I never knew Kay Boyle terribly well, but I had several friends at San Francisco State in the late ‘60s who were students of that school’s first (& at that time only) tenured female creative writing teacher. One day I was sitting with some of them in what was then the school’s cafeteria – long since torn down – when Boyle joined us & tossed down a photocopy manuscript in an envelope.

 

“What do you think of this?” she asked.

 

I read – aloud as I recall – the opening section of a poem picked at random:

 

Leaped at the caribou.

My son looked at the caribou.
The kangaroo leaped on the
fruit tree. I am a white
man and my children
are hungry
which is like paradise.
The doll is sleeping.
It lay down to creep into
the plate.
It was clean and flying.

 

“Sounds like the New York School meets surrealism,” I pronounced with the arrogance of instant judgment that only somebody on the shy side of 21 can get away with.

 

“Maybe,” she said, nonjudgmental. We read some more poems, passing the manuscript around among us. This book, Boyle informed us, had just been given something called the Frank O’Hara Award & was soon to be published by the prestigious Columbia University Press. They had asked Boyle for a blurb & she let anybody who asked know that she thought the Yale Younger Poets series, with which the O’Hara Award appeared to be competing, was perfectly moribund.* Perhaps the O’Hara Award was timed right to take over the “First Book Award” franchise, but was this the right choice, she wondered aloud?

 

Spring in This World of Poor Mutts was published in 1968 & I picked up the first paperback copy of the book I saw. I think I had been bothered by the superficiality of my own snap judgment, not so much that it was wrong, but rather that it wasn’t what was useful or important about those lines at all. Rather, it was the way in which they re-envisioned both the New York School and surrealism at the same time, almost effortlessly. Looking back on that first section of “Ho Ho Ho Caribou” now more than three dozen years later, I realize that I was responding to some exceptionally deft uses of sound, how the reiteration of the word caribou at the end of the first two lines sets me up after the second appearance of leaped to want to hear that synonym for reindeer again. Which means that I find fruit tree completely surprising, leaving it foregrounded in the imagination so that it echoes when I come upon a similar surprising word, paradise. Further, the root of leap appears again in sleeping & echoes in creep so forcefully that I hear the scramble of sounds in plate & then, in the last line, clean with great clarity. Logically, the lines & images don’t connect. Sonically, however, they exert an extraordinary sense of cohesion. The poem’s power is precisely the pull of those two levels in their different directions.

 

In theory, New York School poets don’t, or didn’t, make this kind of dramatic use of the ear in the poem. In addition, there were only a few instances of NY School writing that used such great leaps from image to image, thought to thought, as this – some pieces in Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath, Koch’s process driven When the Sun Tries to Go On & Berrigan’s similarly programmatic Sonnets, none of which looked at how architecturally those gaps look when used in a small space like these eleven lines. Ceravolo was doing something completely new & at the time it was all I could do just to recognize that fact.

 

So I was hooked. Literally, after that first encounter in the SF State cafeteria, I never let a Joe Ceravolo poem go by unread. I never got to meet the man directly, but later heard second hand that he had been bemused at a lengthy appreciation I had done of one of his poems as part of a larger project of looking at ways of talking about new modes of poetry. In part my use had been opportunistic – Peter Schjeldahl’s praise for poetry about which he claimed to have no idea what it was doing was provocative enough a hook on which to hang the article. But I doubt I would have put that kind of energy into it that I did had I not wanted to underscore the many ways in which Ceravolo’s poetry matters. It is precisely because he was such a natural at building complex structures that look on the surface as simple as pie that he was able to transcend each of his influences, giving them new depth & meaning by the ways in which he employed their strategies in his own poetry. It gave his poems a vibrancy that was special at the time he was writing them & whose uniqueness becomes even more apparent with every passing year.

 

 

 

 

* This was a none too subtle slam at recent Yale winner Jack Gilbert who was adjuncting at SF State at the time.