Upon revisiting Joseph Ceravolo’s The Green Lake is Awake: Selected Poems, I’m reminded of what Gertrude Stein said in “A Transatlantic Interview” in 1946 “it is impossible to put [words] together without sense” (Stein 989). Ceravolo’s poetry often bears out the truth of this maxim. However, even at its most disjunctive and oblique—such as the line “Border irrelevent sweet for wounds” or “grateful soccer monet churning oh savage” from “A Story from the Bushmen” (lines 57 and 69)—there is an urgency in the language, driven by a kind of linguistic searching, as opposed to the language of Tender Buttons, which often seems to be driven by a persistent objective to attempt “to make words write without sense” (Stein 989). The pleasure of Ceravolo’s poetry derives from the fact that its refusals to construct meaning, whether at the level of the phrase or the sentence, inevitably find reprieve in an epiphanic moment.
More successfully than the later poems, his early poems enact a convincing and provocative struggle between perception and language which often unearths a small, well-earned—for the poet as well as the reader—epiphany, or what Ceravolo called a “moment of reality”(Ceravolo letter), as we find at the close of “Ocean”: “I couldn’t sleep, but a new / wave comes every few seconds// Yes! They end on the shore” (Ceravolo 24). The verisimilitude of such moments is heightened precisely because it’s embedded in a variety of ‘unreal’ moments, ranging from disjointed syntax to non-sequiters to the surreal, as in these lines from “White Fish in Reeds”:
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? Mmmm
That this temperature 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. (25)
With these juxtapositions, which remain compelling, despite their indefatiguability, Ceravolo is able to deftly straddle two worlds at once — the mimetic, or “the imitation of ‘what is there,’” which we see both in the banal (“Who calls you”) and the psuedo-philosophic (“Streets / have no feeling”) and the meontic, or “the imitation of ‘what is not there’” (Perloff 31), which we see in the disjointed syntax of “on a sun shirt sleeves down his ecstasy,” or the strange meaning and disorientation that comes before and after the linebreak in “That this temperature is where / I feed.” Ceravolo rarely strays too long in the meontic, the world that is not there, which saves his reader from total estrangement, and provides a stimulating backdrop for the lyric moment. Here, the clarity of “And I want to / be / among all things / that bloom” carries a profundity that perhaps would not be there if the moment were not embedded in this lush tapestry of strangeness. As such, Ceravolo creates the illusion that this epiphanic moment is created by the strangeness that surrounds it—that the syntax must be broken, that strange words must be fused together, that the frenetic, roving mind must rummage through the backwoods of language until it finds a moment of tranquility in the simple philosophical truth for which it hunted. What the reader finds gratifying in this illusion is her perpetual surprise as the surface of the mimetic morphs into the surface of the meontic, and back again—not unlike the phenomenom of the Möbius band—and what seemed like two surfaces reveals itself to be one. In his idiosyncratic manner, Ceravolo reminds us of what the Surrealists were enamored—that the waking life, the world that we recognize, is nourished by the dream life, the world that we don’t recognize.
Unlike the Surrealists, of course, Ceravolo brings both ‘worlds’ into the poem, and his transition between “the imitation of ‘what is there’” and “the imitation of “what is not there’” Perloff 31) is made seamless by the melopoeia which often seems to propel the poem from one realm to the other. Indeed, it is often when Ceravolo’s logopoeia and phanopoeia are most fractured that the rhythms of Ceravolo’s language rise to the level of music:
O sun with the
dreadful
of kind Man!
full! of the organ
of
move
Shoulder are the vines
are the plus are the
autumn of found are the fallen
blank are the aussi
the loping
soon
the
wet
blank the soleil les fleurs
the Force of rainbow
shout the fishing
quell quell. (Ceravolo 77)
Ceravolo’s exclamatory “O” is often an ecstatic lamentation, as here, where the rhythms in the syntax create a puzzling catalogue of psuedo-definitions (“Shoulder are the vines”) and Socratic categories (“of the organ / of move” and “autumn of found”). The cadence that he builds here culminates in a nearly logical resting place in the repetition of “quell quell.” The rhythms in the language of this passage feel as if they are moving toward meaning, and in that sensation the reader finds affirmation that this is not an alien world, but a necessary and luxurient strangeness that breathes life into the world we know.
Works Cited and Consulted
Ceravolo, Joseph. The Green Lake is Awake: Selected Poems. Ed. Larry Fagin, Kenneth Koch, Charles North, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, & Paul Violi. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1994. Print.
---. “Letter to David Shapiro.” 29 June 1965. “The Lyrical Personal of Joe Ceravolo.” Jacket2. 2013. Web.
Perloff, Margorie. “Unreal Cities.” The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. p. 31. Print.
Stein, Gertrude. “A Transatlantic Interview.” 1946. Robert Bartlett Haas. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1. 1973. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O’Clair. Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. p. 989. Print.
North, Charles. “Wild Provoke of the Endurance Sky.” No Other Way: Selected Prose. Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 1998. p. 25. Reprinted. The World. July 1976. Print.
M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet and translator whose current work aims to revise the critical interpretation and reception of the enigmatic Anglo-Saxon poem known as “Wulf and Eadwacer,” and to recover this radical female text to the feminist and experimental canons to which it belongs. Her translations can be found in Arkansas International, Brooklyn Rail, Black Warrior Review, The Capilano Review, Columbia Journal, The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, Poetry in Action, and elsewhere.
Her chapbook of ekphrastic prose poems, called Theater of No Mistakes (Anhinga Press), is in conversation with the work of the American Surrealist painter Philip C. Curtis and the mise en scène of the Sonoran desert, and contains a feminist ecopoetics—from an oblique angle. Her poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Interim, The Massachusetts Review, Prism International, and many other Canadian and American literary journals.
An editor for Asymptote, with grants from Bread Loaf, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship, she’s the founder of the Translation Now! symposium. Find more online at M-L-Martin.com.