Stephen Morrissey : Remembering John McAuley, 1947 - 2026

 

                    

                     Work for true poems true to you.
                     The rest are Styrofoam and glue.
                               —John McAuley, "Four Tweets to a Young Poet"

 

 

John McAuley and I were the only members of the Vehicule Poets born in Montreal. John grew up on the West Island and lived most of his life in downtown Montreal, for many years in an apartment at 2151 Lincoln Avenue, just a few blocks from Concordia University where he had been a student and then a faculty member of the English Department from 1978-2018. One evening in the early 2000s my wife, Carolyn Zonailo, and I met John and his wife Ritva for dinner at the Alexis Nihon Plaza, a few blocks from where John and Ritva lived, it was the only time we met Ritva.

Before marrying Ritva, before the apartment on Lincoln, in the 1970s, John was married to Diana Brewer, Marie and Griffith Brewer's daughter. John and Diana (or "Lulu") lived at 1206 Seymour Avenue in the Shaughnessy Village, just south of Ste. Catherine Street West; it is a mostly residential downtown neighbourhood and they lived in a Victorian grey stone building (with lots of old books and needing some work) which I believe was the Brewer's family home going back several generations; it is a ten minute walk to Concordia University.

Artie Gold loved John's poetry, no Trump-like nickname for John that Artie had for one or two other members of the Vehicule Poets. There is John's poem, "Nine Lives for Artie Gold", written just after Artie died in 2007, and published in John's last book, All I can Say for Sure (2013). Ken Norris reminds me that "Artie once said that John might wind up being the best of all of us", of all of the Vehicule Poets. John writes of Artie,

                               Those who know his books
                               will delight at absurdities
                               shadowed by the casual order of things.

All I can Say For Sure might be the best book John published but it received no prizes, few reviews, and little praise; however, here is what Bert Almon, a reviewer for the Montreal Review of Books (spring 2014), wrote about John's book: 

          John McAuley, one of the Vehicule Poets who were so influential in Montreal circa         1975–80, published four books from 1977–79. His new collection, All I Can Say for Sure,   is so good that the long silence must be regretted.

A reviewer for the online Montreal Rampage, wrote the following:

    While McAuley’s writing is poetry by form, it seems like musical prose when read aloud. 
    It is difficult to say why a piece of writing works. To use a cliché, but one entirely           appropriate, you know good writing when you see it. Or, as McAuley states in “Poetry Reading”, “the gut always knows first”—but take it in a happier sense this time. Here, the writing just works. It comes off the page: it is the words in an order and a flow only a long time poet would be able to write. I could “hear” many of the works in my mind.

John and Artie had been in George Bowering's creative writing class together at Sir George Williams University (present-day Concordia University) in the early 1970s. Sometimes I hear Artie's voice in John's work, it isn't just a similarity to Artie's work, John had an equivalent ability to surprise the reader with insightful metaphors; what they shared, and GB acknowledged, is the rare gift for writing real poems. John writes, "The elderly learn the despair of outlasting everything in their closets", "Ancestral dreams in the one dark mole/ on your neck", and "Tranquil poetry arrives/ like unexpected snowflakes/ on your brother-in-law's roof next door."

John is similar in some ways to Leo Kennedy, one of the Montreal Group of poets who brought Modernism to Canadian poetry in the 1920s and 1930s; Kennedy came from an immigrant Irish family and he felt he was always an outsider. John may have identified with Kennedy but, unlike Kennedy, John never stopped being involved with poetry, and unlike Leo Kennedy John lived up to his early promise as a poet. In "To Leo Kennedy 1983" John writes,

                               Half a century ago and one book published.
                               . . . . .
                               Tragic success in finding your music
                               too easy too early,
                               faultless memory for the cost of each line. 

Leo Kennedy published one book of poems and while he was perhaps the most original of the Montreal Group of poets, or perhaps the most idiosyncratic, he was not the best of the Montreal Group. I like Kennedy's book, The Shrouding (1933), but it isn't a book I have returned to after my initial enthusiasm for it; it isn't a book that I have reread as I have with the other Montreal Group poets. John has a long gap in publishing, from around 1980 to 2013; but Claudia Lapp also published few books; I didn't publish any books from 1998 to 2009, an eleven year period. In 2013 I offered to publish a chapbook for John, with Coracle Press, but Ritva vetoed it, she said John didn`t have the work needed for a chapbook; John seemed to be always busy correcting student papers, preparing classes, but not writing new poem.

John and I, and Bob Galvin, organized the 1976-77 poetry series at Vehicule Art Gallery.  Several years before this, in 1973, I had organized a reading at Vehicule Art Gallery with Guy Birchard, and with Artie Gold's suggestions for readers; it was Guy who introduced me to Artie in early 1973 and I often visited Artie's Lorne Crescent flat. A few years later, organizing poetry readings at Vehicule Art, I brought in bpNichol and later The Four Horsemen, they read at the college where I was teaching, and then read at Vehicule Art; I had been corresponding with Clayton Eshleman and brought him in to read at the college and then at Vehicule Art. I remember Robert Kelly's reading and Kenneth Koch's reading. Claudia Lapp knew Anne Waldman from her years at Bennington College in Vermont and that's how Anne Waldman came to read at Vehicule.

In 2013 I suggested to John that he read at the Yellow Door Coffee House, the excellent reading series run by Ilona Martonfi who has done so much for Montreal poetry; the Yellow Door is located just around the corner from Artie Gold's old flat on Lorne Crescent. At the reading I made a short video of John reading his Leo Kennedy poem. The Montreal Review of Books published a poem by John as its Poem of the Month in May 2014. It is not as though John disappeared from the poetry scene, he was present but less than in the 1970s. While Leo Kennedy disappeared from poetry and moved from Montreal, John kept writing and teaching; and Ritva was an excellent editor of his work as can be seen in the poems in All I Can Say for Sure.

Tom Konyves posted videos on YouTube of the readings we did that evening in April 2018 at McGill's Rare Books and Special Collections, organized by Chris Lyon, the former director of that department; it was an evening celebrating the Vehicule Poets including readings by John McAuley, Claudia Lapp, Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, and myself; Artie Gold's and Ken Norris's poems were read by other readers. An interactive screen displayed poems; exhibition cases contained books, letters, newsletters, and photographs of each poet; it was a great evening and well attended. It was great seeing John who was warmly welcomed, especially by Tom and Claudia, John was obviously emotionally distraught because Ritva was seriously ill.

The main collection of literary papers of the individual Vehicule Poets are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections on the fourth floor of McGill's McLennan Library; these include all of the literary archives of Artie Gold, Ken Norris, Endre Farkas, and myself. I agree with Ken Norris in the hope that someone who has access to John McAuley's literary papers donates them to the university, it would be a generous and important gift for present and future literary scholars; it would preserve something of John's literary and personal legacy. If you watch Tom`s video from that evening, you'll see that despite everything John was dealing with, Ritva's illness, John's reading at McGill University was a great reading, the poems he read were a showcase of his talent as a poet. Tom's video is the main visual document of John's public poetry readings. John was self-deprecating about public readings; in his poem "Poetry Reading"; he writes,

                     Years without a reading, no publishing, not much writing
                     as if the word really had gone out from Parnassus 

And then he continues, 

                     Some readers will even think he is dead or the next thing to it.
                     No one will want to talk to him nor he to them. . .
                     . . .
                     By the end of the reading, pale and shaken
                               I can only murmur,
                     "What's wrong with being second or third rate?" 

I want to show John's extensive involvement with poetry in those early days, and his lesser but still significant involvement that followed; I want to show that John participated in creating an open and inclusive poetry scene at a time when English language poetry was in decline in Montreal. John was never solely a traditional poet, he also has a substantial body of concrete and visual poetry. Looking back on things, John participated in the writing and performance of “Drummer Boy Raga”, on 16 April 1977 at Powerhouse Gallery; it was a group reading promoted by Tom Konyves. John's work was included in the anthology, published by Vehicule Press, Montreal English Poetry of the Seventies (1978). John's Maker Press published books and he edited and published a literary magazine, "Maker"; he edited and published our first anthology, The Vehicule Poets (1979). John participated in our collective interview with Louis Dudek and published the interview with his Maker Press, A Real Good Goosin', Talking Poetics, Louis Dudek and The Vehicule Poets (1980). Of course, John's work is included in Vehicule Days, An Unorthodox History of Montreal's Vehicule Poets (1993). John also read at our 2004 reading, C=a=b=a=r=e=t ==V=e=h=i=c=u=le, presented at La Cinquieme Salle of Place des Arts on 8 April 2004, and he was in the anthology of The Vehicule Poets_Now (2004). And John's work was included in Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (2007), edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift and published by Vehicule Press. In addition to the Yellow Door reading in 2013, John also read at Argo Book Shop when DC Books launched his 2013 title, All I Can Say for Sure. He read at both the Bleu Met literary festival reading in April 2018 and the Vehicule Poets' reading at Archives and Special Collections at McGill University, also in April 2018.

John and I used to correspond, beginning in 1974 and ending in 2018, up to 2014 our correspondence is archived in my literary papers at McGill University: there are five letters to John McAuley, in 1976 and 1979-1980; seven letters from John, 1974 to 1976; one letter in 1980; and then years of silence until two letters in 2003, a few letters between 2004 and 2006, and silence until 2010; writing this I reread his emails to me from 2013 to 2018. When John didn't respond to emails from Ken Norris or Endre Farkas I was asked to contact John, which I tried to do. Reading these more recent letters, 2013 to 2018, I even discovered an unpublished review John had written of my book Girouard Avenue (2009); he had been at the book launch for Girouard Avenue, at The Word Bookstore, and after the book launch we had walked along Milton Street, talking about the old days at Vehicule Art Gallery.

I tried to keep in touch with John but, after the Bleu Met reading, in late April 2018, it was with little success; after 2018 John's life was filled with care giving for Ritva. After the event at Bleu Met John and I sat in my car and he told me of Ritva's health situation and that he was her primary care giver; I commiserated with John, I know that care giving is constant solitary work, exhaustion, and worry. I never expected this would be the last time John and I would meet or speak together; I sent him letters and books but they were either returned by the post office or never acknowledged by him, if they were ever received. Ritva died in 2021 and then John's health began to decline.

Memories fade, some are authentic but many memories are forgotten or unreliable, and some things that we remember, in fact, never happened, they are invented by time. Writing this memorial has been a return to the past, a time to remember those years of publishing books and poetry magazines, of public readings, of knowing John McAuley, but it is also about the excitement of being young poets and committed and passionate about poetry. Other than being a highly talented poet, a dedicated teacher, a faithful and loving husband to Ritva, a loyal friend, my memory of John is that he was a good decent human being and that means everything.

                                                              Stephen Morrissey
                                                              Montreal • 20 April 2026

 

 

 

Montreal born poet Stephen Morrissey is the author of twelve books, including poetry and literary criticism. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Honours in English with Distinction, from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in 1973. In 1976 he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from McGill University. In the 1970s Morrissey was associated with the Véhicule Poets. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 - 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library at McGill University. Stephen Morrissey married Vancouver poet Carolyn Zonailo in 1995. Visit the poet at www.stephenmorrissey.ca

Scott Abbott: Alissandru (Alex) Francesco Caldiero (1949-2026)

 

 

 

“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.