Robert Viscusi has become a major voice in contemporary Italian American arts and letters. Born in Brooklyn, NY, his education was strongly formed by the Jesuits at Regis High School and Fordham College. He went on to graduate school at Cornell and graduated with a doctorate in English at New York University, and became a professor of English at Brooklyn College where he is a Broeklundian Professor of English and executive officer of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities. Among his books are a collection of poems entitled A New Geography of Time (Guernica Editions 2004), and a critical history entitled Buried Caesars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing (State University of New York, 2006). In 1996, his novel, Astoria, won an American Book Award. His latest work Ellis Island is an epic poem composed of 624 sonnets.
This book-length poem challenges us to revisit Italian immigration to the United States and to rethink what it means to be Italian American. In this epic the heroes are are not warriors (though sometimes Viscusi’s heroes are certainly at war with the cultural forces that shape their identities). The heroes here are everyman and everywoman, in the guise of Italian immigrants to the U.S., who along with their children and grandchildren. Like the heroes of epics past, they experience adventures and through it all achieve an awareness of the human condition worthy of passing on to new generations.
With the wit of Martial, the rhetorical strength of Cicero, and the poetic dexterity of few others, the author captures levels of experience ranging from the personal to the public, the historical to the fantastical, reminding us that most people live epic lives that can only be recognized in art…
Ellis Island, Publisher: Bordighera Press (2013)
Paperback: 328 pages, $28 ISBN: 978-1-59954-033-7
The following is an excerpt from the poem:
1. the stories disintegrate you like waves
1.1
certain things do not make for good poetry
you write them because you hope to open your heart
which you have closed too many times
people who hurt you for years
now complain that you have hurt them
how do you decide what to do about these wounds
you have decided to expect nothing precisely
so that your own imperfections will not astonish you
nor will the imperfections of others drive you to fury
the music flows through the room where you are dancing
you have decided to feel something while no one is looking
or simply to allow the breeze to touch you
you have perfected a poetry of attitudes and remarks
totally useless at a picnic on the water
1.2
in the boat on the way to ellis island
the people group themselves according to nationality
the taiwanese guide leads his group with a triangular blue flag
the humiliation of a greek mystery cult assails you
climbing into the roman bath where you sit in rows
the goddess liberty announces the completion of the ocean outside
the lovers row past the red buoys in the harbor
the speedboats skirt close to the green buoys
the ferries churn in straight lines like dreams of a schedule
in the great hall the brilliance of the new world blinds you
you only see its grandeur as if you were a caesar
the children pass through the bronze doors to the future
on the esplanade you dissolve in light
becoming a mist
1.3
i was reading the story of stories of stories
they tell on the walls of ellis island
the stories disintegrate you like waves
they break you into a thousand thousand faces
looking out at the skyline from the ships
which of them do you become
you flutter across the stories like a wave
you are the change of shadow on the stories of stories
and the soft backwash of tiny waves on the narrow beach
you are not a story but an aspect of a story’s story
and though you had expected a more substantial career
you appreciate the lightning swiftness of your influence
you are the eyes that transform the city
giving it the softness of napoli
1.4
you were from barbados you were from jamaica
you were from the caymans you were from puerto rico
you were from guyana you were from harlem
you were from trinidad you were from india
you were from argentina you were from france
you were from england you were from mexico
you were from russia you were from west africa
you were from north africa you were from east africa
you were from north carolina your grandfather went to utah
her mother had a serious operation and died
the snow fell for three weeks without stopping in toronto
the wind covered the bodies under drifts that froze solid
the mountains melted and the rivers filled
and you continued flowing in from the ocean
1.5
we ourselves came across high north ridges
that afterwards sank into the ocean long before stories begin
we only remember these highlands as the names of birds
you only know us as a supposition
stranded in the high room where they check you for vermin
and you look out into the river that disappears into the mountains
steep cliffs on the mainland side behind which we fell back
we inhabit the continent as the blind spots of your imagination
so you look and you see everything except us
even though we are standing behind all the trees with tomahawks
we mean to drive you out as we can hide from your mind but it is not enough
we cannot seem to avoid the power of your blindness
it still beats against the atlantic from which we fell back
long swells of you mass in pyramids like beetles of the dawn
1.6
i have been thinking how they designed the place
as a ritual entrance into the imaginary universe
using the masonic formulae for a rite that would change you
did they mean it as a spectacle of purification
they wanted to quiet the fears of nativists
who feared infection as if it were as evil as cheap labor
or did they mean to work magic on all these calibans
the immigration police played prospero and used masonic spells
to tame and to tag the incoming flocks of workers
living organisms the immigration service saw as homer saw armies
generations of leaves flash brightest on the trees just before they die
important to ship efficiently off to farms and mining camps
this jeffersonian church could rename a parish priest a son of liberty
and a figment of the continent’s imaginings
1.7
you tella me what thing you wanta me to know
the mandolins are sounding in the background music
the couple stands on the quay kissing as if it were paris
it is paris
on ellis island begins the dark eternal paris
imaginary streets materialize before your eyes
just yesterday this place was tomorrow
whereas by this morning it had already become next week
and by that time it will be the next millennium in chicago
we are shooting there on light beams
which the women wear as dildoes
and the men display in parking lots across the sky
i have read these dreams in the notebooks of leon battista alberti
and the imaginary character of america is its most italian aspect
1.8
whatever you start it always ends up italian
she said that to me because she loves oldfashioned culture
which is to say italian men
who believe we indicate elegance arrogance intelligence
by patriarchal hand on hip and steady commanding gaze
which we inherit as parrots inherit green feathers
though i might rather be a black snake with diamonds on his teeth
or the purple of a field of wildflowers
i am only one of these human cockatoos
who designed the parthenon the pantheon palladium
and all the mausoleum gardens of the marble mountains
that we filled with domes and porticoes
you keep tasting italian culture you think is no good for you
but a rainforest needs its brilliant creatures
1.9
into the still haze the italians brought red food
where all the food used to be brown and yellow and white
even when it was supposed to have had seeds and visible buds
and the italians brought a green oil that made the food green
under the misty blur they wore black hair
and rode black horses into the dreams of white women
they wore white clothes and broke granite with hammers
so that their very eyelids thickened with powdered stone
as if michelangelo were conjuring a frieze of laborers
the italians brought fish frying in the streets
an aroma that drew people out of their houses at night
where they listened to mandolins by moonlight
americans who had lived in the frames of photographs
made the italians rich with their generous tips
1.10
they said to us since you are italian learn to sing
tell jokes dance and make beautiful clothes
unless you are willing to study latin
in which case we have a steady market for italian schoolteachers
italian lawyers italian priests and politicians
and now we have given them the police force to run in fifty cities
we considered ourselves a race of heroes
from julius caesar to garibaldi
we would have rather been bandits than busdrivers
but in this country they offered a pension
a beach house a restaurant if you were willing to work that hard
so we studied our little lessons
shrinking into comfortable wooden yodelers on clocks
we still do find huge broken italian heroes covered with graffiti
1.11
on ellis island the stories howl through me like storms
a noise with nothing to say except what meaning attaches itself
to your skin in the touch of someone that loves you
here we enter a vast space neither sky nor sea
digging the subways they brought dirt here in barges
and made this well positioned plot
we think of this as the isle of possibilities
we talk about the future as if we could touch it
and explore each other’s faces as if we were concave mirrors
the trees here inhabit a perpetual hallucination
they think themselves to be sea creatures
monumental crustaceans evolved when the sea still filled with lava
we were facing the water and thinking ten thousand nights
awaiting a single dawn
1.12
i fell past needles of silver skyscrapers and woke up damp
when the tall steamer foghorns blat out their arrival going by the bed vibrates
i wanted to stand in line outside the building for a hundred years
i don’t want to go through with it now
maybe later i want think it over
the policeman touched me and said do you want to come in the side door
he was making a scary joke to get me up and walking
i think he didn’t really mean it but it doesn’t matter
every window i look out of i see another wave full of dead bodies
white faces lie on the gleaming plate of the bay at night
bodies cluster under the docks
they remove them with hooks like logs
in the boat there was one woman who never stopped crying for her mother
i call her a woman because she had a baby in her arms but she was herself a child
To read more about Ellis Island, visit Robert Viscusi’s website here. Or, to purchase the work in its entirety, click on the book cover below.
Ellis Island, Publisher: Bordighera Press (2013)
Paperback: 328 pages, $28 ISBN: 978-1-59954-033-7