Joseph Ceravolo

Joseph Ceravolo (April 22, 1934 – September 4, 1988) was an American poet associated with the second generation of the New York School. For years Ceravolo’s work was out of print, but the 2013 publication of his Collected Poems has made his work accessible again. His popularity has been limited to the community of writers. As Charles North writes “[Ceravolo’s] importance to American poetry over the past 30 years is still largely a secret.”

Joseph Ceravolo was born in Queens, New York into a family of Italian immigrants. Ceravolo studied writing with Kenneth Koch at the New School for Social Research. In addition to his career as a poet, Ceravolo worked as a civil engineer. He began writing poetry while stationed in Germany in the late 1950s. He lived much of his life in New Jersey. Ceravolo had a wife, Rosemary, and three children, Paul, Anita, and James. He died in 1988 due to bile duct cancer.

Ceravolo is associated with the second generation of the New York School (which includes writers such as Bernadette Mayer, Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh). Although Ceravolo’s work shares some of the same warmth and immediacy that typifies some of the other New York School Second Generation, his work is less prone to use conversational language and is often less directly humorous than much New York School writing. Influences on Ceravolo’s poetry include Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings as well as Asian and Native American poetry.

Many of Ceravolo’s poems are marked by distorted syntax, elisions, juxtaposition and fragments (a trait he shares with Clark Coolidge, a writer also sometimes associated with the second generation of the New York School) resulting in poems that surprise with their refracted meanings and misdirections. The structure and shape of Ceravolo’s poetry changed over the course of his career: the poems of one of Ceravolo’s early books, Fits of Dawn, are characterized by a dense, relentless gush of words; Ceravolo’s poems (such as in Spring in this World of Poor Mutts) then increasingly experiment with spacing and twists added by conjunction and preposition; poems in Ceravolo’s later books tend to be more direct and lyrical, although parataxis is still prevalent.

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