The incentive for meditation offered by some of the most popular writers of
[the 17th century] was the possibility of achieving the highest reaches of mystical
experience. This is evident in such a work as the Third Spiritual Alphabet of
Fray Francisco de Osuna, the mystical treatise which had so profound an effect
upon St. Teresa. Fray Francisco insists that “the chief reason for which
I wrote this book was to draw everyone’s attention to this exercise of
recollection”— the term which the Spanish mystics, notably St. Teresa,
use to describe the withdrawal from the world of sense-perceptions that marks
the road to the heights of mystical contemplation.
— Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation
his brilliant book is as welcome as the flowers in spring, which in some
ways it resembles. For me, and I would hope for others, it is an awakening— not
to God, which is perhaps what the poet would hope, but to poetry.
I had read some of Frank Samperi’s work in the 1970s and, while I liked it, I hadn’t realized its full range and depth. “The fall of a great house,” Samperi writes in a wonderful, haiku-like poem, “ / the body.” In a longer work, he represents (rather than “discusses”) the flowering of creativity. The lone nouns (“edge / sea / height / depth”) are a frequent feature of this poet’s style. One feels that each word carries with it the full weight of the poet’s solitary meditation— and, indeed, that no poet is more “solitary” than Frank Samperi:
the dying balanced
the spirit realization
the work the word
unity
full
then the flickering
edge
sea
height
depth
effaced
plain burden
sea universe
crystal
the ethical
meaningless
work word revitalized
signification
vision neither in nor out
Little known in his lifetime, Frank Samperi is almost completely forgotten today. John Martone and Station Hill have performed a considerable service by making a sampling of Samperi’s work once again available. In his preface to the book, Robert Kelly writes of “the attention [Samperi’s poems] never particularly got in his lifetime”:
Many a poet who got vastly more public attention than Samperi ever got has been plaintive or vitriolic about perceived neglect. For Samperi, as long as he was paying attention to the words, that was attention enough.
An orphan and first-generation Italian-American, Frank Samperi (1933-1991) was born in Brooklyn. In his introduction, John Martone tells us that the poet “discovered Dante in a Brooklyn institution, taught himself Aquinas in Latin, [and] studied the Indian philosopher Sankara, non-Euclidean geometry, and astrology”:
Although his poetic idiom remains thoroughly contemporary, Samperi was in many respects a medieval Catholic visionary trying to find his way in a deeply troubled America, the vacuous materialism and superficiality of which he could not abide. As a consequence, his work was not just counter-cultural but also counter-fashionable...[Samperi was] cut off from his roots in Italy, on the one hand, and alienated from the poetic avant-garde on the other.
“Each of Samperi’s volumes,” Martone goes on, “is...a poetic sequence made up of subsequences, which are sometimes named, sometimes partitioned by blank pages”; Samperi “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.” This one poem, writes Kelly, is “built of silences hard won from the crapulous tumult of Lower East Side nights in Manhattan where his great years of work were spent...He used the word study to identify this night labor of his.”
Spiritual Necessity is a selection taken from four of Samperi’s twenty volumes of poetry: The Prefiguration (1971), Quadrifariam (1973), Lumen Gloriae (1973) and Letargo (1980). In addition, there is a section of posthumously-published works.
As Martone suggests, Samperi is best read in large chunks rather than on the level of the individual poem: his work contains many resonances which are mutually illuminating. The poet himself remarks that “these same phrases / keep cropping up in my work / over the years / they’re the same words / but the significance is different.” Among these words are “angel”— perhaps the single most repeated word in the book—“wanderer,” “release.” All of these suggest distance, exile, separation from the object of desire: the orphan’s longing for home—or the immigrant’s longing for the homeland—is intensified here into the soul’s longing for God: “After working in the prison yard, a man in his cell turns to his thoughts to hear deeply: God be praised!” In one extraordinary poem, the phrase “letting go” turns from a negative (a man falling—perhaps to his death?) to a positive (the poet finding “release,” “letting go” of the world):
from above
under a tree
people huddled close
gloating over
a man losing his footing
grasping a ledge
unable to hold on
letting go
In another, the loneliness we experience in traveling—the burden of selfhood which appears as we wait to arrive at a destination still distant—is beautifully captured. This poem, like many in the book, has no “I”—only gerunds which might apply to anyone:
riding a train
looking at homes
desiring a home
The emotional intensity of the poem rests upon that word desiring—with its subtle difference from the words riding and looking.
The idea of a poet producing “one long poem”— Martone calls it a “life-poem”— suggests Whitman, but in many ways Samperi is the opposite of Whitman. Whitman’s verse works by expansiveness, not by “silences hard won”; one feels that Samperi works by contraction, by deliberate negation. “Withdraw” and “withdrawal” are among the most important words of his vocabulary: “you’re more withdrawn now than ever”; “It is true that my withdrawal from the literary world is complete”; “the heart skips a beat / when the sun withdraws”; “to withdraw / from the literary world / is a must.” In an early poem he insists that “To be saved I must / slip away from the moderns.” Samperi’s technique is in fact an extraordinary example and development of Pound’s “Dichten = Condensare.” Carrying modernist minimalism into the realm of what Louis L. Martz calls “the withdrawal from the world of sense-perceptions that marks the road to the heights of mystical contemplation,” Samperi gives his reader as few words as possible— though those words often carry a considerable weight of meaning. This poem scarcely differs from a mere list:
leaving the airport
taking the bus
riding past cemetery
thru shopping district
the city truer
dustier
the guest gone
What makes those lines a poem is the resonance between the word “gone” and the word “cemetery.” Once the awareness of death enters the poem, we are not merely “taking the bus” but, as in Dante, we are “in the middle of the journey of our lives”: “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.”
Much of Samperi’s work suggests that he has developed out of “Imagism,” but, like many Imagists, he is also capable of direct, even dogmatic statement: “I lived daily the spiritual / my meals taken alone / the reality false”; “God is the reason / and end / of all our movements.” Samperi’s work is more likely to be enigmatic rather than dogmatic, however. Martone suggests that in his late poetry Samperi “becomes explicitly, even courageously ec/centric and anti-closural.” At times individual words which seem not quite to “fit” will turn the poem into a kind of riddle. In this example, what does “more” mean? What does “center” mean?
I
go up a hill and sit with my
children on a rock
the
tree below quiet more
center
As one thinks about the poem, that last word begins to carry more and more weight.
If Samperi’s early work sometimes reminds you of William Carlos Williams—
...must
you talk
of failure;
even this
snow’s
right
— ah, oak
branching
over
my work
shed—
his later work occasionally suggests Larry Eigner:
shadows of weeds on a rock
evening returning
object
to
object
In general, however, there is no mistaking him for anyone else. He is even capable of comedy, though this is not his strong suit:
no reason to be poetic
but I think
a lot about
our trip to the sea
the place we rented
for $20 a wk
no shower
the bed
pretty bad
room enough for only one
The book also contains an amusing one-liner:
a park poet ok a bum
Another word which appears frequently in Spiritual Necessity is the word “memory”— sometimes linked to the word “haunted” or “haunting.” Samperi’s “memory” is equivalent to Fray Francisco’s word “recollection”— “the term which the Spanish mystics, notably St. Teresa, use to describe the withdrawal from the world of sense-perceptions that marks the road to the heights of mystical contemplation.” All of Samperi’s work is marked by an immense nostalgia. The poet himself interprets that nostalgia as the “longing for purity,” the desire for a “reality” different from the “false” reality he sees all around him: “the spiritual life is the real,” he insists, and he refers to his work as “theological poetry”: “the true object / of the theological poet / is Eternal Form...We bear witness to the Gift.” But, as Samperi was surely aware, in the field of language one nostalgia calls to another. Jack Kerouac remarked that “you don’t have to be a Catholic for the Holy Ghost to speak through you”; similarly, you don’t have to be a Catholic to feel nostalgia; indeed, you don’t even have to believe in God. For Italian-Americans steeped in Roman Catholicism— as for Africans taken to the United States in slavery— the experience of exile is often cloaked in religious terms; and, as an orphan and a first-generation Italian American, Samperi is in a way twice an exile. It is also possible that the poet’s desire for the “real” may have been the result of esthetic rather than religious impulses— esthetic impulses perhaps masking themselves as religious ones. It’s significant that Samperi’s early work sounds like William Carlos Williams. What if Samperi’s longing for the “real” is not a longing for the transcendental (which he believes it is) but a longing for a physicality which his medium denies him?
This is William Carlos Williams’ famous, puzzling poem, “The Red Wheel Barrow”:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
What is the status of “things” in that poem? What exactly “depends” on them? Do we “see” them—and if so, in what way do we see them? Do they change our relationship to “things” we see daily? Williams seems to long intensely for the physical presence of the “things” in his poem—yet all he can do is to turn them into “text.” Perhaps that is Samperi’s problem as well: the very richness of his “verbal manifestations,” as Pound says, may arise out of the poet’s sheer distance from the real (“so I don’t know the practical world / I write / for angels”); Williams’ poem, like Samperi’s work, is not a naming of objects as presence but of objects as absence, distance; objects as they appear to a person forever exiled from them. The deepest emotion in such work is the emotion of longing. Samperi writes, enigmatically to be sure,
the extension of the walls
the senses
the converse
insensible
water
beyond trees
other times
between hill
grove
transformation
preventing
return
The message of that poem may be that, once they have undergone heavenly “transformation,” water, trees, hill and grove will never return to their previous state— a state experienced by “the senses.” But mightn’t it also be suggesting that heaven— from which we have been “transformed” into sensual beings— can’t be returned to, is forever out of reach? This, I’m sure, is not a meaning the poet would endorse— his many sightings of “angels” are proof to the contrary— but can’t the poem be read that way: “transformation / preventing / return”? Mightn’t Samperi’s poetry be more about “longing” (another word which repeats) than it is about “release”? Perhaps the very repetition of words throughout his work is a constantly failing attempt to utter the “word” which will transfigure rather than “prefigure” everything. “To live in God,” he writes, “is to be contemplative”: “contemplation is a prefiguration of the very activity that pertains to the Kingdom of Heaven”:
there was odor
he was garden
seraphs dwelt in him
he responded in grace
he branch
finally light
in itself
Spiritual Necessity is a fine introduction to an extraordinary
poet who is, as he puts it, “very Italian” and “in America.”
Robert Kelly is surely right when he speaks of the “purity” of
Samperi’s poetry: “His language was clear the way glass is, demanding
only attention to its luster, and to the world it lets through.” The
largest section of Spiritual Necessity is taken from Samperi’s
masterful book, Quadrifariam (1973). After reading that stunning
section— particularly the excerpts from “The Triune,” with
the wonderful opening lines, “I walked conversing with angels—
/ trees to the right / animals to the left”— I immediately contacted
abebooks.com; I wanted to have it all.