion tons.
**Philetus of Cos, poet, teacher, famed for his love lyrics, admired by Ovid and Propertius, tutor to Ptolemy of Philadelphus, so small he had to wear lead shoes lest in the desert wind he be blown away.
Paul Violi
1944—2011
Paul Violi was an avant-garde poet. Waterworks, a short selection of his early poems, appeared in 1972, and In Baltic Circles was published the following year. He authored eleven books of poetry, including Harmatan (1977), Splurge (1982), Likewise (1988), The Curious Builder (1993), and Fracas (1999). After receiving his Grants to Artists award in 1999, Violi released Breakers (2000), a selection of his longer poems, and Overnight (2007).
The expanded text of Violi's first collaboration with printmaker Dale Devereux Barker, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes (2002), is a collection of non-fiction prose. Violi and Barker's art books, including Envoy; Life is Completely Interesting (2006), have been acquired by many libraries and museums.
Subsequent to his 1999 Grants to Artists award, Violi was given The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001) and a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).
Prior to his 1999 FCPA grant, Violi had received grants from the Ingram Merrrill Foundation (1979), The New York Foundation for the Arts (1987), and The Fund for Poetry (1988, 1992). He was also the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships (1980, 1986).
Violi was managing editor of The Architectural Forum from 1972 to 1974 and worked on freelance projects at Universal Limited Art Editions, researching correspondence of poets and artists and assisting Buckminster Fuller while he wrote the text to Tetrascroll (1982). As chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, Violi organized a series of readings at The Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1983. He also co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, which produced poetry chapbooks, a poetry magazine called New York Times, and Broadway: A Poets And Painters Anthology (1979), edited by James Schuyler and Charles North.
Violi graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in English and a minor in Art History. At the time of his death he was teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and in the graduate writing program at The New School. He also taught at New York University, The Dalton School, Sing-Sing, Stevens Institute of Technology, Bloomfield College, State University of New York at Purchase, and Scarsdale Teachers Institute. (The Foundation for Contemporary Arts)
I am indebted to Ann Violi, the poet’s widow, for the biography above, for this photo, and for permission to republish the poem, which first appeared in Mississippi Review’s Poets of the New York School in 2003.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One): Paul Violi
Paul Violi’s gregarious and self-effacing “Extended Shortages,” shares James Schuyler’s poetic domesticity, creating landscapes of the indoor, the close at hand. He greets us with a humorous disclaimer of humor: “I must remind you how serious I’ve become, / Almost grave (Though still immensely likeable).
But suddenly he warns of impending danger: “Love threatens to carry me off / Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.” We are reminded of contemporary dance’s fervent moments of extreme buoyancy, when flying costumes seem almost to mate.
Then comes a welcome solution: “A counterweight!” The one that chooses him is history, that weighty discipline, that he reads “late into the night / A scavenger, loading up on high deeds and disillusionment, / Treachery and hope.” The reading lasts until the buzzardized speaker can no longer “hop over a footnote.” How many times have current events made us think ‘Who am I in the face of all this’? How much more so the past.
We next see the items that furnish the poet’s home: “An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon, / A scotch and soda atop the King James”—the poem plays with heft as trivial objects top massively important tomes: The Decline and Fall, the King James Bible—their permanence dominated by temporary pleasures. Our enthralled speaker seems released by the “whiff of pity” that arrives,
Not for me but for that sad Titan,
The dim-witted one who has to bear
The weight of heaven and earth
Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.
Then I can snooze, snicker at my own
Grief and shortcomings and snooze.
His empathy for a mythical lifter of “thirteen trillion trillion tons” saves the speaker/poet from sinking under history’s heft—in the same way, I think, that savoring the name, “Korean Mums,” saves James Schuyler from anonymous despair.
The rest of Violi’s poem, instead of dispensing with the past, invokes it with serio-comic lightness:
Even thinking about you until I feel
The weight of all I recall sink to my feet
And then in a bow to Philetus,
I reach for my shoes.
All at once, we realize that the “you” in the poem is the source of the wilding inflicted by love in the second stanza. We feel poundage countered by the uplift of poetry and love. Paul Violi’s transformative “Extended Shortages” is really a consortium of abundances ending with a physically slight but mentally immense poet, Philetus—a poet named for love, who must wear “lead shoes” to keep from being blown away, who paradoxically cues the abundance inherent in history and poetry and also the moment of ordinary life when we prepare ourselves for the outside world as love and words and world gloriously take each other’s weight. -Angela Ball