Joseph Ceravolo’s work from the 1960s and 70s, what David Lehman calls his “Abstract Expressionist Period,” uses specific kinds of syntactic distortions to produce what I’d call an “experiential metaphor” for intersubjective experience. Ceravolo’s work does something all good poetry actually does—transmits something akin to experiential, non-conceptual knowledge through non-semantic means—but that its particular relation to semanticity, and its tuned (and non-Ashberyian) yoking of the grammatical and the perspectival towards strange forms of contiguity in apparent nonsense helps reveal this more general principle more clearly.

There is very little scholarly writing about Joseph Ceravolo’s work. My rummaging for books and articles turns up only a limited scattering of book reviews, brief mentions in lists of New York School-adjacent poets, index listings, poet encyclopedia entries, a 2013 folio of thoughtful short essays, poems, and interviews about Ceravolo gathered by Vincent Katz in Jacket2, and the two short introductions written for a selected and a collected poems, by Kenneth Koch and David Lehman, respectively. If you can tell me where to find more, please do.

Ceravolo was born to a family of Italian immigrants in Astoria, New York in 1934. He lived until his death from cancer in 1988, during which time he attended City College, graduated, served in the U.S. Army in Germany in 1957, studied with Kenneth Koch after returning home, married an artist, raised children, and wrote and published poetry while working as a civil engineer. He won the first Frank O’Hara award in 1968 for a collection of poems titled Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, which Ashbery and Koch judged. He was loosely affiliated with the New York School. Despite this, he’s not well known, though I find that my poet friends tend know who he is, and Alice Notley once corrected my pronunciation of his last name, in a way that suggested I should certainly know better. This is how I know it’s not pronounced like Seravolo.

Like all poets of the New York School, there’s a strong relationship to abstraction, playfulness, and tonal variability in the work. He likes exclamation marks, and has a relationship to dailiness, although a far more oblique sort of relationship than does O’Hara, Schuyler, or Koch, for example. We are quite far from the land of brand names, quotation, proper nouns, and streets. It’s more a dailiness of flowers, attitudes, continual surprise at minor encounter, child language acquisition, a rotating grammar of modest unmodified nouns, like “soda” or “noise” “path” “clover” or “wind.” We might see in it a kind of precursor to Leslie Scalapino’s aeolotropic series work in long recursive poems like “that they were at the beach”: a kind of Language poetics avant la lettre, one filtered through a specific flavor of serious or spiritual playfulness. I’m going to focus primarily on the poems produced between 1960 and 1968 because his 1969 collection, The Hellgate, marks a substantial stylistic transition away from the kinds of syntactic/grammatical work I’m interested in, as seen in the earlier collections like Transmigration Solo, Fits of Dawn, Wild Flowers Out of Gas, and Spring in This World of Poor Mutts.

Here's a representative example. From the middle of Fits of Dawn (1965), in what appears to be a long poem called “Book II,”

“Quickness! Please

bunch chassis of the

wind    Powers-roses  What! What!

what bust prelude Oh polarity!–

[…]

I tend……………….Downland skill o’clock

nuages soon thrown miss-

ississippi for out simple

                              preunderstands

awkward farm eternity skirmish-

carbon becon as

stop     Place!              King Place!

newal rose inept

I’m the schedule          Paths

roomed little runs dare sleeves

loveliness        Ah shift!” (77)

One might say this is very much like Clark Coolidge or John Ashbery’s poems in its free play with nonsense. Ceravolo seems to believe what Clark Coolidge says; that words have “a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.” [1] Similarly, one might see associative harmonic resonance threads like those William Gass famously traced through Gertrude Stein’s poems, in, for example “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence.” Gass argues, about Stein’s work, that “the entire passage is held together by underlying meanings which are greatly akin and often simply repeat one another […] the passage is pushed forward as much by the progressive disclosure of these deep meanings as by ordinary linear onset.” [2] But unlike the algorithmic or operational project of much Language poetry, and arguably Coolidge’s, that this might also adequately describe, I think Ceravolo, like Stein in Gass’s reading, is someone creating language structures that produce “qualities of feeling.” [3] Ceravolo, unlike the Language poets, achieves a remarkably affectively coherent and forceful…something. Tone isn’t the right word, and neither is attitude. It’s something else, something like atmosphere, frequency, or “quality of feeling” or being-toward-the-world, one that can be tuned into.

The quality of feeling aspect of the work is consistently remarked by the few commentators I’ve found. Charles North says “[h]is voice is unlike anyone else’s, a combination of extreme dislocation and disjunction of language with pure lyric.” [4] Per Lehman, who wrote the introduction to the collected poems, Ceravolo “used simple words and phrases but linked them unusually or leaped elliptically to achieve a sublime innocence.” [5] No one is saying that about Language poetics, nor about Gertrude Stein. Kenneth Koch, in the introduction to The Green Lake is Awake (a selected poems of sorts) makes similar remarks. He says of the grammatical strangenesses and “syntactically unfinished statements” that “[t]hese 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.” [6]

Somehow, the disruptions are expressive, rather than intellectual, surgical, spectacular, or constructivist. Koch thinks this had something to do with Ceravolo’s interest in a “blurring expansion of identity”—something Koch thinks Ceravolo inherited from William Carlos Williams, who he read and admired. We might also, of course, think of Whitman’s “multitudes.” Koch, though, distinguishes Ceravolo’s project from Williams’—he says that Williams “merg[es] with the thing observed so as to describe it more convincingly,” whereas Ceravolo “has a tendency to go back and forth from one identity to another.” [7] Koch makes no claim for why Ceravolo might do this. Here’s poem called “Struggling” from Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (1968) that suggests at a thematic level what Ceravolo might be after.  

STRUGGLING

We are going    the park.

There are swings.

There are rocks  a sand bed.

he flowers rest

The bed. The flowers

rise. We are fatigued

But invade them.

There is a smell.

It invades us.

Notice! There are flowers along

the bed, tiny flower clusters.

But we cannot move our legs.

We cannot move our eyes.

The “we” “invades” the flowers, is “invade[d]” by a smell, presumably the smell of the flowers, a reciprocal invasion, intersubjectivity. The “we,” who we first meet as “we are going,” mobile, ends the poem in a plantlike state, unable to move legs or eyes. Somehow, through the encounter, the “we” and the flowers interpenetrate, ultimately transforming the character of experience of the “we.”

Ceravolo’s syntactic center is fluid, inflected, plural, complex, and intersubjective. His “I” is inflected deeply by what it perceives and encounters, in ways that deform or restructure the shape of its possible world, in the Uexküllian “umwelt” sense.

Since the poems are language, often the way this fluidity seems to express itself has to do with the “syntactically unfinished statements” Koch remarks. Here are a few representative examples, but one could easily find hundreds in the sixties work:

“When has I now wowed?

sands brooked llama regret low           how

Has sap-company growdigious of?

Long Oraly none.

            Hate

            along is myself

            groundfully a soul

            motion kiosky off able” (54)

or

“There were some thing an old

no presumed by really growing” (54)

or

“song triculate throws, let us!

Why did have stayed?

concentric urges the

dispunt long puedo less over

that stares       Who? Wonder

who water is” (56)

or

“In precede deign decide

impudent softly-very where am

bursts fell

Poor more couple furiously tree

anotherless swagger-who

surface” (60)

“Unroar!   Alive the

promisable my or capable.

No mean silver of skin” (66)

As you can see, making sense of the statements often requires a perspectival shift. One must change the kind of subject (often shifting from singular to plural or vice versa) from which one imagines the language to be issuing in order for the grammar to function as grammar. Or, one must splice together temporally discontinuous vantages. It still doesn’t, arguably, function, but its deformations require something like what’s represented thematically in “STRUGGLING”—you (reader) must shift what subject you understand yourself to be. This isn’t as literal as the flower-human intersubjective exchange representation, because it isn’t depictive. It’s choreographic.

For example—when reading

“Why did have stayed?” or “where am/bursts fell”  or “There were some thing an old/no presumed by really growing”

What to do with that? There’s no easy route toward semanticity. What is being represented? By what/whom? When? Why? The syntactical contiguity breaks down. As in “Why did have stayed?” these “breakages” or “unfinishednesses” or “ruptures” are often set up such that it feels like either time has been disjoined and spliced back together, or the subject has. Between “Why did” and “have stayed” some translocation, change, or transmutation has happened. And yet, I do often, as Koch describes, get “an intense clear feeling” through these “oddnesses”—which, as Koch correctly contends, are there “to be given in to, so that the poem can have its say.” “If one can do that” says Koch, “it’s certainly worth it.” [8] As Adorno says in Aesthetic Theory, to perceive art truly requires that one understand and then skillfully submit to its immanent formal logic: the way it structures experience.

Put differently, I don’t “know” what it “means,” but I know what it means, the way I know what a summer wind means, or calm. The way I know what love means, or the mutually hallucinated intersubjectivity one feels at times. There is no conceptual meaning, it can’t be known with the discursive mind. Ceravolo’s syntax-twisting gaps or breakages, with their specific jumping and subject or temporal re-splicing logic, figure, through experience, what it might be to move along a vector of feeling or energy through multiple beings, multiple consciousnesses, multiple finitudes. Something streams through all of it.

This is, importantly, not the same thing as Eliotic polyvocality, or any of its many descendants, though of course Eliot famously uses rhythmic continuity to suture the gaps in his cubist perspectival collages, a kind of vectoring contiguity across ruptured vantages. Pound did this too. Name a Modernist, they probably did some version of it. Contemporary poets, though almost uniformly less sensitive to prosodic structures, tend to employ a similar method. But in these works we are attending to the fragment, and, to various degrees, dynamism between and across and via fragments. Fragmentariness is a big part of the point, multiple textures, etc. But this isn’t what Ceravolo is doing. There is a fairly uniform texture, a stable of basic nouns. In Ceravolo, that which streams is what we are most present to. The best poems don’t feel like fragments: I forget, most of the time, that there are fragments at all, so present am I to some other thing. It’s not an image. It’s not an idea. It’s not information. It’s a kind of invitation to a frequency of being.

As Ceravolo puts it in a 1965 letter to David Shapiro: “I think I’m obsessed with reality, I don’t mean realism but that sense of reality, like “I’m really here and I feel it” even though I can’t explain it. Something like that. Which everyone feels and you recognize it when you see it in a poem” [9]

Or, as he says elsewhere in this same letter: “ Poetry is a flock of geese flying out of formation being in formation.” [10]

To close, I’d like to share one last poem, my favorite of Ceravolo’s. It’s called “White Fish in Reeds,” and first appears in his 1967 collection Wild Flowers Out of Gas—

WHITE FISH IN REEDS

Hold me

till only,      these are my

         clothes         I sit.

Give them        more songs than

the flower

These are my clothes to a

boat     Streets

have no feeling

Clouds move

Are people woman?

Who calls you

on a sun shirt sleeves down his ecstasy

The hair you are

becoming? Mmmmmm

That this temperate is where

I feed      The sheep sorrel flower is

And I want to

be

among all things

that bloom

Although I do not

love flowers

This poem has less of the syntactic splice perturbations I’ve focused on, though even here, there are things like the not-quite accounted for propositional “that” of “that this temperate is where I feed/sheep sorrel flower is,” or the “Are people woman?,” [11] or  “who calls you/on a sun shirt sleeves down his ecstasy.” In it, however, is the characteristic frequency of Ceravolo’s work, one that evokes, as Kimberly Lyons puts it, “a realm of relation in the poem that is trans-species, trans-object, and non-object.” [12]

So, the poems may conjure an experiential metaphor for intersubjectivity, in that they produce felt knowledge without conceptual knowledge in the form of reconfiguring orientational invitation. But I’d argue that this doing is actually the way they represent something which can’t actually be represented—specifically, the intersubjective nature of reality. Ceravolo seems to believe in a model of the language subject as a temporary formation capable of being streamed through by rays or energies that extend beyond its embodied contours, that an affective wavelength can move between organizing consciousnesses, vantages, and subjects. That’s why Ceravolo is able to harmonize the syntactic math operations of Language poetics with intense affective force (often, paradoxically, openness as a kind of powerfully experienced affect) in the poems. The syntax math isn’t syntax math for him. It’s a form capable of holding the simultaneous inflected separateness and fractioned togetherness that constitutes embodied relational being and experience.






Acknowledgements

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This essay is adapted from a talk given at Peter O'Leary's Poetry & Magic panel at the 2024 Louisville Literature & Culture Conference. 

I am grateful for reading group conversations with Jack Chelgren and James Garwood-Cole that helped shape my understanding of “Struggling.”



Notes

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[1] Coolidge, Clark. Poetics statement 1968 (reviewed in “To the Cold Heart” (2022). Caesura https://caesuramag.org/posts/coolidge-to-the-cold-heart)

[2] Gass, William. “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence.” World Within the Word, 1973. 95.

[3] ibid 79

[4] North, Charles. “Wild provoke of the endurance sky.” Jacket 2. https://jacket2.org/poems/wild-provoke-endurance-sky

[5] Lehman, David. “Introduction.”The Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo. xxiii.

[6] Koch, Kenneth. Unnumbered. “Introduction.” THE GREEN LAKE IS AWAKE.

[7] ibid

[8] ibid

[9] Ceravolo, Joseph. “Letter to David Shapiro 6/29/65.” Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/article/letter-david-shapiro-62965

[10 ibid.

[11] (though he reads it in a Pennsound recording as “women”)

[12] Lyons, Kimberly. “Closer to Everything.” Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/article/closer-everything