The Whole Song

by Ferrini, Vincent; Warren, Kenneth A.; Whitehead, Fred

• ISBN13: 9780252029097
• ISBN10: 0252029097
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

With a voice emerging from class tensions, labor struggles, the Great Depression, and World War II, Vincent Ferrini lived as a people's poet crying out for an end to exploitation and organized greed. Radical Christian gnosis and the conviction that poetry should be more than a display of word-craft distinguished him from poets like T. S. Eliot, infusing his work with dynamic images of Christ as a fighter, a revolutionary, and a martyr in opposing the mighty for the sake of the poor.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
The city	p. 3
Jeffery Tallcott	p. 4
Peter Joyce	p. 6
Tanney Bronson	p. 7
Nora Omen	p. 8
William McCarthy	p. 9
The factories	p. 10
Fluoroscope of evening	p. 12
Workshops in labor	p. 13
The city with empty closets	p. 15
Letter to my brother	p. 16
Forge plant	p. 17
Termites in the floor	p. 18
Ignorance escapes from the tomb	p. 20
Under the heel	p. 22
Live cemeteries	p. 23
The reign of beasts	p. 25
Photograph of starved child dumped in a burial cart	p. 26
Fishcutters	p. 29
Folksong	p. 30
A little autobiography	p. 31
This house	p. 32
In the arriving (excerpts)	p. 33
The square root of in (excerpts)	p. 39
The other side	p. 41
The garden of the apocalypse	p. 42
The gold	p. 43
Spades	p. 44
Aria	p. 45
The Theia mania of Charles Olson	p. 46
In the wake of night I beheld the generations	p. 48
Dialogue with Thoreau	p. 52
Moon soliloquy	p. 54
The flood time of fishing	p. 59
A song of rage	p. 63
Council meeting	p. 64
The bulldozers get the fishermen's institute	p. 66
Pharaoh Otto Bosselman	p. 67
Mural of the harbor	p. 68
Angel of death	p. 70
Blacklisted	p. 71
Blessing of the gasoline tankers	p. 72
Cativo	p. 73
Ballad ov da cut	p. 74
Torch Moynahan	p. 75
Fort defiance	p. 76
Rag Picca : trowaways	p. 77
Da Summa Creche : Da Castagnaccis	p. 78
Duntouchables	p. 79
Da Loss ov da Capt Cosmos	p. 80
Divinin rod	p. 81
Patty Welch's dream & Mimi Deamin	p. 82
One	p. 85
December 26, 1969	p. 88
January 23, 1970	p. 89
September 3, 1970	p. 90
September 29th of the lost year	p. 91
August 5th, another lost year	p. 92
August 7, 1976	p. 94
November 3/1977	p. 95
Gloucester A.D. 1973	p. 96
Charley Olson	p. 98
The ghost of Rocky Neck	p. 99
We are born sleepworking	p. 101
At the brink	p. 103
A preface to the art of fishing	p. 105
We are the wildflowers	p. 109
The winter of ideologies	p. 110
Sea medicine	p. 111
Stale supper	p. 112
The holiest of holies	p. 113
The Olson strain	p. 114
The salt marshes of our lady	p. 115
Mount Ann	p. 118
The date	p. 120
Answers	p. 122
Wraith reading	p. 124
The big question	p. 125
Ellis Island rediscovered	p. 129
The interrogation	p. 130
Visa	p. 131
A poem is made of	p. 132
The gas poem	p. 133
Hunger	p. 135
The gold miner	p. 137
July 4, 1776, sign of interdependencies	p. 141
Foreknowing	p. 143
Journey to Raiano	p. 147
Love song for the Jews	p. 152
Miriam	p. 155
IHS (excerpts)	p. 161
Song of the Amaranth	p. 166
The rocks of wisdom	p. 167
The alchemy of the poem	p. 173
Rhapsody of the God fish	p. 177
The whole song	p. 181
A fact of no time	p. 183
Churches	p. 186
Schools	p. 187
Negroes	p. 188
Bookshop	p. 189
Mass meetings	p. 190
Notes to the poems	p. 191
Vincent Ferrini bibliography	p. 203
Index of titles	p. 207
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