On Joseph Ceravolo's "Drunken Winter" [by David Lehman]

David Lehman on "Drunken Winter" by Joseph Ceravolo (born today):

Oak oak! like like
it then
   cold some wild paddle
so sky then;
flea you say
“geese geese” the boy
June of winter
of again
Oak sky

-- Joseph Ceravolo

          Joseph Ceravolo is a great overlooked American poet. Born in the Astoria section of Queens, New York, in 1934, Ceravolo began writing poetry while serving in the U. S. Army in Germany in 1957. He wrote his first poems while on all-night guard duty in a stockade tower. A civil engineer by trade, he studied with Kenneth Koch at the New School in New York City in 1959. Koch's teaching had a strong and lasting influence on him. Frank O'Hara called him "one of the most important poets around," and it was fitting that Ceravolo's debut collection, "Spring in this World of Poor Mutts," won the first Frank O'Hara Award in 1968.

          Though little known, Ceravolo’s work is admired intensely by those who know it. David Shapiro calls Ceravolo “the best religious poet writing in the English language.” Asked to name his three favorite poets, Jordan Davis begins with Ceravolo then tacks on Whitman and William Carlos Williams. “The Green Lake is Awake,” a posthumous volume of Ceravolo’s selected poems, won favorable notices in 1994.

          Nevertheless Ceravolo remains a secret ardor in part because the New York School as an entity or category has until perhaps recently eluded academic attention. I love his simplicity – his apparent simplicity, I should say. In reality Ceravolo is, as he writes in his poem “Happiness in the Trees,” “no more / simple than a cedar tree / whose children change / the interesting earth / and promise to shake her / before the wind blows / away from you /in the velocity of rest.”

          Ceravolo uses mostly simple words of few syllables. The effect of their conjunction is startling. He makes the words seem as actual as objects and as strange. In some instances he resembles a painter who has limited his palette to a few colors used in dazzling combination. In "Drunken Winter," look at how the poem punctuates space. The meaning is in the arrangement. The line breaks, the syntactical breakdown, the spacing, the incidental punctuation (exclamation point, quotation marks) are crucial to our experience of the poem. It's as though a complicated narrative has been reduced to bare essentials delivered breathlessly, and what is communicated is not an anecdote but a stammering excitement charging the words themselves.

In this and other poems, Ceravolo displays an uncanny ability to convey the child’s conception of the world. The child seems older in “The Wind Is Blowing West”:

          I’ve been waiting in my tent
          Expecting to go in.
          Have you forgotten to come down?
          Can I escape going in?
          I was just coming

          I was just going in.

Ceravolo pushes the laconic style to achieve a sublime innocence. A six-line poem begins: “O moon / How ghost you are.” All the pathos of childhood informs the moment in “Ho Ho Ho Caribou” when the speaker says, “Like a flower, little light, you open / and we make believe / we die.”

          Ceravolo’s poems are lean, full of working nouns and verbs stripped of modifiers. He is unafraid to end a poem abruptly. He can move from whimsy to high tension in a line. Yet none of this finally explains the magic of these poems – how they transform the commonplace into the extraordinary or why they make this reader feel he is in the presence of a natural poet, for whom poems came as freely as leaves to the tree.

          Ceravolo lived quietly with his wife and three children in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He avoided the “poetry world” beyond the local. He was 54 when he died of an inoperable tumor on September 4, 1988.

- David Lehman, 2002

Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988). "Drunken Winter" (1967) owes its effect to "the things in it," Kenneth Koch felt. "Even the words like like seem thinglike." See The Oxford Book of American Poetry for this and other poems by this extraordinary talent. Jose[ph Ceravolo’s Collected Poems was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2013.

Comments

[Glen Hartley]

I cannot perceive what you or Koch or O'Hara or anyone else can appreciate in this poem. It seems to me to exemplify what people hate in modern poetry: no music, no meaning; no beauty; no intelligence. Is it some kind of inside joke among NY School poets? You owe it to your readers to take them through a line by line understanding of its worth. (I also saw nothing o merit in the Oxford anthology inclusions.)

[Glen Hartley]

This is what is known as bad poetry, which as agents we get every week from would-be poets. Does a random assemblage of words make that aesthetic? Bad enough at the opposite end we get those who can write decent prose in small quantities. And so many are would-be stand-up comedians posing as poets.
I might add here that the new poetry editor of the NYer seems so far to have exercised poor taste if he is responsible for the past 2 or 3 weeks. You can't even call what he has published poetry.