Joseph S. Salemi



Joseph S. Salemi teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University, and in the Classics Department of both Hunter College and Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y.  He is a widely published scholar, translator, and poet whose work has appeared in over fifty journals and literary magazines in the United States and in Britain. As a translator, Salemi has rendered into English a wide selection of Latin, Greek, Provencal, and Sicilian poems, and his scholarly work has touched on writers as diverse as Chaucer, Machiavelli, Blake, Kipling, Crane, Ernest Dowson, and Wiffiam Gaddis. He has won several awards, including the Herbert Musurillo Scholarship, the Lane Cooper Fellowship, and an N.E.H. Summer Seminar Fellowship. He was the 1993 recipient of the Classical and Modern Literature Award for outstanding contributions to the combined fields of ancient and contemporary literature, and was twice a finalist (in 1994 and 1995) for the Howard Nemerov Prize sponsored by The Formalist, a journal in which his work has frequently appeared. He was also one of the 1995 winners of the Orbis Prize for fixed-form poetry, sponsored by the English journal Orbis. Salemi is also active as a journalist, writing on current academic issues and controversies for the publication Measure in New York, and for Heterodoxy in California. He is a grandson of the Sicilian poet and translator Rosario Previti. His two books of poetry Formal Complaints ($5.00 plus $1.50 shipping) and Nonsense Couplets ($8.00 plus 1.50 shipping) may be ordered from him directly at: 220 Ninth Street Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215-3902, and we can think of no better use for such a small investment.



Two New Sections from A Gallery of Ethopaths

with illustrations by Bob Fisk

New Formalism is dying from decorum. I don't mean "decorum" in its correct rhetorical sense, which refers to the proper allocation of tone and diction to subject matter. I mean the kind of social decorum that is expected at a cocktail party in the Harvard Club. For some strange reason many poets who have championed the revival of metrics seem to think that a corollary to their task is a revival of the Victorian mindset, with all its quaint notions of propriety, decency, and schoolmarmish reticence. As a result a great deal of contemporary formalist poetry is anemically bland. Very little sex, and no salty language.

A partial explanation of this phenomenon lies in a larger American social problem—namely, the unspoken and unholy alliance of the prudish Religious Right and the prissy Feminist Left.  Like the Hitler-Stalin Pact, this marriage of convenience is one that left-liberals would prefer to forget.  But the alliance is real, and it is effective.  And it has had significant consequences for American linguistic habits, at least in the public sphere.

Our Midwestern Bible-thumpers hate salty language for religious reasons, and will quote you scriptural passages ad nauseam on the subject.  If you actually look at those passages, however, you will see that they are about swearing, cursing, and taking the Lord’s name in vain, and not about using what are politely called "four-letter words."  To swear is to take an oath; to curse is to call down evil on something; and to take God’s name in vain is to utter it disrespectfully or in a context that lacks reverence. But salty language? There isn’t anything in the Bible that says you can’t make generous use of George Carlin’s infamous seven vocables.

In the case of feminists, their objection to robust language has to do with a visceral rejection of anything that smells of male boisterousness or insensitivity, and is more a function of their white middle class status anxiety than anything political. Feminists are the true neo-Victorians in our society, a coterie of unpleasant little Orwellians who would dearly love to censor speech in the same way that they have wrecked pronoun usage. And together with their nominal enemies on the Religious Right, they are working assiduously to geld and denature public discourse in the United States.

In Book XXIV of the Iliad, the goddess Thetis advises her son Achilleus to forget his troubles by having casual sex. She says "It’s good to lie in lovemaking with a woman." A more up-to-date translation might be "It’s great to get laid." Would that sort of Homeric honesty fly in our overly decorous New Formalism? Probably not, if the Bible-thumpers and the feminists have anything to say about it.

The following two unpublished sections of A Gallery of Ethopaths are presented here, along with illustrations by the superb political cartoonist Bob Fisk, as a symbolic counterweight to this mésalliance of homegrown American crackpots. We cannot allow discourse, whether poetic or forensic or political, to be strangled by fanatics. Do you think otherwise? Then visit one of those hideous Third World tyrannies where the politicians will make you spend every waking hour thinking about what you can and cannot say.



Clean-Language Freaks

A boring sort of ethopath
Is one who’s seized by livid wrath
If you use "bad words" in his hearing.
He gets upset if talk goes veering
In a raw, obscene direction—
He’ll hit you with a stern correction,
And say that you must watch your tongue
And not throw vile words in among
The purer vocables of language.
His warning has an adder’s fang’s edge,
And I have not the slightest doubt
If you don’t stop he’ll punch you out.
You mostly find these prim-lipped clowns
In stupid little one-horse towns,
Or hamlets where some Baptist howler
Makes Sunday mornings even fouler
Telling folks how to dress and think.
There is a pretty solid link
Between the fans of Nice Clean Speech
And tendencies to gas and preach.
These puling, milksop moral lambs
Can’t stand the sound of hells and damns,
And if you say a word like shit
They’ll go into a holy fit
And blow their little moral stacks
And lambaste you with thumps and whacks.
Don’t dare to utter cunt or prick—
They’ll have your liver on a stick.
They even grab their birchen rod
If someone simply mentions God
(They think He should be called "The Lord"
In tones that are quite overawed.)
They cannot even be enticed
To say the name of Jesus Christ
Except when muttering a prayer
In rapturous devotion’s air.
These prissy, squeamish, tight-assed nerds
Who can’t abide four-letter words
Are lacking in the basic grit
That makes a man a mensch. A bit
Of blue-toned language spices life
And keeps one sharpened, like a knife
Ready to slash and cut and stab
Some dull opponent’s mental flab.
Plain language tells all gutless types
That you have got the balls and tripes
To say whatever you are thinking
While they are tied in knots and shrinking
From honest and forthright expression.
Their pallid speech is a confession
That they lack spunk and inner drive,
And hence their words are not alive.
Vapid twits who do not swear
Give off a tweedy, pious air
Like otherworldly English vicars
Who pass out at the sight of knickers.
But as for one who’s not averse
To belching out a raw-boned curse,
The arsenal of human speech
Is well within his grasp and reach.
His tongue’s a well-honed bayonet
Kept in its scabbard, safe, and yet
Quick to be bared when danger nears—
Liars and fools and sloganeers
Are terrorized by his tongue’s bite,
Its stinging lash, its will to smite.

Copyright © 2008 by Joseph S. Salemi
All Rights Reserved



The Dating Service

The modern world does not take chances—
We even regulate romances.
We don't trust Cupid's random dart
To pierce us with its burning smart.
Instead we ask a bunch of experts
To smooth our path to lively sex. Skirts
Aren't chased the way they once were.
Indeed, you'd be a total dunce, sir,
To use that antiquated means
For getting in a lady's jeans.
The process is no longer sleazy—
The businessmen have made it easy.
They've turned dating to a science.
A smoothly running new appliance
Couldn't function any better
To find a girl and help you get her.
Here's the way the system works
To guarantee your carnal perks.
Once past thirty, girls get nervous—
They sign up in a dating service
That promises to locate men
Who'll call them every now and then.
The girls hope that the men will wed them;
Most guys merely want to bed them.
They do one girl, and find a newer;
The average man's a serial screwer.
That's the basic situation:
Male lust, female desperation.
A girl is hungry for a beau—
The dating service knows it's so.
They charge the chick a hefty sum
And pair her with a jerk, a crumb,
A psychopath, a nerd, a cretin
Who then expects some heaving pettin'
On the first night that he meets her.
He doesn't even spring for pizza!
He's vile, disgusting, smelly, dull,
And brainless as a hollow skull.
His breath's atrocious, and his talk
Is raucous, like a mallard's squawk.
He rips her blouse and runs her hose,
And spatters semen on her clothes.
The girl's enraged, but still determined—
She tries again, and yet more vermin
Show up at her door unshaven,
Pock-marked, horny, or plain ravin'.
She tries once more. This time it's you
With suit and tie, and flowers too.
You escort her around the town.
You don't act like a selfish clown.
You treat her well, you buy her dinner—
In her eyes, you're a hands-down winner!
Suddenly the skids are greased—
Romantic chances are increased.
When girls meet a halfway decent
Guy, they think of their most recent
Date with some obnoxious boor.
And here you are—polite, mature,
Friendly, funny, sweet, unsweaty.
At that point, to Jane or Betty
You're a godsend and a blessing.
Pretty soon you're freely messing
With her hair, her cheek, her ear
And unhooking her brassiere.
The dating service triumphs nicely!
She gets what she wants precisely:
A man who's not a loathsome geek
With scabrous skin and body reek,
And you get free, untroubled mating
Without the cross of prolonged waiting.
A brilliant ploy for every fellow!
This service is a cheap bordello
That sets you up with some cute honey
And doesn't cost you tons of money.
Capitalism has it planned:
Let supply control demand.

Copyright © 2008 by Joseph S. Salemi
All Rights Reserved



La Nonna's Cracked Clay Jug
(La quartara ciaccata di la Nonna)

        Dura chiù na quartara ciaccata
        ca una sana.

        --Sicilian proverb

Whether it cradled wine with curved caress,
Whether it travelled daily to the well,
Whether it carried oil from the press,
Or stood as empty as a whitened shell,
This clay jug served to oversee and bless
La Nonna's kitchen, and just as a bell
Sings in its circled fullness, arching round,
The jug--in silence--still makes its own sound.

Nine decades since it turned upon the wheel
La Nonna's jug assumes a static role,
And scorns, in haughty honor, to conceal
From lip to base (as if from pole to pole)
A line that zigzags downward to reveal
A cracked jug will last longer than a whole.



Poetry Today

Since Baudelaire and Verlaine, the field has shrunk:
Mere feelings, hokum, moral cant, and whining.
In greater ages, poetry was drunk
On Bacchic dance, blood lust, occult divining,
The savagery of Swift, the wit of Byron,
Poe's death-wish, Dowson's pedophilic viols;
The obscene lisping of a sluttish siren
Formed Wilde and Swinburne's Dionysian styles.

No tawdry brothels now, nor spired cathedrals:
Just thatched mud huts for lemmings to call home--
Epiphanies of small, pathetic people
As pallid as a cracked and sunbleached bone.
Today verse wears the regulation dress
Of inoffensive bourgeois politesse.



The Missionary's Position

I maintain it all was for the best--
We hacked our way through jungle and sought out
These savage children, painted and half-dressed,
To set their minds at ease, and dispel doubt.

Concerning what? Why, God's immense design,
And how it governs all we do and see.
Before, they had no sense of the divine
Beyond the sticks and bones of sorcery.

Granted, they are more somber and subdued,
Knowing that lives are watched, and judged, and weighed.
Subject to fits of melancholy mood,
They look upon the cross, and are afraid.

What would you have me say? We preached the Word
Better endured in grief than left unheard.



The Lilacs on Good Friday

Tumult of noontide long ago dismissed--
The rent veil unremembered, and the sun
Relit, though shrouded in a new eclipse
Of rainswept sky. The garden seems to shun

That spectral agony of blood and bone;
Consigns itself instead to placid sleep
Untroubled as the moss upon a stone
And heedless while the three Marias weep.

Four decades' growth of lilac by this wall
Stretches its shallow spiral to the sky.
Clustering blossoms, soon to swell and fall,
Gather themselves like nimbuses on high

Out of my hand's grasp, yet I still can bend
The pliant osiers downward to my face,
And sniff the buds that already distend:
Late April lilacs, delicate as lace.

Unlike that rigid tree, untenanted,
And red with memory of three hours' grief,
The thornless lilacs summon up no dread,
Demand no witness. Flower, branch, and leaf

Are only what they are. They have no words
For us to ponder, though we sometimes feign
To speak for them, as augury of birds
Construes an omen of impending pain.

The book is shut, the candle snuffed, the bell
Rings the finale of a troubled day.
Did lilacs grace the garden where we fell,
Or scent Gethsemane? I bade you pray

And watch with me a little while this night--
Could you not watch one hour? The world's bereft
Of that which once gave stomach for a fight
Or certitude to vision. I have left

The Office of the Holy Cross unsung
But patient on the rubricated page:
Open my lips, O Lord, and let my tongue
Announce thy praises--in some other age.

Here in this garden how could it displease
To let the lilacs offer up my prayer--
Sweet censers that, when shaken by the breeze,
Scatter their fragrance in the evening air?

And in that garden where a sepulcher
New-hewn from rock awaits the mourners' tread,
Where cerecloths, unguent, aloes mixed with myrrh
Will soon enshroud the lacerated dead,

There is some solace from the thought of how
Late April lilacs, coming into bloom,
Shall dance the currents of the air, and bow
To shed their flowerets on an open tomb.

--from Formal Complaints



Dizain for the Lamia

     The lamia was a fabulous beast, half woman and half serpent, that
       lured men to their deaths through sexual temptation. The lamia
       emitted a hissing sound so soothing and seductive that men were
       irresistibly drawn to her.

Go to a charnel house, and enter in--
Curled in a corner sweetly hissing lies
The lamia, a female shaped for sin,
Who writhes a serpent's tail below her thighs.
Uncoiling to meet you, she will rise;
You cannot move, transfixed by that dull hum.
Her scented breasts invite delirium;
Hope's lost in the profusion of her hair--
Those dead grey eyes say one word only: Come!
Her kiss is lethal. But you hardly care.

--from Formal Complaints



The Bones of the Armenians

Son of man, can these bones live?
--Ezekiel, 37:3

Not the trump of Gabriel, nor the tumult
Stirred up by a clamorous resurrection
Can awaken bones from that desert nightmare's

  Prodigal torment.

Not the prayers from myriad begging voices,
Solemn penance chanted by dirging fathers
In atonement's chorus of expiation

  Cleanses the blood-guilt.

Neither screaming pleas of a gang-raped mother,
Nor the pistol shots to the heads of children
Rouse them out of somnolence. Nothing serves to

  Summon avengers.

Just the dumb remembrance and silent breathing
Of those few survivors who still can picture
1915's Golgotha, red with murder,

  Waiting for answers.

Published in First Things



In One Ear

In the Strand I picked up a little
profligate wretch and gave her sixpence.
       James Boswell, London Journal,
        4 June 1763

Boswell listened, Johnson talked.
Then the Scotsman went and walked
London's alleyways and mews
Seeking trollops from the stews.
All that weighty, sage advice
From the Doctor, without price,
Never made the slightest dent
On a youth whose natural bent
Drew him towards the rankest sluts--
Brains were trumped by churning guts.
Such are humans. At the best
We may listen, be impressed,
Marvel at sagacious wit--
Then go act as we see fit.
Mind and will stay far apart;
Reason does not touch the heart;
Impulse shatters logic's chain;
Argument goes down the drain.
Aristotle's books slam shut
When we are in heat or rut.

Published in The Formalist



Calligraphy Lesson from a Chinese Student

She took my hand and showed me how to coax
The inkstone gently, to release black swirls
Into a well of water. Soon smooth strokes
Of badger brush--held upright--laid out twirls
And streaks of meaning. "Here I make the sign
For teacher," she said, smiling as she drew
A character, precise in every line,
And glistening with fresh wetness. I said, "You
Are now the teacher, and I am a student."
She made me no reply, but then extended
The brush in offering, as though impudent
Forwardness on her part had offended.
I laughed, refused, and urged her to go on
She smiled again, the chill of distance gone.



A Martian in Michigan Sends a Message Home

American folk are the dutiful sort
Who never would nurture a renegade thought.
Their minds move about in some well-travelled ruts;
They think with their glands and their gonads and guts.
They cannot see reason; they cannot make sense--
They're sure disagreement just proves you are dense.
They only know how to exhort and to preach
And pass regulations to govern your speech.
They gossip, drive cars, and consume franks and beans,
And haven't a clue as to what it all means.

Published in The Formalist



An Academy Painter Judges the Impressionists

Impressionists? Their palettes are ablaze
With upstart colors heretofore unseen.
The lack of expert drafting makes for haze
And blurring in their polychromic scheme:
Puce, lemon, antique rose, and tangerine;
Cinnabar shading into umber hints;
Streaks of a velvet peridotal green
Speckled with azure flecks and ruby tints.
Sienna strokes are stabbed with yellow glints
Of golden fire, while a violet hue
Bleeds into ochre patches; orange sprints
In flashes across lilac and soft blue.
Not unexpected--once you banish line
Color runs riot like an unpruned vine.

Published in The Formalist