From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM 
 Subject:      Joe Ceravolo

 Mark (et al),
 
 The web is a perfect tool for the project that Joe Ceravolo's son seems
 to be putting together--making an essentially "hard-to-find" poet's
 work available to any and all. There had only been a few hundred hits
 when I visited the other day, but I recommend it to everyone on this
 list heartily (and, Loss, if it hasn't been done, set up a link from
 the author's index at EPC forthwith).
 
 http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~ceravolo/
 
 There's a link from there to the site done by Ceravolo's wife, which
 includes a short bio definitely worth reading. And Jim (the son)
 responds quickly to email.
 
 I've never seen Ceravolo's work in any context that wasn't clearly
 associated with the NY School (with the exceptions of the two talks
 I've given myself that focus in part on his work). Tho I never met the
 man, I was told (by David Shapiro or Joel Lewis? Probably the latter,
 tho I don't recall exactly) that Ceravolo was "puzzled" by "Migratory
 Meaning" when it first came out in print.
 
 You're quite right that his work does things that nobody else involved
 with the NY School has done--the base seems very much to have been
 surrealism and there's also a distinct zen air (tho whether that's
 simply intuitive on his part, or whether he was interested in
 non-western conceptions of life and art I can't say). To my knowledge
 he never wrote or spoke critically on the subject of his writing -- I'd
 love to discover otherwise. And it seems obvious that his reputation
 "suffered" because he didn't hustle his work and generally fell into
 the trap that befalls too many lyric writers -- virtually all of the
 major critical writing post WW2 about the "parallel tradition" tends to
 focus elsewhere (the notable exceptions being O'Hara and Creeley).
 
 Now that the selected poems has gotten an excellent response, I suppose
 we can hope for a collected.
 
 All best,
 
 Ron Silliman
 rsillima@ix.netcom.com