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Since long before the appearance of his
first book of poems, River Full of
Craft, in 1956, Felix Stefanile has labored quietly and effectively in
the field of American letters. In 1954, with his wife Selma, he founded Sparrow, a journal of poetry that
they continue to publish. He has translated Italian poetry into English: Umberto Saba: Thirty-one Poems
(1978), The Blue Moustache: Some
Futurist Poets (1980) and If I
Were Fire: Sonnets of Cecco Angiolieri (1985). He has contributed essays
and criticism to national publications.
In
the past, his work has received some prestigious awards, including the Balch
Prize of the Virginia Quarterly Review
for a group of poems and the republication of an essay of his in the Pushcart Press Prize Anthology.
While
his poetry has appeared in many of this country’s most eminent journals, he
has always maintained a low profile, focusing his time and effort on his art.
Some of his major collections are A
Fig Tree in America (1970), East
River Nocturne (1976), and a volume to be published in 1994 entitled The Dance at St. Gabriel’s.
No
matter the medium, Stefanile brings to his writing a strong sense of craft
and aesthetics, along with a fierce pride in his Italian heritage. This
interview was conducted in the fall of 1992 in his West Lafayette, Indiana,
home.
* * * * *
VIA: Do you see you see yourself as an
Italian/American writer, or is it a category critics like us foist on you?
FS:
First, I really don’t think that many people have paid attention to my work,
so the question is difficult to answer. I would say that even though I insist
on calling myself an American writer of Italian descent, I believe that one
of the sturdiest elements in my work is the Italian/ American theme.
VIA: The relationship between
Italian/American writers and anti-fascism has only begun to be explored. What
effect did the development of Fascism have on your Italian/American identity?
FS:
I think it helped because I was made aware in ways I didn’t like of my
differentness. I think all immigrant children, especially first born, first
generation, are born with a sense of difference, but I think that made a
certain attitude toward being different very intense. I know young men who
volunteered in World War II because they were ashamed of being Italian
Americans; they wanted other Americans to know that they were just as
American as anybody else in the country. On the other hand I also know
people, including one weinie professor here, who, when he was drafted, lied
about his name; he said it was not Italian. How he could do it with the name
he has, I don’t know, but that’s what he said and I believe him.
VIA: Did the rise of Fascism make you very
self-consciously Italian?
FS:
Well, yes, and at the same time, very self-consciously singled out as being
anti-Fascist. I’m not claiming we were a very numerous body. In the 40s I was
very active in the American Labor Party. And in fact I was a precinct
chairman, and there were other Italian/American people like me, and we were
working side by side with black people and Jews and labor people. And in fact
in New York State, the percentage of the vote for the presidential candidate
Wallace was 8%, but in our district it was 22%, and our district was still
largely Italian American. When you consider that was the year Truman and
Dewey were running, 22% becomes a very interesting statistic.
VIA: During what years were you doing this
work?
FS:
As a precinct chairman, 1946 through 1948.
VIA: And when does Felix the poet arrive?
FS:
Well I would say about 3 years later. My first important publication came
about 1951.
VIA: Ok, that’s the publication, but you
must have written years before that?
FS:
I’ve written all my life.
VIA: Where does the poetry come from? How
does the idea of writing something down relate to your parents’ generation?
In other words, I’m sure you had pen and pencils, but did you have books in
the house?
FS:
Yes, we had books. And my mother was a reader. She was also the “letter
writer” for the neighborhood, letters from folks to Italy. In fact we used to
subscribe to Italian journals, one or two. And my mother was the first one to
introduce me to poetry. She used to recite the poetry of Salvatore DiGiacomo,
which was very easy to do in those days, since he’s the poet out of whose
beautiful little poems Paolo Tosti wrote his incomparable songs. “O Sole Mio”
is a DiGiacomo poem. “Mattinate” is another. And there are several of them
which my mother knew as a little girl, and they became songs. Tosti was just
a marvelous composer; in fact he was a friend of Puccini, Mascagni, people
like that. The great philosopher, Benedetto Croce, wrote a book on DiGiacomo.
Aside from that I have to say my parents
were too busy to pay much attention to me, except that I say with some pride
they never interfered with my writing. In fact I remember how amazed I was
when my stepfather, (you know my mother had remarried by then, and my father
was long gone), and we were in a different element, but he came home one
night with a table from his restaurant, you know, those old fashioned
marbletop tables. He just brought it up to my room upstairs and said, “This
is for you for your writing.”
VIA: You said your mother read poetry to
you, but there must have been some place along the line where you said “I
want to write,” to choose poetry as opposed to prose, what was that? What
kind of writing were you doing?
FS:
I think mainly I just liked poetry that much largely because as a child
poetry was an extremely pleasant experience for me. What’s ironic is that the
first poetry I heard was Neapolitan poetry. Even before I heard nursery
rhymes. When I went to school I had great teachers like Mr. Abraham Aronowitz
and Mrs. Catherine Mandarino. These two, along with a few others, did what
all great teachers do: they taught me to love books.
VIA: What about your playmates, did any of
them become poets?
FS:
One of my teenage buddies became a writer, in fact he sometimes writes for
the New York Times, but he’s a
freelancer, he’s more of a journalist. But he wanted to be a writer. He
didn’t become a poet.
VIA: Any others who went on to higher
education?
FS:
Very few, very few. This is where we come back to the question of
Italian/American culture. I was the first Stefanile to go to college in 7000
years, and I look back now on three generations, with my extended family,
whom I love very dearly and whom Selma loves as much as I do. They’re
beautiful, beautiful people, but they don’t send their kids to college. And
I’m talking now about my third cousins, I’m not talking about first cousins
now. They don’t send their kids to college.
VIA: So, what’s the first poem? Does it come
while you are in college?
FS:
No, I think I was first published after the war. This is what we have to
remember, the hiatus of the war. I was writing poems in my teens, but I was
drafted by the time I was 22, and I didn’t get out until I was 25 and a half.
VIA: Where did you serve? In the European
theater?
FS:
No, I mostly served here. I once went to Europe on flights as an interpreter
and a translator. And I used to be with generals who held very important
meetings with the Italian people. We stayed in Sardinia overnight and then it
was back to America.
VIA: So, what was that like, being the
interpreter for these big wheels?
FS:
Well, there was pressure to it. The American Army was working with the
Italian resistance. One of the things my outfit did was to work on the
translation of the American technical manual for malaria control that was
used in the Mediterranean to get rid of malaria in Sardinia and parts of
Lazio for the first time in 3000 years.
VIA: So you were drafted, or did you
volunteer?
FS:
Well, I half-volunteered. I could have had a deferment, but because my
buddies volunteered, I was too ashamed to try to get out. You know how stupid
we were? Can you imagine guys doing that today? I could have dangled, sure I
could have stayed out another year, all things told, all I had to do was
change my program and I might have even been indefinitely deferred. Such
options were available, like suddenly deciding to become a doctor, or a
dentist. I have a poem about this in my forthcoming book.
VIA: So at this time you were in school at
City College?
FS:
Yeah, I was at CCNY and it provided a very good background for my politics of
the time. As you can imagine we were all immigrant kids, and there was a
large proportion of Jewish Americans, and they were all, of course,
anti-Fascist, and it was very reinforcing.
VIA: CCNY was the poor man’s Harvard, right?
FS:
That was a great place, as far as that goes. You couldn’t get into CCNY
unless you had a high school Regents’ average of the high 80s or more. And it
was free, completely free, all you had to do was buy your books and pay some
minor fees.
VIA: Who were some of your teachers there?
FS:
We had some good teachers. I remember, my favorite was Professor Ferrante,
who taught me Petrarch. He was my favorite, he was very kind. I had Luciani
who was a big figure in whatever the Italian teachers organization of that
time was. He used to publish in Italica,
places like that. I remember we had a poor kid in our class whose first name
was Pasquale, and Luciani wouldn’t let him go; he constantly made fun of his
name.
There was a boy in our class, named
Rapisardi, I think, who used to speak (as they used to say in the parlance of
those days) Northern Italian. And Luciani only talked to him all period long.
VIA: He was from Northern Italy?
FS:
I don’t know.
VIA: Any of this behavior from non-Italian
professors?
FS:
I don’t recall any, but I think the Jewish boys suffered from anti-Semitism
from some professors, and I think it was in the language department too.
VIA: Luciani was from Italy, correct?
FS:
I have no idea. He spoke good English, he didn’t sound to me like an
immigrant, but he obviously had picked up something about that north-south
dichotomy in Italy. It was dreadful. I couldn’t really learn Dante from him,
though I admit he knew Dante. I suspect he suffered from misplaced pride. I
think he was angry that most of his students came from such humble origins,
and knew so little about the glories of Italy.
VIA: What was it that made you decide to
study Italian?
FS:
My major was English, my minor Italian. I have to give my folks credit for
that. My grandfather, and my parents; and my stepfather was as proud of his
heritage as my father was. My fondest memory of my father, whom I lost when I
was eight, is sitting me on his knee and his telling me of the beauties of
the country he came from.
VIA: Was your father a reader?
FS:
My mother was the reader, but he must have read, because he was in business.
He was, in fact, a rather successful butcher. Very popular. And my mother
used to feed me books, even as a kid; that’s how I read “Cuore” by DeSanctis,
which you know is such a sentimental book, but I love it. To this day, if you
give me “Cuore” I turn to blubber. All these good boys, all these good girls,
all the self-sacrifice. The book obviously was meant as some kind of
catechism for the new Italy of the 19th century, wasn’t it? If ever you want
to write about my poetry, one easy way in would be to read my poem “The
Marionettes” which will appear in my next book even though it’s an old poem;
it springboards from Pinocchio. I
think Pinocchio is such an
underestimated classic, because to me it is a story of redemption. Like all
great children’s stories, it’s a book for grown-ups. And I am so proud to
think that Karl Shapiro took that poem from me years ago for Poetry. May I brag a little?
VIA: Of course!
FS:
The poem, among other things, is a paraphrase of Pinocchio’s story. The child
with the blue hair is one of the “disguises” of Pinocchio’s fairy godmother.
The poem is a kind of a deconstruction, if you will, to use a fancy term, of
the Pinocchio story by Collodi.
I brought this up once with some of my
colleagues, and they stared at me queerly. I said I thought Pinocchio was a great book, a great
novel, and a story of redemption. A Catholic talking about redemption. After
all, Pinocchio is finally resurrected; he becomes a real boy, through
suffering and love.
VIA: Here you are, you’re studying these
Italian classics, books you feel influenced you, what happens when you start
reading, Chaucer, Shakespeare? Is that all happening at the same time?
FS:
Yes, they go together.
VIA: But does it change your attitude toward
your italianita?
FS:
No.
VIA: What other Italian writers have
influenced you?
FS:
Not necessarily “Italian.” I came across Rossetti and it blew my mind,
because not only is Rossetti a fine poet, but he was what I was, a first
generation son of an Italian immigrant. He simply engulfed the British
culture, and painted it Italian, as everybody knows who reads Rossetti. At
one time his influence was great, for instance, on Ezra Pound. He’s still, to
this day, one of the greatest translators of Italian poetry. I was too dumb
to understand what I was exposing myself to, Dante Gabriel Rosetti. And
that’s all there is to it. I was off and running from that time on, he
justified me in ways that I couldn’t find in America. There was a time in my
teens when I knew Rossetti by heart.
VIA: Was British poetry considered superior
or more important than Italian?
FS:
Oh, no I never felt that, never. But I fell in love with Keats at the same
time, and believe me there is nothing easier in the world than to fall in
love with Keats. Remember Keats fell in love with certain aspects of
Mediterranean civilization anyway. Like his sonnet on the Elgin marbles, like
ancient European mythology. These are all European things, these are not
English things. In key ways the great Elizabethan Age had Italianate roots
too, but Rossetti made my path clear.
VIA: What was your first published poem?
FS:
My first important poem was “The Marionettes” which appeared in Poetry in 1951.
VIA: What was it that made you say, “I can
write a poem like anybody else,” and send it off to a place like that?
FS:
My mind wasn’t cluttered with those staple inhibitions and protocols that
come naturally, and sometimes rather endemically to the youthful spirit of a
person growing up Ph.D. I never had that reserve, that intellectual shyness
sometimes necessary to good scholarship. I just rushed in where angels fear
to tread.
VIA: So “The Marionettes” is the first and
. . .
FS:
The first, and a key one. In those days Poetry
was the La Scala of the American poetry world.
VIA: What are people like Eliot and Pound
doing to you as you are learning your craft?
FS:
I think Pound influenced me more than Eliot. I’ve always admired Eliot, but
I’ve always felt that there was something a little too Olympian about him,
whereas Pound had, I believe, a certain courage, and vigor, and charm, and
also an interest in Romance languages that I could flirt with. And you know,
Pound loved the Medieval Italians, people like Cavalcanti; Pound has his bad
points, as we know, but I don’t see how one can discuss High Modernism
without him.
VIA: And what about your own relationship to
the establishment. Does “Marionettes” open your way into other magazines?
FS:
Yes, I think it did; there are smart editors out there who look for things
like that. You know, talent scouts. I had a run of acceptances all over the
place, including invitations from editors.
VIA: What are you doing? You’re not
affiliated with a University or anything.
FS:
I worked like a dog, that’s what I was doing. I was a bookkeeper, I was a
stock clerk, I was a bank reconciliations clerk. Eventually, the smartest
thing I ever did, I became a civil servant, and I worked for the Department
of Labor.
VIA: Hmm, a radical like you inside the
Labor Department?
FS:
That’s precisely it though. I worked, I think out of my idealism that I was
helping working people, and it worked out that I really did. I worked in the
unemployment insurance division, but my job was largely things like
statistics and entitlements, and, I’m afraid, fraud.
VIA: So, what then makes your transition
from being civil servant writing these poems that are being accepted by major
magazines, and then being brought into academia? What is that transition?
FS:
Well, that was fairly simple. It was a matter of luck and timing. In the 60s
the idea of having a poet in residence caught on in the universities. I had
by then established editorial relationships through my activities as a poetry
editor. When, in 1961, Purdue decided to expand its English department, the
head, Barriss Mills, who knew me and of me, persuaded his colleagues to offer
me an appointment as a poet in residence. I accepted.
VIA: Let’s go back then to Sparrow. What was it that prompted you
to move from a worker poet sending out his poems to starting a journal?
FS:
I think that’s very simple. Number one, I married Selma. She was working and
we had enough money to start a magazine. When we got married Selma made more
money than I did. I write about this aspect of my career in an essay that
appeared in the New York Times Sunday
Book Review several years ago, 1980, I think.
VIA: But why start a magazine?
FS:
Because, since I was not an academic, I had no way of living the life of
letters, unless I invented my own. And it happened overnight. We published
early work of Creeley and Vassar Miller. Any number of poets, like that, who
today are fairly well known saw publication in the early 50s in Sparrow, among other places.
VIA: Why the name Sparrow?
FS:
I chose Sparrow because a sparrow
is the opposite of the bird of paradise. A sparrow does not run away in the
winter, and a sparrow can sing among the stones, it doesn’t need leaves to
sing. Some commentators on me have looked for literary origins for the name,
but they’re off the track.
VIA: In what year did you start Sparrow?
FS:
1954.
VIA: And it’s still going.
FS:
Well, it’s going now largely as an impulse thing.
VIA: But that’s your prerogative. You chose
to keep control of the journal all those years.
FS:
In fact I’ve not only chosen control of the journal, but many, many years
ago, feelers were put out from Purdue to see if I wanted Purdue to take it
over, and I didn’t. I said to myself, this is me, not Purdue. That was
twenty-five years ago.
VIA: Was there a peak period of Sparrow?
FS:
I think there was, in fact I think the biggest mistake I made with Sparrow was when I was appointed
chairman of the Editorial Board of what was then called Purdue University
Studies, but which is now Purdue University Press. And I felt that because of
the possibility of a conflict of interest I had to give up Sparrow for a few years, which I did.
And it was the wrong time to do it, because Sparrow was very well known at that time, in fact I think we had
a subscription of 2,000. Which for poetry is enormous. That lasted from 1964
to 1970, or so. And it was a mistake; I shouldn’t have done it. I think Sparrow is taking off again now, as a
“politically incorrect” magazine devoted to sonnets.
VIA: How did moving from the worker poet to
the professor change your life?
FS:
I don’t think it changed it all that much, I think it gave me more time. If I
have to say what I’m grateful about Purdue for most, it would be the summers,
the freedom to write. I think I gave them their money’s worth.
VIA: Let’s talk about that now. How do you
see the change in poetry from the time you came to Purdue?
FS:
I think today poetry is in bad shape. First of all it’s fragmented, and
second of all there’s this, I can’t agree with other people of good will that
there is not a paradigm of excellence. I believe there has to be a paradigm
of excellence, and that every civilization worth its name has a paradigm.
VIA: Well one of the questions is who
decides . . .
FS:
I know, but that’s such a predictable question, as well as a cliche. Our
present so-called “revolutionary” situation in poetry—including the strange
idea that every kind of poetry is equal to every other kind of poetry—leads
sometimes to successful politics, and always to moral relativism, and, in
teaching, to moral cop-out. The teacher can always hide behind the politics,
and not the art. We live in a time when extremely bad poetry is all too often
rewarded in the name of something other than art. To me that’s a crock of
shit.
VIA: Do you think that time will change
that?
FS:
Well I think time will decide. I have no doubt. My only concern, as you see
in the latest issue of Sparrow, is
that the culture I respect isn’t being taught in the schools. Only free verse
is taught in the schools. I don’t want to sound like Pat Buchanan, don’t
misunderstand me, but a culture is being exterminated. And to me the supreme
irony of it is that when I went to school, only three percent of children in
America went to college, and, as you probably very well know from your
studies, a large proportion of adolescents were yanked out of early high
school and given working papers at the age of fourteen, and slotted into the
labor market. And yet in that era people knew poems by heart, because they
listened; poetry was written with mnemonic devices, tune, echo, it was easy
to pick up, it was catchy. Whereas today everybody goes to school, and one of
the biggest ferments in literary circles today is that more people write
poems than read them. I can remember as a kid there were old-timers who
recited lines of Tennyson and Longfellow. Everybody knew “Trees.” You don’t
have that today, and do you know why? Because you can’t remember free verse.
You cannot remember free verse the way you can remember, “I think that I
shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.” Which, you know, by the way, is a
bad poem. But it was extremely popular and it is a lovely song. But isn’t
that an irony, you guys are educators, isn’t that an irony? Outside of school
today the general American reader no longer remembers poetry, doesn’t even
like it.
VIA: I think it has to do with the different
methods of teaching.
FS:
Well I think it’s a conspiracy today, because we’ve got these fat cats in the
programs, and they have to protect their jobs. It’s money today. They direct
programs, they teach writing, and they know nothing about tradition, and they
keep this secret. As you must know from your own experience, most college
administrators are busy building ball parks and dorms. They couldn’t care
less about poetry, so the fakers are safe.
VIA: When we look at the whole idea of
Italian/American writers, who do you think has been overlooked by the larger
establishment?
FS:
Oh, I think any number of us. I am sure that di Donato’s path, regardless of
his personal devils, might have been more clear, if he had not had the name
of di Donato. I am sure of that, positive. Especially for the 30s and 40s.
VIA: What about someone like Fante?
FS:
Fante, I think, is a little different, I think, however, Fante also had his
devils, but I think in Fante’s case, it’s the insuperable lure to all
children of immigrants that he found a chance to make money. In Hollywood,
that is, and he couldn’t give it up. And I can understand that, I might have
done the same thing if I had had his knack for writing scenarios, and that
kind of thing.
VIA: What about someone like Ciardi, who was
the opposite of di Donato in a sense?
FS:
Well, Ciardi, though, I don’t know about his youth too much, but I think
Ciardi forged his way, he simply had the genius to forge his way. I suspect
for all the quality of his poetry, and he was a very fine poet; he had that
marvelous, aggressive mind. He worked very hard as a reviewer in his early
years, and eventually somewhere along the line he got a job as columnist on
the Saturday Review, and literally
hacked out a career. And how about Francesca Vinciguerra, with that enormous
bestseller Poor Splendid Wings, the
life of Rossetti, by the way, Vinciguerra is another one for me that is
impressive. But remember, she changed her name to “Winwar.”
VIA: Also, she was very much involved in the
anti-Fascist movement. She spoke at the American Writers Conference back in
the late 30s. How did the Communists snap up someone like you?
FS:
I think through childhood friendships. Let’s face it, when I was a kid, most
intelligent kids, no matter their nationality, were left leaning, it just had
to be. I never was a communist.
VIA: You never joined the Communist party?
FS:
Oh no, no.
VIA: Why not?
FS:
There was something there that always held me back, and I don’t think it was
fear. I remember I didn’t care for their bouts of self-criticism, which by
the way remind me very much of today’s political correctness.
VIA: Right, di Donato joined when he was a
teenager, and then quit fairly quickly. Angelo Pellegrini joined when he was
a kid and then quit. Mangione came close to joining, but decided not to
because he thought the dogma reminded him too much of the church.
FS:
Maybe so, I don’t know. But I know I was lured. What they say about what the
communists used to try to do to attract you to them it is true, including
pretty girls dancing with you, and that kind of thing. They were great ones
for dances; they had great dances in the 30s and 40s. In fact I came from an
Italian neighborhood, and the communists had their dances in Astoria; they
had a Young Communist League office there and used to have a dance every
Saturday night; the Italian boys from Corona went to the dances.
VIA: In terms of this whole politicization,
in a sense, you talk about Amiri Baraka, some of those people, moving away
from the aesthetics, into the politics.
FS:
But you know, the thing I’m happiest that I wrote in my talk at the 1992
Romance Languages conference, you’re looking at a man who remembers when he
was a teenager looking for a job and he would walk up and the sign on the
door said, “No coloreds, Italians, or Jews.” And the New York Times used to carry those ads.
VIA: So where would you go for a job, then?
FS:
After World War II, things changed a bit.
VIA: How do we get beyond that?
FS:
I don’t know, you don’t get beyond it because I think we have an unhealthy
political situation, I think you had two deadheads running for president, and
you’ve got a Democratic party bent on making us into a maximist state. I
don’t think people like the Democrats are bad people, but I think they’re
silly people. And I think that the way I would divide Republicans from
Democrats is that the Republicans are simple business types, but very
transparent people; they’re not like the Democrats who have public relations
savvy. And I’m not too sure, I don’t see anything we’ve done for the blacks
in the last forty years that has helped them, in fact I think it’s perverted
the black problem. You notice I’m not saying “the blacks,” but the problem.
VIA: There used to be talk about an Italian
problem, especially in the past at church. What we’re doing is sort of
resurrecting that idea, dealing with the Italian problem in American culture.
FS:
I think that’s a good idea, you touched me very deeply when you wrote about
the T.V. image. And I’m very troubled, because I’m publishing a poem in Sparrow by X. J. Kennedy, which I
think is a funny poem, but in which the Pope speaks broken English. I had to
make a judgement call on it.
VIA: A Polish Pope?
FS:
No, an Italian Pope, in which he forgives Father Belli, in fact the name of
the poem is, “A Penitent Giuseppe Belli Enters Heaven;” it’s a poem Kennedy
wrote to honor Miller Williams, who translated some of the sonnets of
Giuseppe Belli. At the end of the poem, for a line or so, the Pope says
something very funny, but says it in broken English. It’s a judgement call I
made.
VIA: We talked about this future of
Italian/American culture and so on. There are a number of minor institutions
that have tried to create these Italian/American studies centers. Yet, for
example, Pietro di Donato’s archives remain in the basement of his house.
FS:
I hope that people like you could succeed in establishing a proper place for
such material, more than just letters.
VIA: What about your papers, your
correspondence?
FS:
I have always very carefully destroyed what I have. It’s too much of a
bother. I’ve been to those places, and it gives me a very chilly feeling. It
looks like a place where they keep the ashes of the dead. Not the bodies,
just the ashes. I have some things. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.
Selma and I were privy to loving correspondence from William Carlos Williams,
and the only William Carlos Williams we knew personally was the sick, tired
man of his last few years. I have destroyed those letters. I think the
Williams collection of letters now holds only one addressed to me.
VIA: All the letters, torn up?
FS:
Yes.
VIA: We’ve talked a lot about you, but what
about Selma? When were you married?
FS:
1953. And she still regrets that she couldn’t succeed in persuading me to go
to school again. I might have saved those twenty years I broke my back before
I got to Purdue. I couldn’t have done it without Selma. I couldn’t have had Sparrow without Selma. And Selma’s my
best reader, has always been, because she looks at something and she tells me
right out, “That’s not you.” And she’s right. She’s an editor, she’s my best
reader of poetry in town.
VIA: Why didn’t a good Italian boy marry an
Italian girl?
FS:
Because I fell in love with a non-Italian girl. When I was young all the
Italian girls I knew wanted to get married—the quicker the better—have
babies, and a husband with that good old job in the factory. They also pretty
generally thought I was quirky for wanting to be a poet. I got the message
early, and looked elsewhere.
Back to Top
by
Felix Stefanile
MY UNCLE CARMINE
for Maria Mazziotti
Gillan
My uncle Carmine took his knocks all
right,
grew old in the Great Depression.
Rumpled, gray,
he settled into winter. He liked to stay
in his snug kitchen corner, where the
light
hit last, before the whole west took to
flight,
and left him dozing as another day,
another dollar—he would say
in broken English—vanished into night.
He kept a garden, and a little shed.
Aunt Antoinette was satisfied he grew
the vegetables, good years fat figs and
peaches too.
Their children were as loud and overfed
as pasta, peaches, and her crusty bread
could make them. In those days the uncle
knew
it was the garden that would help them
through
the winters, and he loved the old
homestead.
For visitors he would invent a chore
a fence away, that he might show his
prize:
the frost-lit garden, glistening, like
his eyes,
and all his winter cellar held in store.
And when you said Good Bye, he held you
back,
to fill you up some soup greens in a
sack.
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