Spring in This World of Poor Mutts

by Joseph Ceravolo

.

Genres: Poetry

85 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

A poet sometimes associated with the New York School of poets, Joseph Ceravolo began writing poems in 1957 while completing his Army service in Germany. In 1959, Ceravolo earned a degree in civil engineering from the City College of New York and enrolled in Kenneth Koch’s poetry workshop at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.

The New York–born son of Italian immigrants, Ceravolo died at age 54 after publishing several books, establishing a career as a hydraulics engineer, and raising a family in New Jersey. His 1968 collection, Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, was published by Columbia University Press and won the first Frank O’Hara Award for poetry—“intended to encourage the writing of good new experimental poetry.”

Ceravolo’s other publications include Fits of Dawn, published in 1965 by close friend Ted Berrigan’s C Press; The Green Lake Is Awake (1994), with poems selected by Larry Fagin, Kenneth Koch, Charles North, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, and Paul Violi; INRI, (1979); Millennium Dust (1982), which includes poems later anthologized in The Poets of the New York School; Transmigration Solo (1979); and Wild Flowers Out of Gas (1967).

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It Is Morning


Too late
Hard fish
Too late to be morning
Too early . . . . . early love
The tree played into
by 4 birds
The hornet . . . . . even though
the nest is shaking
Where did they go?

*

After the Rain


The soap is wet from the storm
and then it is lost
. . . . . . . . .
I am peeking out.
I feel a chill across
the forehead
The breeze. The toy gun . . .
The quiet birds,
not as quiet as the cork

from this bottle we
drank last night

*

Dusk


Before the dusk grows deeper
Now comes a little moth dressed in
rose pink, wings bordered with yellow. Now
a tiger moth, now another and another another

*

The Wind Is Blowing West

1

I am trying to decide to go swimming,
But the sea looks so calm.
All the other boys have gone in.
I can't decide what to do.

I've been waiting in my tent
Expecting to go in.
Have you forgotten to come down?
Can I escape going in?
I was just coming

I was just going in
But lost my pail


2

A boisterous tide is coming up;
I was just looking at it.
The pail is near me
again. My shoulders have sand on them.

Round the edge of the tide
Is the shore. The shore
Is filled with waves.
They are tin waves.

Boisterous tide coming up.
The tide is getting less.


3

Daytime is not a brain,
Living is not a cricket's song.
Why does light diffuse
As earth turns away from the sun?

I want to give my food
To a stranger. I want
to be taken.
What kind of a face do

I have while leaving?
I'm thinking of my friend.


4

I am trying to go swimming
But the sea looks so calm
All boys are gone
I can't decide what to do

I've been waiting to go
Have you come down?
Can I escape

I am just coming
Just going in

*

Cool Breeze


In the night
in the day
it's possible to be defeated,
but how I love.
We walk down.
The children feel warm
but where is defeat?
I look up
The sun is
on the wet glass. The beach
where I love is now cool.
The children are still warm.

*

In the Grass


Here in the grass
where the flowers
walk softer than bids
to their nests
in the clouds
Where the rain
falls toward the sky,
the small breath
of the insect
is like a breeze
before rain

*

Red Sun


You can't take me with a look
These are the keys
to an orgy

after work
but they will not work
of beautiful sensuality.

Yes, work is so remote, here beneath the tides

I cannot plant the creep's
universe As my hair stands
out of one autumn chance
to another O

The late red sun
farther than the equinox of a dream,
cannot make the people
more vivid than this goddess's eye.

*

Noise Outside


I'm tired
I'm going to bed.
I'm tired. Look for me.
I will wake up
And kiss me
whether i wake up
or not.
I'm tired.
When the birds stop
I will wake up or not.
The windows are open.

*

When the First Tree Blossoms


Snow fall like April;
the icicles stick. Like April
the birds float.
It is white foam.

Like April when the first tree blossoms
and you do not know it.

*

Doubts


The more along you are the more

there's no ways things of passion,
the floral humaneness, can stop.

Love speeds in struggles
in beautified temptations.

Quacks
of ducks are planed, are falling.

Are you going to hold me
or is a visionary of Spring

also coming

to take you away from me?

*

Passion for the Sky


You are near me. The night
is rectilinear and light
in the new lipstick
on your mouth an one the coloured
flowers. The irises are blue.
As far as I look we are across. A
boat crosses by. There is something
sold, lemons. Corn is whizzing from the
ground. You are sleeping
and day starts its lipstick.
Where do we go from here?
Blue irises.

*

Lonely in the Park


A sore of love.
That I've found. Formula.
What?
From cell to cell. From play. Enzymes.

*

I Like to Collapse


Saturday night I buy a soda
Someone's hand opens I hold it
It begins to rain
Avenue A is near the river

*

Drunken Winter


Oak oak! like like
it then
cold some wild paddle
so sky then;
flea you say
"geese geese" the boy
June of winter
of again
Oak sky

*

Polar Flower


Poverty needs us in
this riot
of our body,
driving the jobs of the helpless to
the grainless without weapons.
Our hopes
our bodies stay awake
in the light.
Positions, interventions, work,
riots and leaves around us.
O the hungry body
of our souls
marooned like a polar flower.

*

Struggling


We are going the park.
There are swings.
There are rocks a sand bed.
The flowers rest
the bed. The flowers
rise. We are fatigued
but invade them.
There is a smell.
It invades us.
It hides us.
Notice! there are flowers along
the bed, tiny flower clusters.
But we cannot move our legs.
We cannot move our eyes.

*

Grow


I fight and fight.
I wake up.
The oasis is now dark.
I cannot hear anything.

The wind is felt
and the stars and the sand
so that no one
will be taken by pain.

I sit next to the bushes,
Hercules couldn't move me,
and sleep and dream.

The sand, the stars are solid
in this sleeping oasis,
alone with the desert and
the metaphysical cigarette.

*

Happiness in the Trees


O height dispersed and head
in sometimes joining
these sleeps. O primitive touch
between fingers and dawn
on the back

You are no more
simple than a cedar tree
whose children change
the interesting earth
and promise to shake her
before the wind blows
away from you
in the velocity of rest

*

Mountains


The surface of the mountain flows.
Here on these vibrating peaks.
I am hungry,
and the mountain continues to flow.
The light, the cylinder,
the river and the river
between the lightning and the love
and the nude river.
Next to the body, continues,
continues to drive my penis
into the seaweed forever,
today.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book from my good friend, Gus. I've read all of the poems in it a few times, but I'm keeping it on my "currently reading" shelf, because I think I need to read them each several more times. Gus tells me that this is New York School of Poetry, Second Generation. He describes it as relatively accessible, which concerns me.

[Ed Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually Joe gave his book to me back in the early 1980s.
It might have been after Ted Berrigan's funeral in Bloomfied.
Mark Hilliringhouse, the late Mike Reardon & I were having a few
beers with Joe & his wife Rosemary. The Ceravolos were very kind to
us and we talked alot that day after Ted's funeral had to be 5 or 6 P M
the Sun was coming through the windows. WE drove out to Long Island
Veterans Cememtery because Alice Notley has no money to bury Ted.
His first prized book from Columbia Univ.