Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures

by W.S. Di Piero

W. S. Di Piero is one of the most capable and wide-ranging poet-critics of his generation. His essays are contemplative, analytical, and interdisciplinary, critical yet arising out of his own artistic practice. Di Piero looks at interrelations between the arts, and at the ways in which the arts express aspects of contemporary culture as well as the individual temperaments and gifts of their makers. These essays are elegant and passionate tributes to the intersection of art and self.

222 pages, Paperback

First published June 3, 1996

About the author

William Simone Di Piero was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and earned degrees from St. Joseph’s College and San Francisco State College. A poet, essayist, art critic, and translator, Di Piero has taught at institutions such as Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, and Stanford, where he is professor emeritus of English and on faculty in the prestigious Stegner Poetry Workshop. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, Di Piero was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2012.

Di Piero’s poetry is known for its gritty realism. Populated with characters and settings reminiscent of the South Philadelphia neighborhood of his boyhood and the Italian-American working-class families he grew up with, Di Piero’s poetry frequently makes use of colloquial language and diction.

An award-winning translator of Italian poetry, Di Piero’s first translation, Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri, was nominated for a National Book Award. Other translations include Sandro Penna's This Strange Joy, which received the Academy of American Poets Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, Leonardo Sinisgalli's The Ellipse (1982) and Night of Shooting Stars (2011), and a translation of Euripides’s Ion.

W.S. Di Piero has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[H]

"Surprise for the poet, that is. Let poetry be entirely of accidental consequence for any person beyond its maker. Its surprise lives on, available for readers who turn to poetry not for curricular pedantries or workshop brillancies but for the plain promise of a language to embody the passion of consciousness, which is the ordinary work of the imagination. Alice tells the caterpillar that someday he will surely feel as strange as she does (she is only a few inches tall) when he turns into a chrysalis and then turns into a butterfly. 'I should think,' she says, 'you'll feel it a little queer, wouldn't you?' And the caterpillar replies: 'Not a bit.' "