The Whole Song: Selected Poems: Vincent Ferrini. Edited and with an
Introduction by Kenneth A. Warren and Fred Whitehead. University of Illinois Press, 2004. $25.00 hardcover.

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Venanzio Ferrini was born in Saugus, Massachusetts on June 24, 1913, and he is very much alive, and still writing. He grew up in poverty, among Italian immigrants, in Lynn, Massachusetts. Lynn was the hub of America's shoe manufacturing industry, and also a hotbed of union activity and radical thinking. More can be found about Ferrini's mentors and influences in Warren and Whitehead's introductory essay. In short, Vincent was a "Poet of the People". He worked with, and wrote about, the shoe-industry workers in
Lynn, and, later, the fisher folk in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was also in Gloucester, Massachusetts that Ferrini became friends with the poet Charles Olson, whose theory of Projective Verse catalyzed the Beats. Ferrini and Olson were both friends and literary competitors - Olson, especially, was not only an huge guy, but had a big ego, too. The poems in Shoe City, the first section in this anthology, are very much like the poems in Edgard Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, first published in 1914. Here is Ferrini's

Nora Owen

A 10 cent wedding ring tied the nuptial knot.
Their bed is the Welfare
And their rooms rest on quicksand.
Her hatchet nose defies all enemies
And eyes spit fire,
Blunt as a sledge blow on fingers.
Organizes mothers on her street to strike for low rent,
And committees to cut the price of milk and bred;
They never knew how before and it works,
And they love her for it.
Visits them bringing gifts of leaflets and pamphlets with answers.
She sails into the offices of the Powers That Be
And rocks the roofs of their smugness.
Get smart with her and your head's in pincers.
Quickest time to get results is a straight line of attack.
Persistent as a flood,
Her words and manners punch you in the nose.
Offers no excuse
And changes her tactics.
Loses herself and evolves
New ways of living.
Loving this life fiercely for what it must become.

It isn't possible in a brief review to show the stylistic changes in
Ferrini's work - which became more expansive and open in form due to his friendship with Charles Olson. And Ferrini's longer poems are too long to quote from in full. But he also wrote short, and to my mind, memorable lyrics such as

The Gold

The suddenness flowers have
startles the air
with their fire and ether
as we do with what is ours
because we are
the gardeners of each other.

This could be read as a love poem or a socialist poem - in a true
collective we would take care of each other, as lovers and gardeners do. Vincent Ferrini, like the poet Don Gordon, reviewed in the Spring 2004 SHP, is not, and was not, an academic poet, that is, one who gets his or her living and career by teaching in a university. Poets such as Ferrini and Gordon have, in my opinion, more news to bring us about the political and social realities of our everyday world than do most of the academic poets. Again, Fred Whitehead, though this time with a co-editor, Kenneth A. Warren, does yeoman work in editing yet another collection by a worker poet. Thank you, Fred and Kenneth, for introducing me to Vincent Ferrini.

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Originally published in The Secular Humanist Press, Winter 2004-2005. Reprinted with permission of William Witherup.