Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Vincent's Ferrini's Fortieth Book

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Thomas Lowe Taylor


Listening to him talk about vocation during a reading, you realize he's
talking about the Stations of Attention, locating the moods and sensations
via voice of states of being which attend from a complete world view, one
which includes his corporeal chakras and an enlivened and illumined eros.
No, we are not listening to erotic poetry, but to poetry from an erotically
enlivened man, in whom vital energies are successfully utilized in erasing
the poet's body from the physical body and so blur the inner/outer illusion.
"I am the poem...we are all the poem...." he says expansively, noting that
it was in the mutuality of his friendship with Olson that his sense of what
poetry does was made firm, not by who Olson was, certainly a contributing
factor to the depth it achieved, but more in the fact of friendship that the
word became flesh.

And so Vincent inhabits all religions in his embracing of them, and not with
any attitude at all save the tonality of his line, be it brief or vernacular
or pure juice, it is all cosmos and he is its evidence. This is ecstatic
poetry.

Vincent is a manifestation of the sacred and complete man, saying that he is
"a communicator", perhaps enlivening the notion of what a poet is, he
inhabits the personal with his Word, noting that for the most part, we have
lost touch with it.

But if you aren't somewhere, that is, manifesting yourself, all of
this takes place in a vacuum--hence Vincent's sense of community, of being
somewhere, interacting with other people in their lives. His poetry is a
poetry of voice, of encounters, of a life lived fully among and within other
people. "A person is a person because of other people" goes the saying. No
ivory tower here.

The poems strike not like artifice, but as true speech, sometimes embellished
by poetic effect. A word is a just cause, not to be misused or misplaced, in
each place made specific by its use. In much that is about today, the
plasticity of material is so disrespectfully used as to deny many "word
products" their vitality.

To have a poetry which is not out of one's life and vision is to write
someone else's poetry, or perhaps no ones, perhaps it is just "to write".

Word as flesh, not as signifier
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