poetfranksamperi

Review on Spiritual Neccessity by Ian Brinton, Spring 2006

2012-01-31T08:03:00.000-08:00

Spiritual Necessity, Selected Poems of Frank Samperi edited by John Martone,
Barrytown/Station Hill Press 2004

The overwhelming impression one gets from a first glance at this long overdue selection of the New York poet, Frank Samperi, is one of whiteness and space:
…must

you talk

of failure;

even this

snow’s

right

—ah, oak,

branching

over

my work

shed

It is almost as if the words were like bird-tracks in snow or as if they were yearning upwards to get to a rarefied world beyond the page. Robert Kelly’s Preface to the volume suggests that ‘Frank Samperi was legendary for the purity of his poetry. His language was clear the way glass is, demanding only attention to its lustre, and to the world it lets through. His poems are statements, clean as rock crystal, rhythmically minimal, intellectually ardent.’ The word ‘crystal’ is interesting not only on account of the volume’s inclusion of a prose piece from Samperi’s 1967 volume, Crystals, but also because it points towards the clarity of edges, the sharp definition which words have in these hauntingly cut poems. Cid Corman, whose series of Origin, A Quarterly for the Creative, was central as a platform for new poets in the quarter-century from 1951 onwards, wrote a review of Samperi’s The Prefiguration in May 1971:
The shortest poems often suggest an opening, a love of the page’s white space—and Samperi is extremely careful in his layout (and the publisher has followed it precisely).
Movement is backwards, the past, or sorrel horses galloping along a dirt road that is itself moving—to a standstill? Or a train, magician, covering distances, exposing a sudden vision of continuity.
Always in a room, looking out a window, or from a train, or even on the street, eyes peering out of the flesh, the stranger within, trying to compose, discompose or recompose, the scene. The seen.

Samperi was in good company in Origin. The first issue, Spring 1951, contained the first of Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, the sixth in the Summer of 1952 William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Desert Music’. Looking through the subsequent issues of this journal one comes to recognise the names of many of those who would feature in Donald Allen’s seminal anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-60. Each series of Origin consisted of twenty issues, four a year, according to the seasons, for five years and, as Corman announced at the back of the issues in Series 3, ‘Origin…intends to clarify the editor’s sense of art as the central relation of all human being, the realization of man’s relation, affectionately, to each other and himself and thru himself to all that is met in circumstance.’ The poem quoted above was published in Second Series, issue 12 (January 1964), alongside work by Louis Zukofsky, Clayton Eshleman, Gary Snyder and Eugenio Montale. On the front cover, in bold type, it announced
featuring—

FRANK SAMPERI

Corman went on to publish much of Samperi’s work over the following issues highlighting him as the main contributor in Third Series, issue 19 (October 1970) and Fourth Series, issue 1 (October 1977).

When The Prefiguration was published as a Mushinsha Book by Grossman Publishers in 1971, Samperi wrote to Corman to express his delight with the exact presentation of the text:

I must confess that I was overwhelmed by the book. E’s (the publisher’s) fine sense of structure establishes the proportions of the book beyond a doubt—the malleability of the prose in harmony with the longest poems, plus the ease of the last 6 poems surprisingly resolving the totality of vertical direction. Purity is an element throughout, and that does me a world of good.

In the margins of the letter he wrote ‘I mean, the whole book seems to be drawn to the top of the page—so in a truly profound sense So Close is the finest aspect of the vertical.’ Martone’s selection of the poems keeps this visual delight and in the pages of So Close, the lines do seem drawn upwards. For instance the two lines ‘in the midst of the collapse our room dark our/speech our love the background’ sit delicately four-fifths of the way up a completely blank page.

In 1965, Will Petersen published Samperi’s short collection Of Light in Kyoto containing the following page-length piece:

going out
to
the backyard
to shovel snow

away from
the
cellar door
an old man

looked up
at
a shadeless
window

blinding
in
the sun
setting

behind the
homes
beyond
the freight yard

It is worth comparing the contemplative tone of this word-painting with Samperi’s own comments on the act of contemplation, published here in the extract from Crystals 1967:

It is wrong to think of contemplation as the opposite of activity: that is, contemplation is a prefiguration of the very activity that pertains to the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the State that fosters the idea that contemplation is passive, therefore, more in keeping with the man who doesn’t work, or better who won’t contribute to the give and take that is the market. From this it is just to ask: what is the meaning of the word activity when the State is Unity. It’s obvious: exploitation.

Samperi’s attention to moments is an active engagement which, as with Gerard Manley Hopkins, is also a profoundly spiritual one and perhaps part of the alluring contemplative tone in Samperi’s lines can be expressed by going back to Hopkins’s Notebook entry for March 1871:

What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and false instress of nature. One day early in March when long streamers were rising from over Kemble End one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith with a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping—regularly curled knots springing if I remember from fine stems, like foliation in wood or stone—had strongly grown on me. It changed beautiful changes, growing more into ribs and one stretch of running into branching like coral. Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.

The detail involved in total engagement with something was what prompted Olson to write to Corman in March 1951 concerning the matter of proof-reading for that early Origin:

I shall be most grateful to you, if you can’t send proofs, if you will be this kind, and take the time I know it, hopingly, takes, to do this for me. For—as you yourself—I know I have a damn irritating style of punctuation & placements (I do it gravely, as a part of, my method, believing that, resistance must be a part of style if, it is a part of the feeling)—and if errors creep in, palpable errors, then, the whole careful structure comes down.

However, with the words ‘market’ and ‘State’ and ‘exploitation’ in Samperi’s prose we might also be inclined to look back to William Carlos Williams’s early poetry:

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colours.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

(‘Pastoral’ from Al Que Quiere, 1917)

The word ‘this’ has ambiguous reference to the poem as a construct as well as to the poverty. The shack is pushed to the limits of the city so that it won’t draw too much attention to itself and the poem, written some five years before the publication of The Wasteland, won’t disturb literary society too much! If you are interested in ‘contemplation’ and politics then it would be worthwhile looking at Ed Dorn’s poem ‘Time Blonde’ from his 1964 volume, Hands Up!

John Martone’s introduction to this selected Samperi is clear and sympathetic:

Samperi was one of that vital generation for whom poetry and life were a single task. Along with Olson’s Maximus Poems, Larry Eigner’s countless books, and Corman’s Of, Samperi’s work belongs to that distinctively American genre of the life-poem. His work is a radical autobiography, structured upon image rather than narrative.

Martone sees Samperi as a visionary pilgrim who has Dante as his master: orphan and first-generation Italian-American, he discovered Dante in a Brooklyn institution, taught himself Aquinas in Latin, studied the Indian philosopher Sankara, non-Euclidean geometry, and astrology.

Editing Samperi’s work presents specific challenges. On the one hand, he wrote but one long poem with structural complexities reminiscent of Dante’s Commedia, complete with late-twentieth century versions of his predecessor’s canticles, cantos and episodes. Each of Samperi’s volumes is in fact a poetic sequence made up of subsequences, which are sometimes named, sometimes partitioned by blank pages. Conveying a sense of the individual lyric in its own right and in terms of its place in the opus is a difficult proposition in a volume of selected poems. The meditative and visual qualities of Samperi’s work also require abundant “white space” in any faithful edition.

The results of Martone’s editorship can be judged by the extracts he has chosen from Lumen Gloriae, Grossman 1973, where he has kept to the nine words to the page for

riding a train

looking at homes

desiring a home

or the simple junction of movement and stillness in

an old man leaning out of a window

knowing himself useless

the potted plant beside him

backing it up

When Samperi defines contemplation in terms of activity there is another interesting link to be made with Charles Olson’s immensely influential essay, Projective Verse where he sees movement as being essential to the poetic enterprise:

Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.

This sort of relation was perhaps what was on Corman’s mind when he delivered his Aquila essay, ‘Projectile/Percussive/Prospective: The Making of a Voice’ in March 1982:

Though Olson, Creeley and I have worked out our own modes for ourselves and hopefully of use to others, our voices, I believe, utterly individuated, impossible to confuse us, we are also deeply related. Not only through the ear of Pound, the idiomatic quickening and flow of Williams, and for Creeley and myself at least the confirmation of exactitudes within the confines of language in Zukofsky, but through continuing attentions. There are others, of course, too, like Dorn and Sorrentino. Or Samperi.

Corman opens his review of The Prefiguration with a few lines from Hopkins’s ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ and goes on to say;

To read Hopkins or Samperi, for me at least, requires no suspension of either disbelief or belief. I hear what they say to the extent that I can and to that extent precisely my own words follow.
A man in the middle way, or an innocent, for he is an innocent. His eyes see beyond judgement, though the body’s needs brought to society bring him to critique.
The earlier poems are lonelier and even more imaginary, a man talking to himself always, trying to make sense, if only to himself, seeing himself dying, seeing himself dead, his body roped to a raft by vagrants and children, with lilies and seaweed,
the raft
adrift.
In a sense he comes on like the Noh, from way back, posthumously in the guise of a native of New York, or Brooklyn, but clearly, transparently, a spirit.

Samperi’s spiritual quality is not a turning away from the world around him but rather an embracing, an understanding of its components. In Crystals he is very clear about the spiritual in the modern world:

To be drawn into the market only intensifies one’s sense of the ambience that impedes; therefore, any science that pretends to have discovered a means to a re-establishment of the natural has, in truth, simply proposed to the mind an end that places the whole populace in a position conducive toward complete service to the State.
The despair: to say the world is to give rhetorical definitiveness to your world.
It is obvious that the notions making it on your own and being responsible are there solely for the sake of stressing the eternity in the now.
Linguistics is the sole study of the logomachist.
Looking out only to refer back and then finally looking out significantly.
A doctrine is only valid ontologically, that is, nothing that one man or another can say can place the meaning unequivocally there rather than here. What is intended is a boundary that reduces each man’s movement to a movement essential in the sense that the ambience is but a projection of his inner state.
There is a seriousness of tone here that points back to Blake on the one hand and forward, perhaps, to the Kitchen Poems of J.H. Prynne on the other. In terms of the former there is the aphoristic sense which echoes the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; in terms of the latter there is the italicised colloquialism which is inserted into the discursive text carrying with it a tone of anger at the State’s involvement with the life of the individual.
Samperi’s spiritual quality can be felt through the simplicity of lines such as

we stood on a bridge

the vantage point

a willow

eery

Or, it can be read in the translation of Dante’s Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, which Corman published in Origin Fourth Series issue I, October 1977, where it appeared alongside William Bronk and Lorine Niedecker:

As is the geometer who wholly applies himself
to measure the circle, and doesn’t meet,
thinking, that principle whence he needs,
such was I to that new sight:
I wished to see how the image agreed
with the circle and how it places itself there;
but the proper wings were not for this:
except that my mind was struck
by a brightness in which its wish came.
To the high fantasy here power fell short;
but already was turning my desire and the velle,
like wheel that’s moved equally,
the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Ian Brinton, Spring 2006
Tears in the Fence, Literary Journal

The Intensional and Extensional Motion of Frank Samperi's The Triune, by Michele Mazzia

2012-01-27T19:48:00.000-08:00

Feb 12 (not sure of the date) I think it might be 1975.

Dear Mr. Samperi,
Last semester I took a course in contemporary literature and Caterpillar Anthology was one of the course's texts. Reading 20 sections from The Triune was like following a path of discovery - the poem is pure energy to me. I've since read The Prefiguration and plan to order The Triune.
My professor, Peter Clothier, suggested I send a paper I wrote for the class to you. I hope you enjoy
seeing in what manner The Triune speaks to some of its readers.

Sincerely,
Michele Mazzia
Senior philosophy major
Univ. of Southern California

The Triune is a journey: a man's walk through the country and the city, a soul's passage through time.
1) The motion is expressed in the flow of both concrete images and abstract concepts.
The extensional motion, the form of the lines and stanzas, is that each line is one unitary image or concept.
Each linear unit gives way to the next. The lines are equally spaced and positioned along the same margin;
thus each line is of equal weight and each image is as primary as the next.

CONCRETE

The park quiet
I climbed rocks
came to paths to bridges
to grass trees beyond
turned down to a lake
few rowboats out
some boys their pants rolled up
fishing at the edge (p.152)

The poem is a first-person narration. The narrator, the subject of the journey, is always present; and when reference to him is explicit, it is most often with the motion verbs "I walked," "I climbed," "I came," "I turned."
Thus the images are always the images he sees as he travels; the images are united and flow naturally. There is constant reference to paths and bridges-- connectives between sites.
The direction of the motion is "ambiance conchoidal": the curving paths and recurrent images--hill, rocks, trees, river--recurrent locations--weed, desert, city, valley. It is a journey round and round toward a center, also a unification. It is "circular movement squared." (p. 166)

ABSTRACT

The flow of concrete images is juxtaposed by the succession of abstract concepts.

sweet peas
the graveside
then water
space a reflection unity
light to river
the flowers planets
the universe a body
an obviation
horizon (p.158)

The movement of the body is accompanied by the movement of thought. But the abstractions of thought are not analytical or logical, but rather imaginative. Compare the above passage to the introduction to Blake's "Auguries Of Innocence:"

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

It is a move of the imagination from the particulars of sense to the totality of space; it is the imagination that likens the universe to a body.
2) There is a tension between the concrete and the abstract that heightens the energy level of the poem.
In general terms, the tension between the concrete and the abstract is the disparity of the particularity of sense-perceptions and the unity of the imagination. An expression of a more specific form of tension between abstract and concrete in The Triune is the polarity of geography and geometry.
The motion is at once geographical motion--from rivers to valleys to hills to cities--and geometrical motion--"conchoidal" and "circular movement squared." The motion is both between two particular places and an instance of a universal geometrical form. The higher energy level of the poem is the result of this representation of the same phenomenon is alternative descriptions. It is like two different motions.
3) But the distinction between geographic particular and geometrical universal breaks down, for they both pre-suppose each other.
There is a contradiction in taking the geographic location as only a particular:

left and right rivers
the geographical false
stressing a position

For position is only a position within the whole, in relation to the totality of locations along the conchoidal path. Similarly, the conchoidal form of the motion presupposes a particular point as center:

Circle whose center was no where visible except as
circumference presupposed itself as center to a
circumference no where visible

Thus, the particular geographic locale moves into the totality, and the universal geometrical form moves into
the particular. This motion between universal and particular is continuous, and analogous to the endless
conchoidal path whose point-center is never reached.
4) The motion in The Triune is thus shown to have a dialectical character: the movement of qualities into their opposites.
The kinetics of The Triune are attained in the passage from a concrete image or a concept to its opposite.

CONCRETE DIALECTICS

a) "the right reflects the left"
b) the rising and setting of the sun
c) the path from the river to the desert
d) "sleep the awakening"
e) love/hate:
"a man and a woman lying amidst grass"
"men and woman shot among the trees to the right of a waterfall
a girl raped left naked"
"war
crime
diversion
the architecture positions
the people individually met belying the peace"
f) "fire below by the river"
g) from the country to the city

ABSTRACT DIALECTICS

a) "straight line
curve
one the other
other
reflecting"
--reflection is between opposites, the uniting of opposites in the reflection.

b) "the unitary unjustified
line spectral
point zero unresolved
unit net zero
however no negative no positive
--negativity contained in the meaning of positive, so there can be no positive without the negative. The point zero, neither positive nor negative, is an enigma--the unitary is not zero, so it must pass directly from the negative to the positive, with no intermediary zero state.

The life process itself is dialectical:

identity a person
dying
depersonalization
contradiction

The activity of life is a movement toward death: living is dying.
The dialectic is described:

the god involution evolution
resolution deceptive
induction deduction
transformations
therefore equilibrations
then opposite
generation
circular movement squared

The spiral development: deceptive, for though traveling along the same course, every step taken has its opposite.

The Triune presents dialectical motion at a multiplicity of levels, and thus is itself a spiral staircase. The first level is within the concrete and abstract realms themselves: the movement from images concepts to their opposites. The second level is the dialectic of the course traveled: the endless conchoidal path. The third level is the inter-action of the abstract and the concrete: the particular geography and universal geometry moving into each other. The next level is the general description of the dialectic within the poem. The last level is
The Triune as a whole containing the other levels. Each stage contains the dialectic of the previous stages.

The only overtly dialectical motion of the extension of the poem is the last line of the Caterpillar excerpt: the line extensionally reads in a downward direction, but the intension is climbing, transcending.

Dialectics achieves a unity higher than that of the totality of the imagination, for it unites that totality with its opposite particularity. But of course, the vision of the totality afforded by the imagination is necessary to the dialectical consciousness. The place of dialectics in the journey of the spirit may be as a source of partial light on the true course, analogous to Dante's flame symbolic of the light philosophy can give to the
heathen.

Reality Studios, May 1978

2012-01-16T18:58:00.000-08:00

Two American Poets: Frank Samperi and Cid Corman
By David Miller

         Frank Samperi is one of the few really outstanding poets of the present time. His work is not really
comparable to that of any other living poet (and in fact I think Samperi would find any such comparison
irksome): as he stands against so many of the current tags chosen by critics and poets alike,
including "modernism" and "the contemporary", it is happily impossible to fit him into any "group" or
"movement" or "general direction" - however, because of this Samperi's work has not found the acclaim,
except in certain outlying quarters, which it deserves. His is a poetry of profound lyricism and of
spiritual depth. Even comparatively "trivial" or minor things by Samperi add something to the total depth of
his work. (The same is true, I believe, of another outstanding poet, Cid Corman.) Frank Samperi's major published work to date is the trilogy comprising The Prefiguration, Quadrifariam and Lumen Gloriae
(all: Mushinsha/Grossman, Toky/N.Y.). I have written about Samperi's work - especially concentration on
the triolgy - in an essay which appears as an Afterword to his volume The Kingdom (Arc Publications,
Lancs.). Samperi's most recent book to appear in the states in sanza messo (Elisabeth Press, N.Y.), a
small collection which, like the earlier The Fourth (Elizabeth Press) is "to the side" of his major projects, yet,
also like the earlier volume, containing a number of excellent poems. sanza mezzo will not reveal Samperi
at the depth of the trilogy, but it does show the insistent beauty and incisiveness of his poems:

the birds
among
the flowers
startle

then continue
their flight
leaving
even

the trees
a
shattering
mass

at first
a
shuddering
mask

Some exceptional work by Samperi has also been appearing in Cid Corman's journal Origin
(Fourth Series).

    Cid Corman has been publishing since the 50's, and has a long list of books and pamplets of
poetry, criticism and translations to his credit. 's is the 15th, and most recent, of his books to appear from
Elizabeth Press alone. Corman's poetry is sparsely exact without being "bloodless", indeed the
pressure in his lines (often considerable) is the pressure of a life which celebrates life: life without hope.
Life facing death. I am reminded of Andre du Bouchet's lines, from "The White Motor" "I found
myself/ free/ and without hope." In one poem Corman writes:

So little wanted
already too much.
Assume your breath as

what it is - your fate.
And in the name of
God - abandon hope.

So much of this poetry centres upon the two terms (realities), breath and death - appearance and
absence, being and nothing. In an earlier collection, significantly titled Livingdying (New Directions, N.Y.):

Mother, you will die.
In a few years, more
or less. I have the

doctor's word for it.
What is there to say
or see or do? Day

extends day. Body
bends to earth to drink
a dish of shadow

(The title of that volume, incidentally, derives from Corman's extraordinary version of a Chinese poem,
probably by Tu Fu, beginning "Ten years living dying alone...")
    The vision is bleak, but not so bleak as it may seem at first. Corman's concern for concrete detail is a
loving concern with the particular. His vision is also a humanitarian one, centering upon people in relation
and in their essential loneness. (Cf. "Making Love", in Livingdying.) Nor is the poetry divorced from "aura" -
the term breath is not only the actual physical act of breathing and existence of breath but also conveys
the spiritual principle. For Corman's is an interior poetry - not in the sense of being merely personal/
autobiographical nor in terms of narcissistic psychodrama - but in the sense of manifesting an interior
movement, where interior is not split from the physical world, not made to stand over against it as the
subjective in relation to a cold and spiritless objective world. (As the Gospel of Thomas has it: The Kingdom of Heaven is both within you and without you.)

Established.
As if a
name could by

being breathed
mean something
beyond the

breath. The ar-
chitecture
of a flame.

   That pressure in Corman's lines is partly due to the actual insistence of what the poem says; partly
to Corman's skilful use of syllabics - which he uses strictly or freely, as it suits him. What the pressure
reveals is of the other side of hope/hopelessness; it does not depart from the actual, yet in this very
insistence Corman is drwan to reveal, existing at the heart of the poetic vision, what Dante called
"the love that moves the sun and the other stars":

Except we are loved.
we cannot love. Here
is the root then, the

love of a father,
and the tree, the worth
of the child. Except

there be fruit too, love
in us, again to
them, both root and tree

will wither in us,
howsoever they
hitherto have grown.

Drawn to love by love,
everlasting in
revolving splendor.

March 17, '78.
Editor: Ken Edwards

From Steven Toussaint's blog posted Nov 1, 2011

2012-01-10T18:42:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, I was introduced to the beautiful, delicate poems of Frank Samperi by Elizabeth Robinson. I have spent the time since acquiring rare, out-of-print editions of his books and learning as much as I can about this poet whose work, though abundant and original, is largely unknown.

This seems to be changing due in large part to the work of his daughter, Claudia, who started a blog devoted to her father's life and work. There are also two wonderful essays on Samperi's work available online by Peter O'Leary and J. Townsend. This past week, PennSound launched Frank Samperi's author page featuring a recording of Samperi reading in 1987 and pdf versions of four of his out-of-print collections.
I find something incredibly beautiful, earnest and sustaining in efforts like these to rescue a singular voice from obscurity. Recoveries, rediscoveries of this kind make contemporary poetry the vibrant and diverse creature that it is, and I applaud and thank all those involved in bringing Frank Samperi back into the world.

Posted By Steven Toussaint

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T09:49:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to everyone! Let it be a bessed year.

From Lumen Gloriae

a whole garden of angels
each leaning upon each
light flowering heavenward
tho each flower heaven
animals under flame
key releasing ground
fire air earth water
outside the walls
_________________________________

Then the dwelling of the angel in the soul
or rather the odor
sign
of the dwelling
continuing
habituating the man
to the daily
drawing out radiance
preparing
rendering
transparent
the surroundings
the universe
the aureole
receiving
truest
ray
______________________________

existing no place
pilgrim no staff
entering no space

in light spirit to spirit
recalling deeper light
communicating deepest
sight

universe closing behind
pilgrim beyond
even
one with point

A letter to Frank from Will Petersen, 1967

2011-12-24T13:19:00.000-08:00

wonderful! you have a dash in place of the date!!!

Monday, 27 Aug 67

Dear Frank,
                   a letter from you and also a good one from Walter Hamady in Madison, Wisconsin. It's good
news that even before finishing your letter I came here to sit down, correspond, eagerly. Ami and I were
having coffee when the mail came. We'd played catch, as a way to wake up, get a rhythm going. It was good.
                    Immediately after writing you I began working, and, as always happens, all sorts of little things went right and there were good "coincidences". For one, I made myself a bowl of Japanese noodles in broth (soba) ) (for the first time in the US) and watched the Japanese ALL Star Baseball game, and a letter came to me from Ami's younger brother. For me, simply, it was relating -- and the dream I had last night was good too.
                     Ami and I had a good long talk too, during the course of which she quoted you, saying:
as Frank says, poets don't belong in workshops.
                     In any case, somehow I've broken out of the not-caring, tired, what's-the-use, all's meaningless state I've been in for so long.
                     But now what? Do I want to explain? I suppose this is our modern curse.
.....

During the game a man hit a triple and the pitcher smiled. The American broadcaster noted this and the American playing with a Japanese team commented that this was something he could never accept -- that the pitcher should be angry, that it was inconceivable that he was not, and therefore the smile was insincere, phoney, untrustworthy. It is , if one accepts the western, or American basis. As I watched and listened, I smiled - or noted myself smiling, and I was feeling good. (I'm tired of this talk of loss of face, as though American anger isn't also concern with loss of face.) Anyway I felt light. (Think of the smiles on ancient sculptures, in early Christian painting or medieval sculpture, in old oriental works. In art history it is referred to as the "archaic smile", meaning it is primitive and early on the progress & evolution value scale -- that is, those guys didn't really know how to sculpt or paint realistic expressions.
                      If it takes less muscles to smile than to frown, it would seem the smile is lighter, and more natural. Anyway, I smiled, and went back to work.
.......

I am definitely leaving the school after this year, knowing that I cannot teach -- except for drawing (but I couldn't get a job teaching that), for teaching drawing is good seeing-exercise for me. I also knew, as I 've always known but have tried, how I 've tried, as that I can't be part of an academic community, artist's community, etc. I also know I'll never sell enough to exist by my work, and that the truer the work the less chance of gaining income from it. Whatever I sell will only partly pay for the high costs of materials.
As for the city, I've got to be near the city to be able to buy the papers, printing inks, papers, brushes, gum arabic, acids and other things I need, for I have these cumbersome stones, this heavy press....Since I do make objects I also need from time to time to be with fellow objects, to look and be nourished, to meet my friends..., as you need to meet Dante. So the painter envies the poet, who seems purer--who doesn't seem to be so saddled, doesn't seem so tied to place by need for materials. Saddest seems the sculptor, Sadder still, the architect.
I'm happy to receive your letter, and for me it is joy that my letter prompted it. I feel complete agreement with it--FEEL, because I feel "right", honest and myself; feel true. FEEL, also, because the whole of me accepts, agree, but I cannot say THINK. I am not a thinker, or, perhaps, more accurately, my thoughts form themselves more accurately in the images I make, in the colors I place, than in words. I can visualize shapes that eliminate conflict, but words return us to it. So, when you say "The conflict between you and me in this: you see the community solution (that is, it isn't the State, etc..........)....." I don't recognize myself.

That at core, at center, however one wants to put it (already I feel troubled by verbal idioms) we are not in conflict is why we have been friends for so long and continue to be, and that the friendship is not broken by oppositions. Meanwhile we wear clothes, buy shoes, earn money for food, seek solutions, choose toothpastes...and "glad to hear you had a nice trip" or any other statement can be cause for argument. (God, after all, is a word, and an English word at that. In praise of God. Yea! But no, perhaps when someone else says it. No art even existed that was not religious, I said to Ami, but then what does each person mean by religion? So I am in agreement with "God is dead" and at the same time reject it completely, utterly--absolutely out of the question, an impossibility: if God is eternal, etc., then God is dead is too ridiculous a statement to even think about--something else is dead, if anything. And if religion had nothing to do with art, or if art replaced, etc then it's not my religion.
                The difference between one bowl and another is that one is in praise of God, is religious, and the other not. All the discussion of shape, clay body, glaze, form, curve, lift, sit is finally irrelevant---and yet not.
               If one cannot speak of a bowl as religious, or of a painting of nothing but persimmons or a spray of bamboo as religious painting, then it is not what I mean by religion. If only icons or representations of saintly figures are religious, I want no part of that religion. I know you agree, even if you wrote back in argument, for your work is certainly an example. But how can I explain to someone that a poem of yours, take for example:

the street the reflection
the window
the waking
the backyard
snow
moon

                  is religious (and not a "landscape" poem, or a "still life" or "a slice of life" or a "scene" or a "decoration" or a "mood" or whatever) while so-and-so's full of Christ, God, love, Heaven, soul and other words is not at all religious? I can't. One either sees or doesn't. As fa as I'm concerned. I 'm not a teacher or missionary. Though I wish I could get people to see.
                   My sister once said to me, why do you sing sad songs (not unlike Zukofsky advising you to stop writing sad poems and to write happy poems)--but I was not sad, nor was I joyful, unless we redefine both words. So Hasegawa always said I'm sad-happy or happy-sad when asked how he felt. Maybe joyful-sorrowing or sorrowing-joyful would have been better, but English was not his language, and not being a poet I translate these words. As I suppose you, working with words and concerned with their precision, cannot, or would not. Likewise, looking at a visual equivalent of the above, I, concerned with just the right shape, color, form would not, could not, alter what I saw, but would reject. But Hasegawa tried his way to get away from the everyday dualisms. So, there is sorrow and sorrow, joy and joy. Or, as you put it to me:
"Your notion of joy is therefore to me a middle class sentiment." You underline notion, so I suppose you would disagree with the above and say, no, Will, there isn't joy and you, but only joy, an absolute, a single definition, but there are false notions and middle class etc distortuons--I suppose you would say that, and I suppose agreement again.
                    So, "don't write sad poems, write happy poems" is really irrelevant. A smile when the opposition hits a triple of of you may be a social smile, may be a false smile, may be deceitful, but it may also be true--it may be religious.
                     But when the work goes (or comes), how good, how true, how right. And the truest test is perhaps when I sit down, look at it (someone else looking at it might find it depressing, sorrowful, sad or whatever) feel quiet joy, feel true--if it is in praise of , what else can one feel? I've had those times, and always I've found myself feeling:now I can die.
                   Or, maybe if one put it: now I can meet my Maker--maybe that would be better, a better way to put it.
                   At that moment all is true, I'm physically alone, but feel isolated, alone, lonely, sad--nor is it what we usually call happy, joyous. It is joy, yes, and sorrow, yes. But not heel-kicking Eureka, not "Boy o Boy! I've got to show this to somebody", not "Boy am I good"--joy, but now of that. Maybe not even smile.
                 I suppose the archaic smile seems "primitive" because art critics and historians dislike the ambiguity, neither happy nor sad smile, so it must be the artist's inability to accurately portray emotion and expression. No one considers that the artist did succeed in doing just what he intended doing.
                  At the same time, Hasegawa's work was never as good as he was--I was at his deathbed and know the spirit of the man. I know Murray Jones died an awakened, a saved, man--meanwhile, there's his widow, his children, meanwhile there's his beautiful work which is stacked up unwanted...At the same time there's the dirty man, the ugly man, the conniving man, who does beautiful, does pure work---because there's that purity in him, but here we are with masks, clothes, layers, overgrowth, undergrowth, parasitic growth (even inside us) and all is very complex, and the language we use if full of "kill" words and "pay load" and "pays off"....
                So, we'll argue from time to time, which is okay. We'll do another portfolio--I don't know when. Right now I've got to keep on with solving, or trying to solve, the color work, the large prints, I working on--and the work is full of contradictions. "Thinking" blocks me. I falter when I try to figure it all out or plan it first or justify it it or think in any way--I've got to go ahead, bumble my way through, error after error, and then when I'm done sit and look at the result in amazement, because it is incredibly complex in the way it works out--and after it's done I can find the most complex mathematical, for example, relations, and it seems inconceivable that is "wasn't planned" or thought out. In any case our ways differ, are complementary. Opposite poles.

I'd better go down to work. (Speaking of place, I do need daylight. Going down into the dark basement, working by artificial light, is no good.) Final word: Whenever I am positive I'm leaving Columbus and the school, that's exactly the time I can stay--or stay or go, all the same. Then I return to that state I was in in Oakland when I said: "I've got to get to Japan, I have to. It's the most important thing in my life. But, if I don't go, that's okay." And everyone looked at me thinking I made no sense.

Yours ever,
Will
(good to get a good letter from you!)

Will Petersen and Frank Samperi letters would make a great book.

What Shape Sound by John Phillips, 2011

2011-12-16T19:07:00.000-08:00

One comes to
places curious
like years ago
recognizing
faces there
that never were
----------------------------

How still the
wind not
in the leaves is
not moving just
now it was
fallen so that
dark between
each makes
still green
light leaves
away falling no
closer to see
--------------------------

Less your face in
the morning
than the face in the
morning you
see
           thrown
cold
           water does
not make
feel
           or wet hands
dry
-------------------------

We talk thinking the words say
what we want the silence
to know we do not understand
ourselves to be
-----------------------------

Going out
to see the moon
is part of seeing it

Remembering
it inside
is another
----------------------------

It is outside the wind I hear
in here listening to not a sound
other than what is heard
not listened to     rain can be
heard   not yet fallen    it will
------------------------------

The room
we are in
is not the same
room for each
of us      here
-----------------------------

This book is done by Skysill Press, Sam Ward, UK

Phillips has discovered the fact that words, like all other things - those which are natural around us,
as well as the things/symbols that we create for our own convenience - have a life of their own.
He has respect for that simple, and usually ignored, fact.
-Theodore Enslin, First Intensity

SAMPERI'S DIAGRAM by Clayton Eshleman

2011-12-08T21:45:00.000-08:00

The paradise of the Frank Samperi diagram,

showing poets how to get through. Can you believe it,
I said to Carol Berge, on the sofa beside me,
she was twisting her hands in something on her lap,
"I am unsure." So I investigated,
spotting the black horse head areas in what looked like
a complex airport diagram, with lights, on a vast wall,
Samperi appeared, more healthy than in life,
"The horse head areas are disaster spots,
you have to figure out how to move around them,"
or did he say "through them?"
                                                 Now in Samperi's realm,
on his road, or via, I struggled with bales,
saw marvelous living rocks, emerald things speaking to me?
I was in "everything is alive."
"all is in constant transformation, "then I thought of Caryl,
made it back to our bedroom where hunched Samperi figures were by
      her bed, backs to me.
I saw one slithering under the springs,
I threw them away-monks? demons? Samperi outriders?
and immediately wanted to pursue was it Samperi's Jumanji?
Not sure, never sure, always on this wavering transcendental road,
      plagued with the iridescent,
where hollows are owls, thrown instantly-sprouting reeds,
reeking with meat, and the meat spills its lore, whore-angles pour,
to reveal the beast in harbor, the hall-spurting storm
     is a chrysanthemum-radiant isle. Then Frank reappeared-
I told him: I'm so blocked by transformation, plus
your henchmen passing rods through Caryl...
"Here," Frank said, "work with these..."
He spilled some black pebbles which I scooped, swam with,
tossing them before me as I pulsed,
I ran the Samperi road, miles racing under me,
toppled herms, Frank's life and death, I saw the mother he told me was
    a prostitute,
her hair streaming lizards, she wept little Franks who I kissed,
hedges, towers, a rain of moles, a goblet passed or was passed to me,
I watched the shrimp dancing twitch, then drank,
my infancy became a pile of tiny pearls, "what to do" became a lot of tools,
my newspaper route, I was at 49th and Boulevard Place,
freezing, as the truck dumped the Indianapolis Times,
I tore open the moor, to find the under-sage, twiggy trails led me back,
flying Samperi's diagrammatic sentence, I heard
"You've joined the diagram..."
                                                 Was that Berge?
"Oh it is wonderful," she said, as I plopped down beside her,
"wonderful when vision works at the speed of mind."
Then I saw her chipmunk, I mean her baby anaconda, and broke down
     in tears:
only parts of the dream could be recovered here, and is this vision?
I have remembered, invented, remember-invented,
I was in paradise how long?
I cannot recall its caul, or its multifoliate delivery-
cannot here recreate the dream's sensual matrix.
This is the real Fall, the divisional void.
Then to awake, face the clock, the media headlock,
what a wrench, fellow man, what a wacky disorienting brainswipe,
the zero time of paradise chopped up into space.

Notes:
"SAMPERI'S DIAGRAM": The poet Frank Samperi's (1933-1991) major work is a
trilogy made up of The Prefiguration, Quadrifariam, and Lumen Gloriae, all published
by Mushinsha-Grossman, in 1971 and 1973. Station Hill brought out a selected poems
by Samperi, Spiritual Nescessity, edited by John Martone, in 2003. I knew Frank
both in NYC and in Kyoto, and published his Crystals as a Caterpillar Book (1967),
as well as some of his poems in Caterpillar magazine. He is a unique figure in American
poetry, whose force field gravitated totally around Dante.

From Clayton Eshleman, an alchemist with one eye on fire, 2006

Three letters to Frank from Ted Enslin

2011-12-03T18:02:00.000-08:00

RFD #1, Temple, Maine 04984
1970

Dear Frank,
                  Thanks, more than thanks, for the good reading of Synthesis.
It is a reading, and a just one. Other things, of course, but new or old are
not of the process, and there is much on the other side. Yes. I've hesitated
to do much with this piece, for several years. I did read sections in NY, and
Clayton wanted some of it for Caterpillar, hence. It moves slowly. Not FORMS
but allied to the animus that moved there in other times, other places, and above
all, other angles of seeing/being. If it can bring pleasure or recognition, as
it did from you.

Love,
Ted

3/30/88

Dear Frank,
                      It has been many years since we were in direct contact, although we have been
through your good work. LUMEN GLORIAE remains, for me, one of the
very finest books in many years. I return to it.
                     Perhaps Cid has mentioned to you that I might send you a country stick.
Actually this is what is known as an English striding stick. It is by no means a medical
appendage. I have loved walking sticks all my life, and always carry one on walks, hikes, scrambles.
(Actually I use a cane size for level walking, sometimes a strider for distance, and a five foot
alpenstock for climbing.)
So you can see I am very fond of them. Actually the one I'm sending you is #304 of those I've
made. It is white ash, and I guarantee, despite it's slim proportion you won't break it.
I suggest you wipe it occasionally with raw linseed oil. That will nourish the wood, and
deepen the color. I like to think that you have one of these.
I hope you enjoy it.

Love, Ted

4/27/88

Dear Frank,
                       If the stick gives you pleasure, it is only a very small return on pleasure
that your work has given me. So many years ago those few times that we talked
in Brooklyn. Perhaps we will again one day. I go to New Mexico every winter ---not that far.

Love,
Ted

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

2011-11-24T09:49:00.000-08:00

Be merry and enjoy!

From Amie Cesaire, Solar Throat Slashed

2011-11-20T20:43:00.000-08:00

Le griffon

Je suis un souvenir qui n'atteint pas le seuil
et erre dans les limbes ou le reflet d'absinthe
quand le coeur de la nuit souffle par ses events
bouge l'etoile tombee ou nous nous contemplons

Le ciel lingual a pris sa neuve consistance de creme de noix fraiche ouverte
du coco

Andes crachant et Mayumbe sacre
seul naufrage que l'oeil bon voilier nous soudoie
quand ame folle dechiquetee folle
            par les nuage squi m'arrivent dans les poissons bien clos
je remonte hanter la sinistre epaisseur des choses

The Griffin

I am a memory that does not reach the threshold
and wanders in limbo where the glint of absinthe
when the heart of night breathes through its blowholes
moves the fallen star in which we contemplate ourselves

The lingual sky took on a new consistency of a freshly opened coconut's
cream

Spitting Andres and sacred Mayumbe
sole shipwreck that the eye good sailer pays off for us
when soul mad shredded mad
                through clouds that reach me in tightly shut fish
I reascend to haunt the sinister thickness of things
_________________________________________________________

Mississipi

Hommes tant pis qui ne vous apercevez pas que mes yeux se souviennent
              de frondes et de drapeaux noirs
              qui assassinent a chaque battement de mes cils de Mississipi

Hommes tant pis qui ne voyez pas qui ne voyez rien
pas meme la tres belle signalisation de chemin de fer que font sous mes
paupieres les disques rouges et noirs de serpent-corail que ma munificence
love dans mes larmes de Mississipi

Hommes tant pis qui ne voyez pas qu'au fond de reticule ou le hasard a
depose nos yeux de Mississipi
il y a qui attend un buffle noye jusqu'a la garde des yeux de marecage

Hommes tant pis qui ne voyez pas que vous ne pouvez m'empecher de batir
a sa suffisance
des iles a la tete d'oeuf de ciel flagrant
sous la ferocite calme de geranium immense de notre soleil.

Mississipi

Too bad for you men who don't notice that my eyes remember
              slings and black flags
              that murder with each blink of my Mississipi lashes

Too bad for you men who do not see who do not see anything
not even the gorgeous railway signals formed under my eyelids by the
black and red discs of the coral snake that my munificence coils in my
Mississipi tears

Too bad for you men who do not see that in the depth of the reticule where
chance has deposited our Mississipi eyes
there waits a buffalo sunk to the very hilt of the swamp's eyes

Too bad for you men who do not see that you cannot stop me from building
to his fill
egg-headed islands of flagrant sky
under the calm ferocity of the immense geranium of our sun.
_________________________________________________________

Blues

Aguacero
beau musicien
au pied d'un arbre devetu
parmi les harmonies perdues
pres de nos memoires defaites
parmi nos mains de defaite
et des peuples de force etrange
nous laissions pendre nos yeux
et natale
denouant la longe d'une douleur
nous pleurions.

Blues

Aguacero
beautiful musician
unclothed at the foot of a tree
amidst the lost harmonies
close to our defeated memories
amidst our hands of defeat
and peoples of a strength strange
we let our eyes hang
and native
loosing the leading-rein of a sorrow
we wept.
_______________________________________

Three poems from Amie Cesaire, Solar Throat Slashed
Translated by Clayton Eshleman

Clayton Eshleman Reading at Beyond Baroque of Aime Cesaire

2011-11-15T18:33:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday, Nov 13th, I had the pleasure of attending Clayton's reading of his translation of Aime Cesaire's "Solar Throat Slashed".

My husband and I really enjoyed the reading and it was great to meet up with Clayton after so many years.

Thank you Clayton.
Claudia

Complete interview with Cid Corman now on PennSound

2011-11-11T10:33:00.000-08:00

Interviewed by Eric Warren and Claudia Samperi-Warren, New York City, November 1991.
Now the complete video is available on PennSound on Cid Corman's page.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Corman.php

Samperi Notes from Notebook, 1974-75

2011-11-08T20:58:00.000-08:00

Lumen Gloriae fully realized today – 3/24/72

that brings to completion the fullness of the work – what was needed was the realization that came on
the 22nd – not arrogance to say that not since the Commedia has there been a work equally complete -
the analogy works because the work along the same lines – in fact, the 3 titles unifies title forgone the
true Dantesque interpretation, which if used would work wonders….By equally complete
I don’t mean as to characterization but as to Spiritual realization: the there planes have been fully
expressed – the fourfold complement of the contemplative brought to bear upon the Trinity the God
head, that is, establishment subsistence there without a doubt but hidden the numbers part of the
poem – both poems stir thruout wherever stressed: The Prefiguration Quadrifariam Lumen Gloriae is the truest reading of the Commedia.

From the standpoint of the seven directions correspondences; but from the standpoint of the fourfold complement of the contemplative - union identity.
The fourfold is not a geometrical figure, it is a state of meanings; therefore, the fourfold the contemplative The Trinity equals 10 the Spiritual structure: only aspectual if the geometrical the numerical remain in Spirit: if not, then the meaning is clear: release perfection.

Should there still be despair at this stage of one’s life? If a man claims realization, then to admit defeat is to invalidate all his work. This would be true if he was writing autobiography; but since the opposite is the case, it’s just a question of going the way of the stage of vision.

It is not wrong to speak openly of the angel as the presence at the moment of composition.
In my experience it has always been so. A radiance appears, the head becomes visional, that is, a fullness of effulgence takes place in such a way that the physical body is shed, the spiritual body as pure spirit, no where sensed except as the seer.

Does this have any meaning within the context of city life? Yes! where man are there is walks,
spiritualization. A market place is proverbial for its insistence that activistic sentiments are of the very
stuff of human life, and yet the man of God is not touched. He moves as seer, re-orienting all phenomena dissolving them at the center of the heart.

When the angel illuminates the single eye the spirit walks the land reaping integration at
every insight, the recollection of the lack of illumination not a warning for the victorians to gloat over
but a mirror revealing forever habitation. The perfected state is the realization that the mirror
(the recollection) is superimposition.

Not so much a wooded area where an angel crouches over a pool giving itself up to the final
light of the day, nor the spirit by a stream contemplating the same phenomenon, but a fusion of both the image waters from the waters.

Then there is the state of the man at one with the angel, and the consciousness that composition takes its intelligence from such companionship, as well as the consciousness of the loss
that leaves the language dead dull and literal.

For the artist only the work is representation of completion – not the life. The modern artist is way off, preferring the man to the work, the embodiment of Spirit the spirit.

10/24/74

Can anything be more condensed (packed) then quel de passuri e quel de’ passi piedi-

Piedi is Christ viator
- Sleep to the world and rise to God

eagle’s eye in profile
circle described
beginning
thru eyebrow
Traiano acclivity’s fast
Rifeo declivity’s
Dante’s:

Dunque nostra veduta, che conviene essere alcun de’raggi della mente….
is not a variance with susumna – however, the following verses that complete the above
tell us how far nostra veduta alcun dei raggi can go

The key to an accurate translation of the last of Paradiso Canto XX is in the balance
between lo guizzo and le fiammetta –

There’s loneliness however in all this my work walking as I do, taking in fresh air,

the wider avenues teasing with greater blue, but I’m there anyway.

-exhaustion is on the side of achievement, never on the side of inspiration: proof that
(true) art (lofty) can in no sense be tied up with genitalia – and even the freeing of
genitalia cometh from above

Credette Cimabue nella pittura tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido, si che la fama di
colui oscura.

Cimabue thought to hold field in printing and now Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s
fame’s obscured.

America a Prophecy an image of gross man evolving grossly….

- In life we’re under the burden of death, but in art we’re in spirit – therefore,
for their benefit life and art come together only under ad infinitum: from the above
it’s clear why one’s Eternal, the other incomplete, that is, indefinite, that is, not
definitive.

-only under the glorified body (thru Lumen Gloriae) the advantic is our art Eternal (whole)-
as for the other, given the conditions it spins for itself, body and soul must perforce and
ever shall be divided.

Ben m’accors’io ch’elli era d’alta lode, pero ch’a me venia Resurgi’e Vinci’ come a colui che

non intende e ode

I noticed well that it was of high praise, since “Rise” and “Conquer” come to me, as to
one who doesn’t understand yet hears.

To distrust vision is to own up to the fact that such pointedness can only curtail the
effectiveness of discourse.

there’s an assumption
that heresay
I is viable alive and kicking –
who cares anymore

- we exist too much in a space too free

Where has all my poetry gone? it has gone with my youth, my struggle, my lack of
understanding of outcome.

- It’s true that in Dante at times one has to disentangle in order to reconstruct for sense –

but that’s true of all poetry of concentration – in the original es it is (not to be disentangled)
it is a wonder.

Pantheism is all on the side of corporeality, because God and His creatures are said to be
comparable.

- the crux of the matter is not true but he’s there

now only absence or better faster or blur of streetlight

….di se shessa uscio key phrasing for higher meaning, especially of weighed against the
il mio disio e il vella remain for right

a quise di corona, si coronava il bel zaffiro, la coronate fiamma is maria Regina Coeli key
to our receptivity thru purest receptivity (hers) del quala il ciel cui chiaro s’in zaffira (re which
the clearest heaven in sapphires itself)

The art of translation is what it is – we can expect so much, but not more.

For Claudia

moon on roof
snow in wood
even quieter
the stars
the reindeer’s
antlers

Frank Samperi Annouced on PennSound Daily today

2011-10-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

We close the week out with a new author page for Frank Samperi, featuring a number of his out-of-print books as well as a rare recording of the much-esteemed poet.

In this forty-seven minute reading — recorded at New York City's Ear Inn in 1987 — Samperi offers a wide-ranging survey of his poetic output, sharing selections from The Fourth (1973), The Prefiguration (1971), Morning and Evening (1967), Branches (1965) and Of Light (1965), among others. Gil Ott describes this historic event in an interview with CAConrad on the Philly Sound blog: "He gave a once in a lifetime reading at the Ear Inn. It's funny, because sometimes you meet people at the Ear Inn and you expect something from them that they're not. I guess that's true of many things. I expected this guy to look like a monk. And he shows up with his wife, who is wearing a frilly outfit, with fur around the edges. Everything I saw in them bespoke a struggle to maintain a middle class existence. Anyway, he sat down and read, and he read very softly. I have long-sought a recording of that reading, but apparently, due to the Ear Inn's technological failures, no recording is available. But it was beautiful! You really had to listen hard, because his voice was so soft, and the microphones weren't working."

We've also recently added four collections of Samperi's poetry to the PEPC Library: Quadrifariam (1971), The Prefiguration (1971), Lumen Gloriae (1973) and Day (1998), which was posthumously transcribed from 1970 notebook. Charles Bernstein enthusiastically announced these new additions on Jacket2 — the last three books earlier this month, and Quadrifariam just a few days ago.

These texts and recordings come to us through the generosity of Claudia Samperi Warren, the poet's daughter, who runs a wonderful blog dedicated to her father's life and work. Aside from the many wonderful resources there, we'd also like to refer listeners interested in learning more about the poet to Jamie Townsend's 2008 essay, "Spiritual Man, Modern Man: the Poetics of Frank Samperi, published in Jacket #36.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Samperi.php

More on Frank Samperi poet-mystic

2011-10-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

Kyle, it made me happy to see you talking about Frank Samperi on the blog (10/27). I've photocopied the long piece NIGHT & DAY for you from Cid Corman's anthology is out of print, and far as I can tell this piece has never been published outside the anthology, and the magazine from which the anthology is made. (It's a fantastic anthology by the way)

To be honest my first feelings about Samperi were mixed, mostly because I kept getting stuck (annoyed is a better word) with his religious ideals. Soon enough though it became clear (or so it seems) that he was a spiritualist who happened to be catholic. I've met other spiritualists who were also catholic. My old friend Rosina is a pagan who follows her Sicilian mother and grandmother's traditions of the Strega, but also has a serious PASSION for the Eucharist. It can all be just fine together, and I guess I needed to relax about this, and both Rosina and Samperi helped me realize this.

And I'm glad I didn't let the religious language interfere because Samperi is unlike any other poet I can think of from our time (almost from our time).

One HUGE Samperi fan was Gil Ott.

Gil Ott answered:

The poet's face on my kite is Frank Samperi, reclusive when he was alive, but now deceased at least a decade. I would ask him to elaborate on the word "procession," which he used to distinguish from "process." I image this man's mind as pure witness, tuned to the essential deity of events, and so endangered.

Samperi has always been so elusive, physically, and more than almost any other poet I have wanted to know WHAT he looked like. He has a way of making you fall in love with him, really fall in love with him, without ever knowing him. For me, the only other writer who has done this is Franz Kafka, but for very different reasons, and in very different ways. Gil Ott is the only person I've ever know who met Samperi, and so I liked to pump Gil for details.

In that interview I did with Gil for BANJO, Samperi comes up again. Here's an excerpt of that section:

CA: Earlier you mentioned Frank Samperi, and he's someone you have mentioned over the years as being an inspiration to you. Can you share some of your thoughts about how his poems fit into your life as a poet?

Gil: Poverty and art is something I've discussed with the Australian poet David Miller, who is also familiar with Samperi. At the time--which would be the early 80s--Frank Samperi seemed to me to be a great undiscovered poet in our midst. The notion of poverty and art was very strong, and he seemed very monkish to me. This is something I have adopted, as a condition, which is what's interesting in that quote you pulled out earlier from my book WITHIN RANGE.

CA: You met him once didn't you? At the Ear Inn, isn't that right?

Gil: Yes. He gave a once in a lifetime reading at the Ear Inn. It's funny, because sometimes you meet people at the Ear Inn and you expect something from them that they're not. I guess that's true of many things. I expected this guy to look like a monk. And he shows up with his wife, who is wearing a frilly outfit, with fur around the edges. Everything I saw in them bespoke a struggle to maintain a middle class existence. Anyway, he sat down and read, and he read very softly. I have long-sought a recording of that reading, but apparently, due to the Ear Inn's technological failures, no recording is available. But it was beautiful! You really had to listen hard, because his voice was so soft, and the microphones weren't working.

CA: Didn't you say that he died soon after that reading?

Gil: Yes he did. He seemed fairly fragile. I also want to say that part of the appeal of Samperi were the books of his work that were produced. Grossman and Mushinsha published his trilogy. Also some very nice chapbooks of his work that Cid Corman had put out at one point. The linkage with poverty was through the line. His line was very spare. Sometimes one word or two words to a line. And you get these long thin lines that are just barely there, but powerful.

No one put it quite like Gil did.
Thanks Kyle for bringing up Samperi, let's get more going on this amazing poet!
CAConrad

http://phillysound.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_archive.html

More Frank Samperi notes on poetics and the three volume work

2011-10-23T09:31:00.000-07:00

1970 – 1972 notebook

Notes on three volume work.

The father’s first name in union with the mother’s last name engendered the son’s task before the world the father’s inner structure of the same totality as the mother’s but of different octaves
the mother’s revealing in reverse the father’s task whereas the father’s in sum the son’s destiny
the son remembering discovering the father in the doubling

The Quadrifariam means fourfold, but its meaning carries with it Aquinas’ sense of Augustine’s and both bearing upon Dante’s true spiritual refrain of the work. In other words, The Triune is the theme thruout the title presenting the paradox foundation yet boundaries released.

Reduction of the seven directions
opposites causation hierarchies
the heart the fourth itself fourfold
united to the three movements
circular straight spiral
the heart the fourth uninvolved
yet Spirit the spirit
integrity radiance harmony
the spiritual man
state before the mystery

Quadrifariam is definitely the new heaven and the earth: the fourfold resolves the conflicts of the seven directions which reappear in Spirit as the fourfold complement of the contemplative.

The fourfold resolves the seven directions which reappear in Spirit as the new heaven and the new earth the fourfold complement of the contemplative. (3/22/72)

                Lumen Gloriae fully realized today – 3/24/72

that brings to completion the fullness of the work – what was needed was the realization that came on
the 22nd – not arrogance to say that not since the Commedia has there been a work equally complete -
the analogy works because the work along the same lines – in fact, the 3 titles unifies title forgone the
true Dantesque interpretation, which if used would work wonders….By equally complete
I don’t mean as to characterization but as to Spiritual realization: the there planes have been fully
expressed – the fourfold complement of the contemplative brought to bear upon the Trinity the God
head, that is, establishment subsistence there without a doubt but hidden the numbers part of the
poem – both poems stir thruout wherever stressed: The Prefiguration Quadrifariam Lumen Gloriae is the truest reading of the Commedia.

          From the standpoint of the seven directions correspondences; but from the standpoint of the fourfold complement of the contemplative - union identity.
          The fourfold is not a geometrical figure, it is a state of meanings; therefore, the fourfold the contemplative The Trinity equals 10 the Spiritual structure: only aspectual if the geometrical the numerical remain in Spirit: if not, then the meaning is clear: release perfection.

          Should there still be despair at this stage of one’s life? If a man claims realization, then to admit defeat is to invalidate all his work. This would be true if he was writing autobiography; but since the opposite is the case, it’s just a question of going the way of the stage of vision.

          It is not wrong to speak openly of the angel as the presence at the moment of composition.

In my experience it has always been so. A radiance appears, the head becomes visional, that is, a fullness of effulgence takes place in such a way that the physical body is shed, the spiritual body as pure spirit, no where sensed except as the seer.

Frank Samperi’s notes on poetry and poetics

2011-10-17T19:41:00.000-07:00

8/29/69

Handwritten original from “Marginalia” included in Quadrifariam.

For Dolores

These poems may seem to be just occasions; (but) nevertheless there is a desire to place
them more substantially: the spiritual world a light coming thru. (Gathering up or better)
revealing the domestic worthy of the metaphor: the family aware of the fall of light,
darkness no longer something to be eradicated.

9/24/69

-There should be no indenting – also, the lines should fall without spacing.

Anti-Hero

What is known the world over business makes men brutal.
Still feel that the deeping of The Triune depends upon my getting complete rest – no other
way to the spirit except thru a purity of disposition.
It is best that my work remain unknown – the age continues the work of the last 600 years:
Who’s the poet, then?
I’d like to write of friendship, but that’s more memorial than actual fact; nevertheless, the
memory of it mollifies walks otherwise hapless. Not much time for walks these days – the job
tyrannical. It is not possible to teach the young poetry if their sense of (poetry) it is competitive.
They seek judgments that have nothing to do with the art, that is, a man gains nothing from being
told that his work is stronger than another’s: but again, the age wants no part of a teaching that
has God as end, the audience in no sense identifying with a work, release necessarily telic.
Here it comes clear: the teaching of poetry says just that we might be heirs of a view that impedes
no sense – second that the wholeness of a work is equally given up: from these the audience is
fulfilled, the sense the wholeness unimpeded. What happens when the age is false (propagandistic)?

The artist must seek the truth doubly.
You waste away for want of companions – those who insist you only wait upon a verification that
is referable to themselves rather than the common that makes companions participants in the greater
life.
What comes upon one that makes him (you) feel that everything has reached its peak, and that
anything more to do is over and above! There is separation, and the terrible sorrow of the day reflects
it, makes me inwardly dual.
Wait! Don’t work on the major poem until there is time – but suppose the time never comes? Wait! If…
only those writers whose possibilities are granted can expect honor, those ignored can only know
isolation, the act of writing (more) akin to the (criminal action) non-professional, even tho sense of craft
better than those whose positions are granted. The ignored one must take upon himself every insult,
humiliation – the superiorly of his art makes him take it – compromise foreign to him.
The country art is suspect because it’s there for the sake of the tired peoples of the cities – after awhile
people can only take so much concrete – but we can’t be sentimental over this.
We are now into the days (now) when to expect words from another can cause collapse if the words
don’t come. Some poets stay amidst nature because they feel – I guess – that to stay in the city is to be
abstract: they – unknowingly, of course – falsify: in the country does not guaranty poetry; on the
contrary, it is possible to tip one’s hat (to pay lip service) to the natural sciences under such conditions,
that is, the poetic actively there is referable to the position here in the sense that it is there in order to
ease the city of its severity.
So many hours to job – so little now for reading. Was it not once almost 12 hours a day?
The Union of both Church & State has the same meaning as Church Total State Total: total eradication of
differences.
The new Christian the Spiritual man living the Eternal Life.
There’s no time to rest now: poems come of rest? Then let there be a writing: no time to rest –

But are you giving yourself over to expression? No! expression always self: Holy or slave this writing
reveals a purity reflecting Holiness or a shell (inwardly outwardly) cracked reflecting nothing,
which is to say, the ordeal more than the body can handle, yet the brokenness not without some sense
of the release that is Holiness, because the selflessness even there purity tho negative,
to get rid of a desire to be known is to come to grips with one’s humiliation.
I am sick of this age. I am not fit for anything – useless.

gods in shadows

wood beyond hill

above sea

light reflected beyond water – nothing….

Two movements become confused when the vision is single: a man high minded but poor.
(unfit for life.)
It may be that I have written the Life more than any other, but viewed from the role valid identification,
not true, personalism an image in light giving way to God.
I feel deeply misplaced; but know at heart that place here is political, and wonder where is the political
that once was ordinary speech, dying as we do speaking artificially.
This however cannot be right: ordinary artificial parts of the greater no where at odds.
The good life can only be that which despite everything else remains itself.
Why suicide in my work? obvious: the work wishes to take its life.
There is a difference between the actual life and the real life.
Ideally speaking social poetry to the detriment of the familial is circular: peace as end is but the familial
returning: therefore, social poetry is family poetry….
One can’t get rid of the sentimental by identifying with the social.
The sorrow of astrology is that its theoretical configurations stand in need of the practical.
To be thoroughly secular is to be pagan.

My relation to the 4 similar to Dante’s relation to those of the old style.
Beware of the poets who (seek) to equate the will with the vertical and then seek to destroy (get rid of) it.
Knowledge of the individual a ruse: something pantheistic about it.

Frank Samperi: Three Books E-books from PEPC Library

2011-10-08T14:08:00.000-07:00

Three books by Frank Samperi: pdf e-books from PEPC library, ©2011 the Samperi Estate and Claudia Samperi-Warren. With thanks to Claudia Samperi-Warren for making them available to PEPC.

The Prefiguration (1971)
Lumen Gloriae (1973)
Day (1998) (transcribed posthumously from 1970 notebook)

From the bio note in Day:

Frank Samperi was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933. Discovered by poet Louis Zukofsky, his first poems were published in the early 1960’s. Through study of Aquinas, Aristotle, Dante and the Hindu Vedantist, Shankaracarya, Samperi created a body of work that was a unique exploration of the ability of language to exist in a pure musicality apart from thingly reference. “Frank’s work was truly abstract, truly resisted the things of the world and boasted rather the refining fire of the spirit,” said Robert Kelly. In his lifetime, he published 20 collections of poetry.

Coming soon on PennSound: a recording of Samperi reading.

https://jacket2.org/commentary/frank-samperi-three-books

Frank Samperi books available through PennSound

2011-10-07T19:31:00.000-07:00

Now Frank Samperi poetry books are available on PennSound as a digital edition.
Thank you Charles Bernstein.

Click on this link to view books.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pepc/contents.html

The influence my father had on me as an artist from the very begining

2011-10-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

The Green Disciples are a series of paintings about loss. My inspiration came from a journey to Paris 14 years ago at the Pere La Chaise cemetery located in the third arrondissement.
I choose green to emphasise the transient nature of birth and decay and their relationship to classical themes of social processes at work in the fleeting illusion we call - environment.

The Ballet series is a celebration of a personal come back from an injury I received while preparing for a dance recital. The process of dance is one of ethereal beauty and physical pain. Through the hard work comes an almost re-sculpture of your own body to execute the difficult movements, a labor of love.
"Day" is a book of my paintings and my father's poems, a series of poems that were written in 1970.
My father was a published poet of over twenty books. He passed away in 1991 and it has been my wish to publish as much of his remaining work as possible.

My paintings have always been about sadness and its manifestation in the human figure. At times we feel we are in a tight corner, itching to get out, to be free from our bodies, our minds, our environment. I struggle with my work to convey the human figure with both emotion and grace. I have much to do, and many images to go, in order to create the sustained vision of being human in the light of the divine.
My father always said, "be true to yourself, and look within your soul, and you will be on your way to
forming the crystalline".

A Review from Paul Revere's Horse Literary Journal by Russell Duvernoy, 2011 on Frank Samperi

2011-09-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

"You're in light, song"

Considering Frank Samperi

Russell Duvernoy

From Russell:

Thank you so much for contacting me. I am thrilled to hear from

you. Your father's work has been a great source of pleasure and
sustenance ever since I first discovered it in 2008. (This was at a
great poetry only bookshop in Beacon, NY - The Hermitage - which has
since closed. The proprietor Jon Beachum, had several out of print,
and beautiful, copies of Samperi's books, which he recommended.)

The piece you mentioned is an essay on your father's work as a
whole, the impact it has made upon me, and its relationship to
spiritual and philosophical pursuits. I am proud of it as a piece of
writing and I believe it honors your father's work. It draws
primarily on poems found in The Prefigurations, Quadrifarium, and
Lumen Gloriae.

Wonderful review thanks to Russell. Thank you so much Russell.
Claudia

More notes

2011-09-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

You waste away for want of companions – those who insist you only wait upon a verification that

is referable to themselves rather than the common that makes companions participants in the greater

life. What comes upon one that makes him (you) feel that everything has reached its peak, and that

anything more to do is over and above! There is separation, and the terrible sorrow of the day reflects

it, makes me inwardly dual. Wait! Don’t work on the major poem until there is time – but suppose the time

never comes? Wait! If…

Only those writers whose possibilities are granted can expect honor, those ignored can only know

isolation, the act of writing (more) akin to the (criminal action)non-professional, even tho sense of craft

better than those whose positions are granted. The ignored one must take upon himself every insult,

humiliation – the superiorly of his art makes him take it – compromise foreign to him.

The country art is suspect because it’s there for the sake of the tired peoples of the cities – after awhile

people can only take so much concrete – but we can’t be sentimental over this.

We are now into the days (now) when to expect words from another can cause collapse if the words

don’t come. Some poets stay amidst nature because they feel – I guess – that to stay in the city is to be

abstract: they – unknowingly, of course – falsify: in the country does not guaranty poetry; on the

contrary, it is possible to tip one’s hat (to pay lip service) to the natural sciences under such conditions,

that is, the poetic actively there is referable to the position here in the sense that it is there in order to

ease the city of its severity.

So many hours to job – so little now for reading. Was it not once almost 12 hours a day?

The Union of both Church & State has the same meaning as Church Total State Total: total eradication of

differences.

The new Christian the Spiritual man living the Eternal Life.

There’s no time to rest now: poems come of rest? Then let there be a writing: no time to rest –

But are you giving yourself over to expression? No! expression always self: Holy or slave this writing

reveals a purity reflecting Holiness or a shell (inwardly outwardly) cracked reflecting nothing,

which is to say, the ordeal more than the body can handle, yet the brokenness not without some sense

of the release that is Holiness, because the selflessness even there purity tho negative.

To get rid of a desire to be known is to come to grips with one’s humiliation.

I am sick of this age. I am not fit for anything – useless.

                  gods in shadows

                 wood beyond hill

                 above sea

                light reflected beyond water – nothing….

Two movements become confused when the vision is single: a man high minded but poor.

(unfit for life.)

It may be that I have written the Life more than any other, but viewed from the role valid identification,

not true, personalism an image in light giving way to God.

I feel deeply misplaced; but know at heart that place here is political, and wonder where is the political

that once was ordinary speech, dying as we do speaking artificially.

This however cannot be right: ordinary artificial parts of the greater no where at odds.

The good life can only be that which despite everything else remains itself.

Why suicide in my work? obvious: the work wishes to take its life.

There is a difference between the actual life and the real life.

Ideally speaking social poetry to the detriment of the familial is circular: peace as end is but the familial

returning: therefore, social poetry is family poetry….

One can’t get rid of the sentimental by identifying with the social.

The sorrow of astrology is that its theoretical configurations stand in need of the practical.

To be thoroughly secular is to be pagan.

My relation to the 4 similar to Dante’s relation to those of the old style.

Beware of the poets who (seek) equate the will with the vertical and then seek to destroy (get rid of) it.

Knowledge of the individual a ruse: something pantheistic about it.

1/22/70

Frank Samperi’s notes on poetry and poetics

2011-09-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

Paul Revere's Horse Literary Journal

2011-09-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

Last Poets Review by Russell Duvernoy on Frank Samperi.

Russell Duvernoy currently resides in Albuquerque, NM where he studies Philosophy at UNM. His work has appeared in Fugue, Watchword, and Queen’s Head and Artichoke, and he has published a small collection of short stories with the obscure but legendary letter-press publisher Unlock the Clockcase.

Does anyone have a copy? has anyone seen this review?

Very nice. Claudia