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
From The Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). The poem initially appeared in Spring in this World of Poor Mutts, winner of the first Frank O'Hara Award in 1968, which was judged by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Books by Michael Brownstein, Tony Towle, John Koethe, and Kenward Elmslie were chosen for the series in subsequent years. Click here for more about Joe's Collected.
A "civil engineer and regular family guy" (in Tom Clark's words), Ceravolo was born in Astoria, Queens, in 1934, went to City College, began writing poetry when serving in the US Army, and took a class with Kenneth Koch that proved decisive in his development as a poet. Many of us got our first exposure to Ceravolo's poems in the Paris Review when Tom Clark edited its poetry pages. Before dying of cancer on September 4,1988, Ceravolo wrote and published several other books with small presses, but what many readers, including ardent fans of Ceravolo's work, don't realize is that the man produced hundreds of pages of poetry in the last twelve years of his life. The poems — some of which have dates in lieu of titles — stand on their own and also figure as part of one long project: a chronicle of the poet's sensibility.
— DL