Gloucester’s Poet Laureate, Vincent Ferrini, turned ninety-four on June 24, 2007. To celebrate Vincent’s birthday and in honor of our long friendship, I post the following memoir, followed by What the Hell, a poem by our mutual friend, Peter Tuttle, which pays special tribute to Ferrini. Tuttle’s poem first appeared in Issue 45 (April 2002) of the Minutes of the Charles Olson Society.
I was fifteen years old when I first sought out Vincent Ferrini at his frame shop on
Before moving to the Neck, which was still in its heyday as a vibrant art colony, I knew nothing of art and less of poetry. But I had a yearning for what I didn’t yet know. That yearning expressed itself in a fascination with words, words that evoked or sustained deep feelings in me.
The poetry we read in school—Longfellow mostly; some Wordsworth I wasn’t ready for—didn’t give me what I was searching after. But in Four Winds I began to find it. That first issue, which I still have, contained poems by Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Cid Corman and Ferrini himself. They were poems the likes of which I had never seen or read before. I was especially taken by the poem of Ferrini’s that was printed on the inside back cover of the journal:
I pass
by day
and night
no one has
seen me
If you ever
want to find
me
and know me
leave behind
yourself
and enter
the caves
of other
people
there you
will find
me
who is
yourself
It was poetry like this—gnomic, different from what I was used to, yet somehow deeply familiar because it struck an instinctive chord—that sent me looking for more of the same. At the Sawyer Free Library I found the collected works of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. I discovered Yeats' poetry and some verse by Amy Lowell. But still I wasn’t essentially satisfied, just as music didn’t really speak to me until I started listening to Bartok and Stravinsky and my brother and I were introduced to bebop on "Symphony Sid" Turin's radio program, often broadcast live from New York City's Birdland.
Just about that time Ferrini published Mindscapes, a chapbook of Haiku-like meditations. I came across it at W. G. Brown’s book store on
So I presented myself at the frame shop which at that time, 1952, was located in a shed at the rear of the building Vincent now makes his home in. I poked my head in the door late one afternoon on my way home from school and a welcoming face turned from the table saw. Eyes lit up, the saw was shut off, and I received the first of thousands of strong handshakes I would be getting from Vincent the rest of my life.
I had told Vincent I was interested in poetry. When he asked me who I was reading, I could only come up with names like Whitman and Yeats.
“Yes, yes,” he said, not impatiently, “but who are you reading who’s living—who’s alive?”
I was at a loss for words.
“Let’s begin,” Ferrini said, grabbing some volumes down from what I observed were shelves stuffed with books of poetry.
That day Vincent introduced me to the work of Ezra Pound, to William Carlos Williams’
Later it turned out hew knew my father; and even later we talked about our common roots in the Mediterranean, his in
Still, I will never forget those early years of our friendship, when I was in high school and Vincent was so accessible, a storehouse of information about poets and poetry on my way home from the very place that was supposed to teach me about literature but only ended up boring me with the tried and true, that is until my English teacher Miss Harris introduced us to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" and some of us discovered e. e. cummings on our own.
I went to college in
I am only one of the many people, young and old, who came to Vincent to talk poetry and ended up talking life. For him there is no separation; for Vincent makes poetry live in his own work and in his vital presence. I can’t begin to record what I’ve learned from him during the more than fifty years of our friendship because it has become so intertwined with my own life and the workings of my psyche.
What I do know is that Vincent was the first model of an artist for me, a writer. He didn’t show me how to do it, he showed me how to BE it and revealed himself in the act of living and writing simultaneously. For Vincent had, as he describes it in the poem I’ve quoted, entered the caves of other people, and he did find himself; and he has spent the intervening years helping and exhorting the rest of us to do likewise.
(An earlier version of this essay was published in The Café Review, Vol. 2, Number 10, 1991, a special issue honoring Vincent Ferrini and later reprinted in Split Shift, in 1996)
What the Hell
That curve that
Corner in the road
Recognize that curve that
Little white house
Not that it was built as a house
His old frame shop where the
Crossed oars
My crucifixion as he put it
Held his framery sign and I
Recognize the curve
It’s almost dreamlike these
Streets I once rode so
Often
Back to them now three
Decades later
Nothing much’s changed
No one’s fixed the curves in the
Street you couldn’t
Harbor
Buildings pressed up against it on
Either side and down to the
Shore
Over the water in fact
Old wood pilings where all the
Fish plants and flake yards once
Stood
Much of that most of that
Gone now
But the buildings remain and the
Harbor and
Thirty years after I first met him when
Vincent was roughly the age I am now
I was the new kid on the block
Cub reporter for the
Gloucester Daily Times and certainly the
Only person there interested in
Getting to know
Having something other than an
Arm’s length relationship with the
Wild men of Gloucester of which
Vincent was now
With the Big Man’s death
The senior example
Well they interested me
Those guys they weren’t
Shy about literature and they
Weren’t shy about their
Political opinions
Antiwar
All of them though I’d
Missed the worst of that
There- that is- I got it in
School but that’s different it was
Not hard to have antiwar opinions on the
Here
In
It was different and they
No doubt paid the price
Communists
Traitors
Of course Vincent was a
Communist
Back in the Thirties or so I
Inferred
No one came out and told me so but then I
Read No Smoke
His first and best book
1941
About the dying shoe factory town city of
North of
Depression
Possibly Vincent leant me a copy
Possibly I read it
Yes now it seems to me I
Read it in the Library
Part of the collection you
Couldn’t check out
Rare book, even then
And you had the feeling that if
Vincent was no longer a
Believer when he wrote the book
He might well have been one
Proletarian literature
They would have called it
Not a long book
Portraits
One after another of the
People of the city
Everyone from the fat cats to the
Streetwalkers and worse and how
The injustice
The lack of fairness
The lives of work for nothing or
Less than nothing while the
Bosses lived smug and
Comfy
The anger
But it was the idealism that struck you
He wasn’t angry for himself
You thought
Not a selfish book
So though I couldn’t understand some of
Vincent’s later
More recent
Work that looked to me
Influenced by
Big Man’s
The Big Man
Charles Olson
Who’d so obviously
Dominated Vincent’s life
Still the reverence
And that’s what struck me because the
Next book I read was
The Big Man’s big book
Maximus
And found myself appalled by his cruelty to Vincent
Ferrini
Supposedly his friend
This Letter 5 of the
Maximus Poems in which
The Big Man (he was a Big Man, 6’7”)
Savaged Ferrini’s Four Winds a
Literary review that he put out with
Mary and John
(And Vincent was carrying on then
As someone later told me
With
Mary)
Sexual jealousy
Well partly
The Big Man may have
Wanted her too but
Possession
Mostly
The sheer need to be
The Big Man in
Virtually the only man and
After all at this point it was
Ferrini who had the reputation
Olson was the new guy though he was
Older
A late bloomer
Come to
After academia
To take possession
Try to
Take possession
Of
Poetry and then
Die
I read the Maximus poems
Took a helluva a lot longer than
No Smoke
I tell you
And what I came away with was that
They weren’t really poems about
The Olson scholar
Not a wild man
But a professor at UConn who
At regular intervals hoped I’d
Write up his efforts
Articles published about Olson in
Little reviews
Quarterlies
Which I did
Glad to
They all
Ferrini and the
Other two
Disciples
Said how much Olson knew about
The historical research
Studying paintings by
Fitz Hugh
But not
As I saw
Much real history
The history of
History of its fishing industry and the
Fishery of the
That’s what drove the economy
Built all those captains’ houses that
Edward Hopper painted some
Forty years later on the
Hills overlooking
White clapboard victorians
Crowding the streets
Looking out over the water from the
Hills
Even by then gone to seed
Fishing had been falling apart for
Quite some time and those
Captains were the
Captains of the
Glorious days of sail
Long before the Italians and the
Portuguese arrived and the
Side draggers
Well
That was my critique but I kept my
Mouth shut because these guys
They were like some kind of a
Cult of Olson
This man who so dominated their
Thinking that they (then) all
Seemed to think it was enough
Was the right thing
To just go on
Sort of worshipping the Man
Not a word
For all the praise of Maximus of
That cruelty
Right there in the poem
To Ferrini
And how did he feel about that
Well, hell
I wasn’t going to ask him
An excitable guy
I tell you
Kept stabbing his workbench with his
Mat knife to
Emphasize his points
Probably politics
But injustice
Always the injustice
First time I met him
I certainly wasn’t gonna
And you know
You couldn’t
You could see the vulnerability
The wound
It went too deep
So I said
Nothing
Then
Now
Thirty years later
Rented car
Back visiting family
Flown in from the
Dumb rental car
Most of them
They’re all dumb
Riding this street that I’d
Ridden as a young man
Much younger man
Just out of
College then
Even had a girlfriend
Down Rocky Neck
In fact I dropped a motorcyle on
One of these curves
Sand
Skidded
Not hurt but it
Didn’t help the bike any
Riding home from her house at
1:00
AM
Well
It was like a dream
Sunny summer July day now
But the street was real
The curve was real
And there was Vincent’s
Little white clapboard place
A gable end almost touching the road
Not much bigger than a long
Single car garage
No sign now
No more crucifixion
Living on social security
I imagined
Poetry didn’t make you
Rich and neither did framing
But still
Late 80s
Vincent had praised my poetry
Said it might become
As he put it a
Creeping best seller
Imagined the Boston Globe reporters
Green with envy at a
Reporter who could
Write poetry
(I doubted that
Mostly I thought they
Just wouldn’t care)
There was the place
Said I’d buy him lunch
His choice
Least I could do for
All his kindness
Vincent didn’t have to
Praise this book by this guy who’s
Been gone thirty years
So
Well
Tell you truth he
Didn’t look a
Helluva a lot different a
Testimonial to
Walking five miles every day and
Staying away from booze
And sheer determination
He’d lived long enough to
Outlive the McCarthy era
Tar and feathering
Lived long enough to
Outlive Olson
Now he could be the Olsonlike
Figure
Conscience of
Writing the letters to the
Editor and they’d made him
Somehow
I’d have loved to have been at that
City Council session
Poet Laureate of
Though fewer of us
(Perhaps our fault)
Understood much of what those later
All Know Fish
Were about
Didn’t matter
He was still there
And still wrote
Letters to the editor about
Local or national matters when he
Saw things were
Unfair
He put his hat on
Broadbrimmed black
Vanity a friend had
Confided
Didn’t want people to
See him bald
So the poet’s broadbrimmed black hat and
That hot July day we drove the
Not so long way to
Halibut Point
Decent restaurant
Fresh fish and
Talked about
This and that
Where we’d been
Drove back after
He invited me in
And then
And then
I don’t know why
About that Letter 5
Showed my his reply
His last copy of his reply
Written then
In the Arriving in which he
Turned the other cheek
Said how Cid Corman had told him it would
Be the making of him but
Of course the unmaking too
Because he took it
Didn’t turn on the Big Man
Couldn’t
I couldn’t really imagine
Loving or needing another
Man so
But they were all like that
The three of them
Ferrini and the
Other two
Disciples
Olson the Father
Well, all right for one
He was a young man
But Ferrini
Pretty much the same age
Published sooner
Reputation
Now smeared
For what motive
By this guy
Hell
I never met Olson and
Already with Letter 5
I didn’t like him
But these guys
All the children of immigrants
First generation educated
First generation literary
He held something for them
That I didn’t see
Fame?
Connection to the bigger world?
All I can tell you is that in
Among these men
He wasn’t Ishmael
He wasn’t Moby Dick
He was Ahab and
From what I could see
From the evidence of Letter 5
Perfectly willing to use to drive to consume
Anyone for his purpose
This
Possession of
Should have known was
Bound to fail
But to see Vincent
Old
But not frail
To listen to him
Make it new!
Terrible advice
It’s ruined poetry
They think making it new is
Making it different and
No one knows what the hell they’re
Talking about
Postmodern
You know what that is
It’s just second generation
Modern
They have to go even
Further out there than the
First generation did
Look at this
And he showed me a
Little review
They publish my stuff but
I have no idea what the hell
Their poems are about
What
The
Hell.
(copyright 2002 by Peter Tuttle/ all rights reserved)
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