“I want to go where the sound goes after the bell stops ringing.”
“Sonosopher” Alex Caldiero spent a lifetime approaching this place, if it is a place. The specific bell was a handbell he picked up while visiting his ancestors’ church in Positano, Italy. During performances, he either rang the bell or held the bell up to his ear without ringing it and assured the audience that he could hear the silent sound.
At the age of 23, a resident of Brooklyn, where he had lived since emigrating with his family from Sicily at the age of nine, Alex published a poem that ends in a similar no-place.
The path gets straighter all the time.
First there were ten, then nine,
Then seven. Now there are
Three ways to go.
The path gets straighter all the time,
Narrower too.
Soon there’ll be but one way to go
On a path so narrow
It disappears.
Clown War No. 1 Feb 1972
At the age of 76, eight days before his death, still hoping to find a way beyond the limits of articulate language, he sent me a photo of these notebook pages (from the night before and the following morning).
Dante called to him as a reader, he wrote, inviting him into “that auratic realm / Vibrantly alive with the Dead / Learn to become unbound.” The self-portrait smiles. Just a bit.
In 1967 Alex was at Rizzoli’s Italian bookstore on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. While browsing books of Italian poetry, he found one with a title he could hardly read, La peddi nova. He opened the book by Ignazio Buttitta and read the strange words awkwardly, mouthing them, and at once it came to him: This is how I speak. He was illiterate in his native language! He read and reread Buttitta’s poetry and tried writing in Sicilian himself. In 1972 Alex returned to Sicily for the first time as an adult and looked up Buttitta’s address. He wrote the poet from his grandmother’s house on the island and told him about his encounter with La peddi nova. Buttitta wrote back with one word: veni, come. Caldiero went to the fishing village where Buttitta lived and over the course of many visits Buttitta taught him Sicilian language and history through poetry. According to Alex, “he was one of the last bards of the Mediterranean.” “He died at 98, the same day and year as Allen Ginsberg.”
Alex’s book Sonosuono (Elik Press, 2013) is a multilingual book focused on Sicily, the Sicilian language, and his own life as an emigrant and immigrant. The book is rich with anecdotes like the one that begins “Because I grew up in America, I can only ever be part islander. As proof of this, let me recount the incident of my swollen testicle.” There are laments: “My native language doesn’t have a future tense.” The BAWDY RIDDLES AND TONGUE TWISTERS OF THE SICILIAN FOLK, in Alex’s translation, were “all uttered by beautiful, old women who got a kick out of seeing the expression on my face as I sought to unravel their riddles.”
Men with men can do it; / Men with women also; / But women with women, no.
Holy Communion
Five little pricks / And one big cock; / Bumpitibump, / Into the twat.
Toes and foot going into the sock
Folklore was a lifelong interest for Alex. He interviewed fishermen about the volcanoes that overlooked their villages. He collected hand-crafted bells from Sardinia, drums from Turkey, and Mediterranean jaw harps he played at length before performances. Of the latter, he wrote:
The jaw harp has many powers. It can cause pregnant women to go into labor. It can crush thoughts. It can speak so that only the persons who are intended to understand will understand. But above all is its power to make monotony.
...
Let me begin anew to say what this instrument means to me. But there’s no way I can accomplish this without recounting the secret history of the Mediterranean and the people who created it and whose mouth piece it is.
...from per-sonal effects
During the Vietnam War, having failed to complete necessary documentation certifying his position as a conscientious objector, Alex became ineligible for federal jobs and US citizenship. President Jimmy Carter pardoned Alex and hundreds of thousands of his fellows. Alex eventually filed for and became an official citizen, although his heart remained in Sicily. “I am an islander.”
Rather than enrolling in college after high school, Alex chose what became a two-year apprenticeship with sculptor Michael Lekakis, a second-generation Greek immigrant and close friend of e. e. cummings and Ezra Pound. Alex observed Lekakis at work, conversed with him about artistic process and experience, and shared food and stories. Poet Norman Pritchard, teaching at the New School, allowed Alex to sit in his classes and became a lifelong influence.
At a reading/performance of his own work in Brooklyn, Alex met polyartist Richard Kostelanetz. Kostelanetz was impressed and printed Alex’s work “foam and sand” in Text—Sound Text, (along with work by Emmett Williams, Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, and others). He included Alex in his Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, writing that “Sicilian-born, New York-reared Caldiero has created distinguished sound poetry and performance, as well as visual art. . . . OR, Book o’ Lights ranks among the most imaginative and ambitious visual-verbal books of the 1990s.”
Alex and his multilingual, belly-dancing wife Setenay explored various mystical and semi-mystical movements, including the Gurdjieff Society, finally converting to Mormonism. They moved to Utah and began to raise a family that eventually included a daughter and four sons. Remarkable in their own right, the children grew into ardent supporters of a father devoted, before all else, to them.
After an evening performance in Salt Lake City, an audience member approached Alex and asked what he did for a living. I’m a bank teller, Alex answered. I’m wondering, the man asked, if you might like to write users’ manuals for our new word processing software—WordPerfect? I don’t know anything about computers, Alex said. That’s good. You’re attentive to language and you’d make no assumptions that would skip a critical step. Alex worked as a technical writer for WordPerfect for two decades until he and 2000 of his fellow workers were laid off when Microsoft Word came into its own. My most important contribution, Alex claimed, was demilitarizing the language of the manuals. He could only go so far in a genre called WordPerfect, but his poetic work followed John Cage in unsettling “the syntax that is the arrangement of the army.”
Why don’t you join us in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Utah Valley State College? I asked him. I never really went to college, Alex said. The only degree I ever got was the third degree. We won’t mention that, I replied. As chair of the department, I tendered the application for a Distinguished Artist in Residence (Alex preferred Artist in Resonance) with a long list of Alex’s performances, exhibitions, and publications. Not yet fossilized, the administrators of the rapidly growing institution were flexible enough to approve the hire. For more than two decades Alex taught a wide set of courses, including seminars on the Beats, Surrealism, William Blake, the Environmental Humanities, DADA, and finally, Fall Semester of 2025, on the question: What is Poetry?
I had the good fortune to teach several seminars with Alex: Language,
Most Dangerous of Possessions (Hölderlin’s phrase); Nature and Language:
Writing Wild; Picturing Words / Speaking Pictures—for which I insisted on four
weeks focused on Alex’s own word pictures like this self-portrait and this
painting from the series “In Tongues”:
Alex was not a perfect match for an increasingly corporate university. Schooled in the streets of Brooklyn as an immigrant, he followed his creative instincts and brooked no disrespect. Required to publish approved syllabi, to grade on approved scales, and to treat students as customers whose occasionally negative evaluations weighed heavy in administrators’ assessments, Alex pushed all boundaries. My favorite among a long string of incidents came in a required Humanities 1010 class. While Alex lectured, a young couple found their conversation more important than his thoughts on Renaissance art. Please turn around and pay attention, Alex requested. They ignored him. Turn around and quit talking, he said. They ignored him. Get up and leave the class, he told them. They paid attention but didn’t get up. You are no longer members of this class. Leave now. On the way out, one of them leaned back through the door and said Fuck You. And you your mother, Alex replied sweetly. The young man reported this to the Vice President, who reported it to the Dean. Trouble ensued. We all moved on, some of us with a grin.
Good students paid rapt attention to a professor schooled by poets and sculptors, to a man teaching what he himself practiced. One of them, for instance, expressed thoughts many others shared: “Alex was a magnetic force in the classroom, performing and lecturing and leading discussion in equal measure. And so funny! Profoundly funny. But most of all just an incredibly warm and open mentor who accepted my questions and comments earnestly and made me feel heard while simultaneously expanding and pushing the boundaries of my interest and thinking.”
Travis Low and Torben Bernard, students in Alex’s and my class on language, found the topic and discussions so vitally interesting that they followed Alex into subsequent classes. They began to film his performances. They filmed interviews with him in his basement studio. They gathered 8mm family videos and archival material. With funding from our department, they accompanied Alex to Brooklyn and Sicily, recording his responses to places and the memories they evoked. Their work developed into the experimental and moving documentary The Sonosopher, presented at the Cinequest Film Festival in 2010 and produced as a DVD by Ken Sanders’ Dream Garden Press. The film is an extraordinary exploration of the life and work of a remarkable sound poet, visual artist, and musician, of a man who called himself a Wordshaker and a Sonosopher. You can view it HERE. Video clips of other performances, some of which are scenes deleted from the film, can be seen HERE.
Celebrating October anniversaries of Allen Ginsberg’s first recitation of HOWL at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Alex performed the work every ten years in the company of poets, musicians, dancers, and filmmakers. Enthusiastic and spellbound audiences packed auditoriums and galleries for the performances—over 1000 of us for the 50th anniversary.
Alex loved performing with artists of various sorts. His sonosophy often accompanied dancer Maida Withers (The Maida Withers Dance Construction Company in Washington, D.C.—search for Alex Caldiero on this site for several collaborations). He played a wacky character who sometimes resembled himself in films by Trent Harris (Plan 10 From Outer Space and Welcome to the Rubber Room). He participated in radio interviews with Peabody Award winner Scott Carrier (Season Two, #21). His work was exhibited in joint exhibitions with assembly artist Frank McEntire. He collaborated with the musicians of Theta Naught and The Iceburn Collective (he and musicians from both groups perform HOWL HERE (scroll down)).
The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art mounted a 2021 show titled baggage: Alex Caldiero in Retrospect. The catalogue for the show is rich with ideas and images, a work of bookmaking genius and love (some images HERE). The exhibition itself was fascinating, surprising, thought-provoking, unsettling, and uplifting. There has never been, there will never be, another Alex Caldiero.
Over the decades, Alex corresponded regularly with Cid Corman, John Cage, Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Norman Pritchard, Ignazio Buttitta, and Michael Lekakis. He also sent letters to Rilke, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, and other poets he admired and for whom he could find addresses. They responded, he said, in his dreams.
Alex’s work has been published as books—OR, Book O’ Lights (artist book), Illegible Tattoos (Brett Bolander, Paver Press, no date), Various Atmospheres: Poems and Drawings (Signature Books, 1998), Poetry Is Wanted Here! (Dream Garden Press, 2010), Sonosuono (Elik Press, 2013), Some Love (Signature Press, 2015), Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance (Saltfront, 2016), PER-SONAL EFFECTS (Elik Press, 2021)—and in dozens of hand-crafted chapbooks.
The chapbooks have titles that themselves would make a fascinating book: Biotexts; Toy Blood; In Tongues; Lucretius and the Wind; anthem to no flag; Selected Episodes from the Life of the Green Lantern; Corrigenda; Not Dreaming Not Dreamed; Impossible Instrument; Illegible Tattoos; Way after Basho; Body/Dreams/Organs; Anxieties & Chemistries; An Orphic Explanation; vomit questions on the answering mind; Philosophers Stoned; The Food that Fits the Hunger; Of One Seamless Substance; Sphota Probe; Wake up Covered in Language; Sound Mind; noli me tangere; Arse/Poet/Icus; Island Soul; and so on.
In 2018, our little town of Woodland Hills, Utah, was threatened by a raging wildfire. We were evacuated for eleven days. What do you take with you with only an hour’s notice? I took legal documents, my laptop and hard drive, some clothing, and a box with Alex’s chapbooks. The chapbooks are limited-edition hand-made works of word-art given as gifts to fortunate recipients, inscribed in my case with messages like “For Scott A., fellow pilgrim and ever friend!” “For Scott A., another iteration of the soul.” “Scott, here is the final notebook 2007, nine in all (one is a double chapbook). Put ‘em side by side & let ‘em sing!” See scanned examples of several chapbooks HERE. Copies of various chapbooks can be purchased at Ken Sanders Rare Books (Ken is a devoted and generous supporter of Alex).
I once asked Alex about what felt like a sudden proliferation of his hand-crafted chapbooks. “I wanted to reach out,” he told me, “to create a current and a currency, a gratis currency to exchange what I call documents of our common presence. Inspired by some vital zines that asserted their independence from the normal avenues for publication, and goaded by the sheer quantity of my work that remains unshared, I turned to chapbooks as a medium for dissemination. And, I should add, a death sentence lent impetus to the project. In 2014, an acute attack of diverticulitis nearly killed me. They removed a foot-long section of my colon, which prompted you, wag that you are, to note that now I had only a semi-colon. I didn’t die, but the event brought me face-to-face with my mortality. And I realized I had work to do.”
Over the years, Alex
filled hundreds of notebooks with poems and drawings, noting the day and time
for each new entry. The recorded times reveal work at every time of the day and
night. Many of the chapbooks are scanned notebooks, augmented at times by typed
texts when the handwriting is illegible. Yellow-covered Island Soul, for
instance, is (1 of 3) 2008 Notebook 1 (2 Jan - 3 Apr). A red-covered volume is
(2 of 3) 2008 Notebook 2a (May). The second yellow-colored volume is (3 of 3)
(a.k.a. object lost found) 2008 Notebook 2b (Feb, March, May). A fat little
trilogy by A. (A.) F. Caldiero flying the Sicilian colors. Left in a pocket, Volume
3 went through the wash. Ruined? Not at all; rather, transformed like the
languages that cross the Sonosopher’s tongue, like the word-images that flow
from pen to paper, like the language that sheds its clothing as it approaches
the infinite.
The ruined but preserved pages, the illegible handwriting, the creative spelling, the unedited notebooks, and the performances that shift from spoken words to raucous or gentle sounds raise questions. Can’t the author spell? Can’t he copy-edit his work? Can’t he clean up the scribbled pages? Can’t he express himself in good English? Well, yes he could. He wrote users’ manuals for a living, after all. His “Corrigenda“ series is proof of his editing skills. He has written thousands of poems recognizable as such. Read/listen to them closely, however, and see that he has something else in mind/in body. Consider this iconic performance of “this is not it.” And here are some notes I made while witnessing a performance twenty years ago:
Alex whispers. Moans. Shouts. Hums. Chants. Spits. Grimaces. Dances. The poet transubstantiates words into flesh: “Audiobiography!” he screams. He slaps his face. Again. And again.
“I write my pain and the words have no feeling.” The touch of a Brooklyn accent. His face glistens with sweat. A hint of Sicilian herbs. He closes his eyes. He speaks softly and the tension slips away: “Your hair is a labyrinth I can never hope to get out of. This is the beginning of a love poem. I’ll just leave it at that.”
Feverish drumming. Ecstatic eye-rolls to the absent sky. Shouts between drumbeats. He reaches another climax and falls silent. “The mechanic,” he whispers, “is through. Now we can make love again.”
When Aaron, his first child, was born, Alex took careful note of the sounds the baby made, sounds as yet unlimited, unprescribed by English or Sicilian. Sounds from where sounds go after the bell stops ringing. What Alex spoke, wrote, and drew was in the service of a brilliant, unrelenting, profound, humble search for what lies beyond.
A final poem:
My old friend Mallarmé
open his book and he’s there
the patterns on the page
read him into existence
if I say the words just so
he returns and tells me more
My old friend Alissandru, I open your books and there you are. Your patterns question my own. I sound your reverberating drawings and you return to tell me more.
Scott Abbott’s [see his blog here] scholarly books include Fictions of
Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel (1991) and The Perfect
Fence: Untangling the Meanings of Barbed Wire, with Lyn Bennett (2017).
With novelist and translator Žarko Radaković, he has published three books
situated between the former Yugoslavia and the western United States, editions
appearing in both English and Serbian: Repetitions, Vampires & A
Reasonable Dictionary, and We: On Friendship (2013, 2014, 2022). With
botanist and mountain biker Sam Rushforth, he published Wild Rides &
Wildflowers: Philosophy and Botany with Bikes (2014). His meditations on
the death of his brother John of AIDS appeared as Immortal For Quite Some
Time (2016). Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger (2022) is a
series of essays on academic freedom at a Mormon university. There have been
published articles on works by Goethe, Kleist, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Grass, and
Handke. Translations include Handke’s A Journey to the Rivers or Justice for
Serbia, Handke’s play Voyage by Dugout, the Play of the Film of the War,
Handke’s poetic meditation On Duration, and subtitles for Corinna Belz’s documentary film Peter
Handke. With geneticist Dan Fairbanks, he published what has become the
definitive translation of Gregor Mendel’s experiments with pea plants.
He is Emeritus Professor of Integrated Studies, Philosophy and Humanities at
Utah Valley University.
