I had the pleasure of hearing Paul Fericano read poems new and old at the Artists’ Union Gallery last night. Paul’s is a distinct turn of mind–able to sweep up humor, irony, and deep feeling in a winning trifecta. Paul takes the materials of popular culture–from Elizabeth Taylor to The Three Stooges–and makes of them something transcendent. It is precisely in the moment I am laughing in a Paul Fericano poem that my guard is down. It is then when Paul slips in a modicum of pathos, reminding me of how complex it is to be human, how, as Virginia Woolf puts it in Mrs. Dalloway, “dangerous it is to live even just one day.” These are poems that read like the messages in a bottle that might be written by the last sane man on Earth, when everyone else has gone mad.
I leave you with a poem that is fast becoming one of Paul’s most popular–read in Ojai at an event I was sadly unable to attend. I am grateful to whomever filmed it.
This is an open note of thanks to Paul Fericano. I had a great time reading at the Broken Word series at Farmer and the Cook last night, and listening to Danielle Camacho, P.Lyn Middleton, Quin Mallory, Paul Fericano, Crystal Salas, Steve Sprinkel, and Johnny Fonteyn weave words into the warm summer night. Afterward, I got to talking with Paul, and he showed me one of the gorgeous, limited-edition offset-print broadsides he creates. On remarking how much I liked it, he gave it to me. And then another. In fact, a whole set.
Strangely enough, this is not the first time I have gone to a poetry reading and come home with a gift. It seems to me that the best kinds of writing communities have, at their heart, a spirit of generosity. This was certainly my experience in the MFA program, where my advisers gave so much more than what was asked of them by the university. And so, with so much talk about “greatness” in poetry, I would like to propose a new definition–that poets not be measured so much by what the Paris Review says about their twelfth collection–but by how poetry inspires them to keep giving back. The product of great poets is great poems. But, so often in my experience, the by-product is generosity.
