Joseph Ceravolo - Work

Work

Ceravolo is associated with the second generation of the New York School (which includes writers such as Bernadette Mayer, Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh). Although Ceravolo’s work shares some of the same warmth and immediacy that typifies some of the other New York School Second Generation, his work is less prone to use conversational language and is often less directly humorous than much New York School writing. Influences on Ceravolo’s poetry include Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings as well as Asian and Native American poetry.

Many of Ceravolo’s poems are marked by distorted syntax, elisions, juxtaposition and fragments (a trait he shares with Clark Coolidge, a writer also sometimes associated with the second generation of the New York School) resulting in poems that surprise with their refracted meanings and misdirections. The structure and shape of Ceravolo’s poetry changed over the course of his career: the poems of one of Ceravolo’s early books, Fits of Dawn, are characterized by a dense, relentless gush of words; Ceravolo’s poems (such as in Spring in this World of Poor Mutts) then increasingly experiment with spacing and twists added by conjunction and preposition; poems in Ceravolo’s later books tend to be more direct and lyrical, although parataxis is still prevalent.

Ceravolo’s poems often focus on the natural world, as opposed to the social world. The titles of almost all of his books contain a reference to natural phenomena (Fits of Dawn, Wild Flowers Out of Gas, Spring In This World of Poor Mutts, Millennium Dust) and the same is true of the titles of his individual poems. Sometimes simple, sometimes elliptical, Ceravolo’s poems shortcut conventional description, and as Kenneth Koch says they become almost as physical as the natural world encountered in them. An example is the poem “Drunken Winter”.

An enthusiasm can be found in much of Ceravolo’s work, exemplified by use of imperative, address and exclamation, and aided by his syntactical abstraction. A good example of this is found in his poem “The Book of Wild Flowers”.

Even where Ceravolo’s poems are “quiet”, they possess an intensity and openness; as is the case in this passage from his poem “Both Close by Me, Both”.