With a voice emerging from class tensions, labor struggles, the Great Depression, and World War II, Vincent Ferrini lived as a people's poet crying out for an end to exploitation and organized greed. Radical Christian gnosis and the conviction that poetry should be more than a display of word-craft distinguished him from poets like T. S. Eliot, infusing his work with dynamic images of Christ as a fighter, a revolutionary, and a martyr in opposing the mighty for the sake of the poor.| Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Shoe City The City Jeffery Tallcott Peter Joyce Tanney Bronson Nora Omen William McCarthy The Factories Fluoroscope of Evening Workshops in Labor The City with Empty Closets Letter to My Brother Forge Plant Termites in the Floor Ignorance Escapes from the Tomb Under the Heel The Reign of Beasts Live Cemeteries Photograph of Starved Child Dumped in a Burial Cart Fishtown Fishcutters Folksong A Little Autobiography This House In the Arriving The Square Root of In (excerpts) The Other Side The Garden of the Apocalypse The Gold Spades Aria The Theia Mania of Charles Olson In the Wake of Night I Beheld the Generations Dialogue with Thoreau Moon Soliloquy Know Fish The Flood Time of Fishing A Song of Rage Council Meeting The Bulldozers Get the Fishermen's Institute Pharaoh Otto Bosselman Mural of the Harbor Angel of Death Blacklisted Blessing of the Gasoline Tankers Cativo Ballad ov da Cut Torch Moynahan Fort Defiance Rag Picca: Trowaways 7 Da Summa Creche: Da Castagnaccis Duntouchables Da Loss ov da Capt Cosmos Divinin Rod Patty Welch's Dream & Mimi Dreamin The Navigators One December 26, 1969 January 23, 1970 September 3, 1970 September 29th of the lost year August 5th, another lost year August 7, 1976 November 3/1977 Gloucester A.D. 1973 Charley Olson The Ghost of Rocky Neck The Community of Self At the Brink A Preface to the Art of Fishing We Are the Wildflowers The Winter of Ideologies Sea Medicine Stale Supper The Holiest of Holies The Olson Strain The Salt Marshes of Our Lady Mount Ann The Date Answers Wraith Reading The Big Question This Other Ocean Ellis Island Rediscovered The Interrogation Visa A Poem is Made of The Gas Poem Hunger The Gold Miner July 4, 1776, Sign of Interdependencies Foreknowing Magdalene Silences Journey to Raiano Love Song for the Jews Miriam Magi Image IHS (excerpts) Song of the Amaranth The Rocks of Wisdom The Indweller The Alchemy of the Poem Rhapsody of the God Fish Beyond 9/11 8 The Whole Song A Fact of No Time Appendix: Onions & Bread—From a Rediscovered Manuscript Churches Schools Negroes Bookshop Mass Meetings Notes to the Poems Vincent Ferrini Bibliography Index of Titles
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Italian Americans Poetry|Vincent Ferrini published the first poems of his long career in the 1930s. He edited Four Winds, a literary journal, in the 1950s. For many years he was a close friend of the late Charles Olson and of Robert Creeley, and he has numerous acquaintances in literary circles. A resident of Gloucester, Massachussetts since 1948, his papers have been deposited with the University of Connecticut and his late papers have been deposited with the Cape Ann Historical Museum. Kenneth A. Warren is director of the Lakewood Public Library in Lakewood, Ohio, and the founder and editor of House Organ, a letter of poetry and prose. Fred Whitehead is the author or editor of a number of scholarly articles and books on intellectual and cultural history, including Freethought on the American Frontier. He is also the editor of Don Gordon's Collected Poems. He lives in Kansas City.