“I live in the unity of word and image. You’ve got to have both,” Vincent Ferrini

Vincent Ferrini Photo: Robert Branch

In December of 2007 a man whom I had met only four or five times, but counted as a friend, died, aged 94, the poet Vincent Ferrini, poet laureate of Gloucester, Ma.

When I lived in Cambridge, Ma. Working as a darkroom printer and an architectural photographer, I spent many weekends in in Gloucester, America’s oldest fishing port, on Boston’s North Shore. There I would visit Peter Anastas, a writer, jazz musician, social worker and a college friend from Bowdoin.

Peter, born and raised in Gloucester where his Greek father ran a luncheonette, knows the history of every building in the city and in his own writings he has explored how this seafaring city shaped his life and the lives of many others . As he said: “ … in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Gloucester seemed much like the Concord of Emerson’s time, a community of artistic, intellectual and political ferment.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marsden Hartley, and Edward Hopper were some of the writers and artists drawn to Gloucester, and Peter introduced me to all of them, dead or alive, including the writer Jonathan Bayliss, and poets Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini.

Vincent Laughing photo: Henry Ferrini?

Ferrini, a slight figure, seemed a kind of sprite; lively, and effervescent. His eyes usually seen beneath a broad-brimmed hat, would dance with excitement over whatever topic entered his mind at the moment, whether poetry, gossip about a woman he had encountered on the street an hour before, the City Council’s rape of Gloucester, or what he was going to have for dinner that evening. He sized you up quickly and if you passed that quicksilver examination, he instantly took you in as a friend.

Mark L. Power: In Vince Ferrini’s frame shop, Gloucester, 1965?

That’s Peter Anastas on the left, Charles Olson reading in the center, and Vincent Ferrini on the right.

Olson, who died in 1970, was a towering figure both literally and figuratively, a six-foot-seven former rector of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and the author of the Maximus poems which elevated Gloucester into a mythic city where figures from the past, present and the future intermingled. Olson’s poetry is written in a dense, sometimes difficult idiom that continues to influence many poets and writers. Olson’s friendship with Ferrini, (and sometimes enmity), became part of several of the Maximus poems.

Ferrini’s own poems, many written in the back room of his frame shop after hours, had a smaller, more lyrical voice which celebrated the commonplace, tinged with his experiences as a working class radical. As Peter Anastas said in his eulogy for Ferrini:

Ferrini’s radicalism was native, a pure American radicalism… linked to the radicalism of Emerson and Thoreau..Vincent Ferrini was at heart a Transcendentalist. Like Emerson, he believed in the radical transformation of the self and society,… With Emerson and Thoreau, Vincent also believed that the divine was reflected in the mundane; he subscribed to the holiness of every person and to our inherent inviolability. …

Peter’s complete eulogy for Vincent Ferrini can be found on his blog, “A Walker in the City”.

Although the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester has some of the Ferrini works, most of the papers of the proletariat-poet rest in the Thomas J. Dodd research center at the University of Connecticut. The Vincent Ferrini archive takes up exactly 2.25 linear feet in the repository.

All the dreams, triumphs and defeats of a life, the factory work of his early years , later, the daily labor of framing pictures, his friendships with many of the writers and poets of the day including Laurence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Rexroth, Peter Anastas, and of course, Charles Olson, his two marriages, three children, the death of one, the broadsides, the letters, and above all the 31 volumes of poetry, four volumes of plays, and an autobiography, reduced to twenty-seven inches on a shelf. His ashes on his daughter’s mantle in Chelsea probably occupy even less space. I don’t know what moral to draw from these statistics except to observe that’s life. Perhaps Ferrini himself said it best in his poem, “Folk Song”:

I pass

by day

and night

no one has

seen me

If you ever

want to find

me

and know me

leave behind

yourself

and enter

the caves

of other

people

there you

will find

me

who is

yourself