Rooftop Poetry Club - Peter Grieco

Peter Grieco

Bio:
The family history that I can best recount traces me back to two villages in south-central Sicily no more than fifteen miles from each other: Montedoro where my mother’s mother lived, and Racalmuto where my father’s mother was born, though its unlikely the two families met until my parents were teenagers on the lower West Side of Buffalo. The history of the immigrant community in Buffalo from the 1920s through the 1960s fascinates me, and I wrote about it some in my unpublished dissertation on working-class poetry. That I never learned the Sicilian language of grandparents’ is probably partly behind my effort to reclaim some kind of voice in poetry.

I’m attracted to the pure useless luxury of art. Yet I’m not completely adverse to more utilitarian functions: the clarification and communication of emotions; the impetus to see or think differently about the world; exposures to the not-self and the previously unknown.

A lot of my compositional practice involves, word tunes, text collage, journal excerpts, and notebook rambles, as well as certain kinds of meditations. It’s best to have several creative approaches because it is unpredictable which mood or method will be working at any particular time.

I think of poetry as dialectical, an imperfect distillation of lived experience into poetic form, and at the same time the “lifting out”—a term that has been applied to work of Gertrude Stein—of a new experience that happens just now on the page—or on the screen.

My poems have appeared in Harvard Review, House Organ, Bear Creek Haiku, Poetalk, Current Accounts, Court Green, Pegasus, Arsenic Lobster, Nexus, Nthposition, Aquapolis, Puerto del Sol, Folio, Heeltap, Poetry Revolt, Ship of Fools, Armchair Aesthete, Cherry Bleeds, and Italian Americana.

Poems:

ABUSE OF THE COLLECTIVE PRONOUN

I go back to the idea of a book
as a refuge, that illusion of integration
we maintain that helps us move on.
Given "the psycho-pathology of everyday life"
everything is sporadic & half-ended
anger without objects
obsessions without reward
they die of cruel exhaustion.
We want “a small well-made thing”
but small is not always big enough.
We need a place where language
calls the shots, not shoots us.
We dip into a book
as we dip into our sanity
as though we had sanity to spare.

ARTIST’S ROOM IN NEULENBACH
Egon Schiele, 1911

This still-life invites a song,
for what sister arts all share
is the doing, the performance,
the act. What he made—dabbing
paint one handed, scraping it off
with the other, regarding his chambre
à coucher while he poses, balanced
at the threshold just inside its door frame,
a man on stage in his underwear juggling
a conception against what may achieve it—
I imitate by rough analogy, to please
& then to bed.

Yet more than Schiele
in the act, who left at length this
quiet trace; no, not the artist painting,
but the life inside this room—here
is my song. It is just so. We approach
this picture from a distance, as if home
from long travels we see again our
own poor lodgings transfigured, & more
vibrantly our own than we’d remembered
when first setting out, & other intentions
intervened. The table in the corner
propped just so to flatter the eye,
objects exactly where I’d forgotten
I’d left them miraculously surviving intact
& coming slowly unfrozen in time.

SUNDAY MORNING

perhaps I will try to snap a picture with my poem
like this young married couple in Sunday summer outfits

do, her bare back stripped with a tan-line, just before
gulls come, attracted by the thrashing in the water

we all go down, a squirrel has brought a bag of peanuts
to munch as it watches, but the ducklings seem unaware,

gathered about their mother, a shifting cluster of downy balls
bobbing atop the wriggling spiny weeds submerged & agitated,

up above singing comes from the church, organ driven
“faith of our fathers living still” in them who remain

“true to Thee till death,” but these fish know no faith,
when the drive is in ‘em they do not balk, they try themselves

against all obstacles, relentless, like the current flowing back
on itself while all strength lasts, massing together where

this concrete catch-all interferes with their dash upstream,
they are garbage fish, carp, the biggest fucking goldfish

you ever wanna see come to muddy the poisoned pathetic Scajaquada
with their spume and spawn, they are not great leapers & the water

is low, yet they heave their heavy bulks & seethe in slow turmoil,
but here, look, they are everywhere churning, spanking the water

with their mighty tails, sun yellowing their fins & sides,
they grip each other as they can, spin in sinuous desire,

the waters above & below the barrier are alive
with their slidings & rapacious nuzzlings, gaping their mouths

as if to devour one another, they whirl in corkscrew mixes
of fishy bodies suave & gray, glinting in the green-brown water

disturbed with many motions, in pairs & threes & fives, rising volcanic
from the underside of dark shallows always at most half visible