Vincent Ferrini - The Hermit Poet Of The Clouds
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by: mynic3
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Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 Time: 4:06 PM
Venazio Ugo, said Vincent Ferrini was born in Saugus, Massachusetts, June 24, 1913. His father, John, originally from Raia had emigrated some years before in the States to work in the shoe district of Lynn, Massachusetts, along with a group of anarchists raianesi: Vincent's father called a Christian anarchist. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Lynn lived in a large community of anarchists and Italian from Abruzzo, the famous Nicola Sacco was a worker of Lynn. While raianese Umberto Postiglione, described as "anarchist of song" by the poet Ferrini his "cousin", he preferred to turn the North and South America by making a fervent anarchist political action or applying educational principles of Tagore.
Vincent after he graduated from Lynn Classical, unable to continue their studies at the College for family financial problems, he continued his cultural self-taught at the Lynn Public Library, "devouring" in particular texts of poetry, sociology and policy. His desire was to find concrete answers to understand why the onset of poverty and war.
He did a brief stint working in the shoe factories of Lynn: In addition to the family, his reading and participation in a political organization was this work experience that instilled a great sensitivity for the lives of poor and working people.
The Great Depression following the tragic '29 resulted in the closure of establishments of shoes in Lynn, and their transfer to the South the young Vincent then worked as a teacher in the WPA and began writing poems. Proudly repeated:-I was given birth by my mother with a pencil in his left hand. " While his father thought the son of a worker's shoes would never become a poet. Vincent published his first volume of poems, "No Smoke" in 1940: the lyric of the economic death of the largest city in the world of shoes. Currently one of his first poetry collection is used as an epilogue to the footwear industry museum that was set up in Lynn.
In 1943 he published "Jnijunction" in 1945 and "Blood of the tenements": the first three books of poetry have become classics of the time when the lyrical sentiments are mixed with political commitment and passion for the suffering of workers .
At the outbreak of World War II had to work in General Electric where he produced including components for weapons of war.
In 1942 he married Margaret Duffy (Peg), a high school teacher, and had three children, Sheila, Owen and Deirdre.
After the war he taught took the Sam Adams School in Boston.
The turning point in his life was the cessation of the work of teaching and his move to Gloucester, a fishing village north of Boston. These events, along with the American political environment changed, permanently marked a revolution in his life and his poetry until then focused on politics and society. He began to develop personal reflections on life and cosmic and the coexistence of everyone to everything. Gloucester became the dream and the next 59 years became his haven and place of his "hermitage" poetic encounter with the poets and the people, to escape in search of a spiritual dimension which transcends the human find the essence of humanity. A Gloucester poetry and his life are not separate.
Charles Olson, an important American modernist poet of the second generation, after reading a poem by Ferrini in 1949 in the journal Imago, wanted to know. Ferrini from major catalyst of lyricism brought together Olson and Robert Creeley, creating an incredible literary union. Olson subsequently, to the great esteem that is tied to Ferrini, he began what was to be his main work, "Maximus Poems", with letters to Vincent.
In the sixties, after the death of his daughter Deirdre leukemia, divorced his wife and married the artist Mary Shore. When her second marriage ended he moved his shop at 126 East Main Street frames. The little shop became more a meeting point of many artists, poets and writers, who came to Gloucester. Although he had just kept the money lent to friends for lunch or poetry books in his library.
In January 1973 Vincent came to Raiano: ancestral echoes ... they invited me to return to Raia. .... Few days to leave the Holy Fire and experience the paradise of poverty, review some parents, Victor and Orestes, the family home in Via Garibaldi 27, the Church of San Venancio, the cemetery where rests his cousin Postiglione - a poet of the myths twins / how many faces that our Father / Mother and me / "many" -.
He continued to write and read his poems: he sought the answers to life. Although the poems was no longer the main political engagement, not by strangers and social life in hundreds of meetings at City Hall expressed his concern to preserve his city from the fires of greed that could annihilate the spirit and originality of "his" town, Gloucester, who had "graduated" poet.
Until the last month wrote poems and read his poems at public meetings around the United States: the American University, in Museums and Libraries. The last public meeting took place in Los Angeles in May 2007.
The worsening of his heart problems was admitted to a facility for the elderly in Rochester, Mass, where he died on Christmas Eve of 2007 at the age of 94.
The human and literary Vincent was the theme of a beautiful film, "Poem in Action: A Portrait of Vincent Ferrini," his nephew Henry Ferrini, critically acclaimed film.
His literary force and his love for poetry has released his flight to creativity: in 67 years has produced thirty volumes of poetry, four volumes of plays and an autobiography.
He was an academic outsider who has lived without receiving financial compensation for his work as a poet, a very sensitive person especially for environmental, community and planet.
A "visionary" who celebrated the mystique of the sea and the stars and who has not lost the acute pain perception of the world that you shared this. His poetry has wanted to find the self in others and that humanity can find in each person. Ferrini has lived as a poet in love with life, man and earth. His poetry was filled with the strength of his social conscience: the life of the oppressed, the poor, battered women, or the hard life of fishermen.
He lived on a sea shore in Gloucester, but with the conviction that the other side there was the Latin side of his ancestors and was around the world.
Studies of Italian American literature so far have almost completely ignored, even if Anthony Julian Tamburri called him the logical successor to Arturo Giovannitti, the great poet of Italian-American origin and union Molise.
In the "Emigration Fund Abruzzese" House of D'Angelo's Introdacqua (LìAquila - Italy) have kept many books and research materials of Vincent Ferrini.
Vincent Ferrini was the last American proletarian poet.
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