Joseph Ceravolo (April 22, 1934 – September 4, 1988) was an American poet associated with the second generation of the
New York School. For years Ceravolo’s work was out of print, but the 2013 publication of his
Collected Poems' has made his work accessible again. His popularity has been limited to the community of writers. As
Charles North writes “
eravolo’simportance to American poetry over the past 30 years is still largely a secret.”
Life
Joseph Ceravolo was born in
Queens
Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...
,
New York into a family of Italian immigrants. Ceravolo studied writing with
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch ( ; 27 February 1925 – 6 July 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry. This was a loose group of poets includ ...
at the
New School for Social Research. In addition to his career as a poet, Ceravolo worked as a civil engineer. He began writing poetry while stationed in Germany in the late 1950s. He lived much of his life in
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...
. Ceravolo had a wife, Rosemary, and three children, Paul, Anita, and James. He died in 1988 due to bile duct cancer.
Work
Ceravolo is associated with the second generation of the New York School (which includes writers such as
Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer (May 12, 1945 – November 22, 2022) was an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School.
Early life and education
Bernadette Mayer was born in a predominantly Ge ...
,
Bill Berkson
William Craig Berkson (August 30, 1939 – June 16, 2016) was an American poet, critic, and teacher who was active in the art and literary worlds from his early twenties on.
Early life and education
Born in New York City on August 30, 1939, Bil ...
,
Ron Padgett
Ron Padgett (born June 17, 1942, Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. ''Great Balls of Fire'', Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He ...
,
Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan (November 15, 1934 – July 4, 1983) was an American poet.
Early life
Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army. After ...
,
Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet.
Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activ ...
and
Lewis Warsh
Lewis Warsh (9 November 1944 – 15 November 2020) was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that ...
). Although Ceravolo’s work shares some of the same warmth and immediacy that typifies some of the other New York School Second Generation, his work is less prone to use conversational language and is often less directly humorous than much New York School writing. Influences on Ceravolo’s poetry include
Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among ...
,
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism.
In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pedia ...
and
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. cummings and e e cummings (October 14, 1894 - September 3, 1962), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobi ...
as well as Asian and Native American poetry.
Many of Ceravolo’s poems are marked by distorted syntax, elisions, juxtaposition and fragments (a trait he shares with
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge (born February 26, 1939) is an American poet.
Background
As a teenager, Coolidge attended Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island. Coolidge attended Brown University, where his father taught in the music department. After ...
, a writer also sometimes associated with the second generation of the New York School) resulting in poems that surprise with their refracted meanings and misdirections. The structure and shape of Ceravolo’s poetry changed over the course of his career: the poems of one of Ceravolo’s early books, ''Fits of Dawn'', are characterized by a dense, relentless gush of words; Ceravolo’s poems (such as in ''Spring in this World of Poor Mutts'') then increasingly experiment with spacing and twists added by conjunction and preposition; poems in Ceravolo’s later books tend to be more direct and lyrical, although
parataxis is still prevalent.
Ceravolo’s poems often focus on the natural world, as opposed to the social world. The titles of almost all of his books contain a reference to natural phenomena (''Fits of Dawn'', W''ild Flowers Out of Gas'', ''Spring In This World of Poor Mutts'', ''Millennium Dust'') and the same is true of the titles of his individual poems. Sometimes simple, sometimes elliptical, Ceravolo’s poems shortcut conventional description, and as Kenneth Koch says they become almost as physical as the natural world encountered in them. An example is the poem
Drunken Winter.
An enthusiasm can be found in much of Ceravolo’s work, exemplified by use of imperative, address and exclamation, and aided by his syntactical abstraction. A good example of this is found in his poem
.
Even where Ceravolo’s poems are “quiet”, they possess an intensity and openness; as is the case in this passage from his poem
.
Bibliography
Books:
*
' published in 2013 by
Wesleyan University Press
Wesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist.
History and overview
Founded (in its present form ...
.
*''The Green Lake Is Awake'' (selected poems) published in 1994 by Coffee House Press.
*''Mad Angels'' (manuscript).
*''Millennium Dust'' published in 1982 by Kulchur Foundation.
*''Transmigration Solo'' published in 1979 by Toothpaste Press.
*''INRI'' published in 1979 by Swollen Magpie Press.
*''Spring In This World of Poor Mutts'' published in 1968 by Columbia University Press (winner of the Frank O'Hara Award for Poetry).
*''Wild Flowers Out of Gas'' published in 1967 by Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
*''Fits of Dawn'' published in 1965 by "C” Press.
Publications in Anthologies:
(The following is not likely a complete listing.)
*''The Angel Hair Anthology: Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy in My Hea''d (Granary Books, 2001)
*''An Anthology of New York Poets'' (Random House, 1970)
*''All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s'' (University of California Press, 2003) (includes audio clips of Ceravolo reading).
*''Bluestones and Salt Hay. An Anthology of Contemporary New Jersey Poets'' (Rutgers University Press, 1990.
*''The Body Electric : America's Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review'' (W W Norton & Co Inc., 2001)
*''From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990'' (Sun and Moon Press, 1994).
*''Making Your Own Days'' (Touchstone, 1998).
*''New York Poets II: from Edwin Denby to Bernadette Mayer'' (Carcanet, due Jan 2006).
*''The Poets of the New York School'' (University of Pennsylvania, 1969).
*''Postmodern American Poetry - A Norton Anthology'' (W.W. Norton, 1994).
*''Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry'' (Talisman House, 1996).
*''The World Anthology, Poems from the St. Mark's Poetry Project'' (Bobbs Merrill, 1969)
External links
*Joseph Ceravolo Website: https://web.archive.org/web/20190629154946/http://josephceravolo.com/
*EPC/ Joseph Ceravolo Home Page: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/ceravolo/
*The Joseph Ceravolo Project blog: http://ceravoloproject.blogspot.com/
*Joseph Ceravolo Recordings at PENNSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ceravolo.html
*Twelve poems: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i27781517
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cervolo, Joseph
1934 births
1988 deaths
New York School poets
20th-century American poets