A Frank Samperi tribute reading

with Claudia Warren,

Conrad DiDiodato, Harry E Northup,

Phoebe MacAdams, SA Griffin

& Steve Goldman

Samperi’s books online

(all PDF)

Quadrifariam (1971)

The Prefiguration (1971)

Lumen Gloriae (1973)

Day (1998)*

* transcribed posthumously

from a 1970 notebook

A reading by
Frank Samperi

Of the neglected poets of the 1960s onward, Frank Samperi represents something a unique case in that he’d published some 17 books by the time of his early death in 1991. Another five have been published since then. Yet just three of these – Prefiguration, Quadrifarium & Lumen Gloriae, all from Grossman in the early 1970s – got wide distribution at the time. While his poetry often looks on the page like the stripped down poetics of Cid Corman or the shorter works of Louis Zukofsky, two important mentors, Samperi’s impulse was toward the long poem with a decisively Catholic bent. J. Townsend’s “Spiritual Man, Modern Man: The Poetics of Frank Samperi,” in Jacket 36 is available on the web & a second study by Peter O’Leary can be downloaded from Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture in you have access to a library with membership in Project Muse. Most recently, Samperi’s daughter, Claudia Samperi-Warren, has started a website dedicated to her father & his writing. The reading and photo above are both taken from that website. Plus it has an Abebook search tool useful in tracking down copies of his books.