Carlo Parcelli is a poet living in the Washington DC area. He has six books of poetry including ‘The Canaanite Gospel’, ‘Newton’s Scalder Prophesies the End of the World and Other Poems’ and ‘Canis Ictus in Exsilium’. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. But mostly he loves to perform.
BE: On your website you referred to yourself as a “Poet Vaudevillian”. Are you primarily a satirist, entertainer or poet?
CP: All three as regards the Canaanite Gospel. The website is my vain attempt to get gigs – readings. But I’ve never been very astute at promoting myself. Witness – Vaudeville is dead.
(Sample Canaanite Gospel here.)
For the first 35 years of my poetic life, I wrote in Ezra Pound’s Canto style where the balance was tenuous between Phanopoeia, Logopoeia and Melopoeia. I wrote thousands of lines in the Canto style. The poems are long and referentially and intellectually ambitious. I had a strong reputation as one who could write in this difficult style. Roxana Prada, President of the Ezra Pound Society and editor of Make It New, wrote that I was like a “shark” in that I and my poetry seemed to never rest. Another critic compared it to John Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ always probing.
As I’ve said elsewhere, my mentor at the University of Maryland was Rudd Fleming who translated Greek drama with Pound when the poet was incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital here in Washington DC. Rudd thought my early style was suited to the Cantos. Working in such a highly referential form, I read widely.
Though I had some initial success, my first book, Three Antiphonies appeared in 1976, few publishers were interested in long ‘intellectually transgressive’ works. Cultural transgression as exemplified by the Beats or the Confessional movements was in vogue in poetry. But, for all the rhetoric to the contrary, the iconoclastic ‘intellect’ was held in disrepute in America, a line of thinking fostered both by the materialism of corporate culture and the forces that combated it. America just had to loosen up. It didn’t have to die.
The Canto style was indeed most amenable to my poetic project of exploring western philosophy and poetics spearheaded by philosophical approaches to experimental quantum paradoxes. The poetics of Charles Olson was aphoristically central in this regard. For example, his ‘field theory resembled the quantum conundrums found in ‘position/momentum’ paradox in sub-atomic physics.
But I quickly became concerned with the ‘scientific method’ itself specifically the mathematization/quantification of ‘reality’ especially the late Renaissance/Enlightenment acceleration of it.
My concern from the beginning veered toward the apocalyptic. The most obvious development was nuclear weapons. But gradually other scientific technologies, ones associated with ‘progress’ and progressive thinking began to ratchet up my concerns. Now, we have global climate change. Why bother about the mechanism destroying the planet if that mechanism is so rooted in the dominant, western epistemology that no matter the operator’s intentions the resultant solution will be inherently Apocalyptic.
So I was looking to move on even though it was obvious if that canard Jesus ever did dare come back, he’d be playing to an empty house.
I was the poetry editor of a literary magazine called FlashPoint . One of our favorite poets was the Welsh/English poet/engraver David Jones. One of our staff members, the 20thcentury poetry scholar, Professor Brad Haas was a member of the David Jones Society.
It just so happened that Georgetown University here in Washington DC was bequeathed a huge collection of Jones material. The Jones scholars gathered here in DC for a 3 day symposium where it was decided that we would publish the papers being delivered.
In the process of ‘editing’ the papers, I was energized to re-read much of Jones’ poetry. In a collection of ‘fragments’ called ‘Sleeping Lord’ Jones’ speaker is a Roman principalis. I always loved that voice. So I wrote a monologue along its style. It’s the first Severenus monologue in the Canaanite Gospels.
Eventually the work became the Canaanite Gospel with its 67 or so ‘voices’ all dealing with events surrounding Judea/Perea in 33AD.
BE: What was your primary reason for writing the “Canaanite Gospel” and how are people reacting to it?
CP: The primary reason for writing the Canaanite Gospel was to abandon the Canto style which I had exhausted and had exhausted me. Also, there was the opportunity to utilize the voice Jones established in his two poems, ‘The Fatigue” and ‘The Wall’. But more importantly, I wanted the monologues to serve as an allegory for all empires especially the US imperialist empire which heavily resembles the brutal Roman version and its denouement.
This is where the swearing and the racist slang come in – both intimate facts of the language of empire and the clash of cultures it heightens. Empire ain’t pretty and neither are the Canaanite Gospels. This also helps to keep my readership down for as T.S. Eliot says in the Four Quartets, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” -especially, poetry’s ‘humankind’.
As for reaction, I sent out about 200 invitations when I premiered the CG monologues. About 17 people, mostly old friends, came. After my hour and a half performance of 12 of the monologues, Gene Rosenthal who owns Adelphi Records offered me a recording contract. Now Gene is also the guy who released Patrick Skye’s “Songs That Made America Famous”. I was proud that Gene liked the monos after all he had had the guts to record Skye’s Luang Prabang. It seemed like good fit.
Another friend in publishing wanted to publish the CG. But nothing came of either project and Mark Kuniya and his Country Valley Press ended up publishing them in 2012.
Rosalie and I went to at least 100 open mics flogging the Gospels. Generally they were very well received especially by people who despised poetry. No one dosed off. No one was bored. Bars were the best. Patrons felt entertained by the humor AND the pathos – read Gesmas. The characters are real, not sentimentalized puppets rushing toward a two line sentimental bathos.
I got to do my ‘intellectual transgression’ thing in an atmosphere that was entertaining for much of the audience and me. And I loved performing.
The ‘heavy’ accent as you call it, is my version of East End cockney. David Jones uses it in his epic poem ‘In Parenthesis’. This is all explained in the introduction to mark Kuniya’s publication of the Gospels. Also, I’ve tried to train my ear to Elizabethan prosody. It’s so much richer than any of the shit we spout now.
Of course, with such ‘controversial material’ there are back stories galore; the city councilman who a decade after still raves about a performance of mine he attended.
There’s the crowd that stared at me with grim hostility when I performed ‘Lazarus’. Turns out the jazz guitarist I was billed with was also a Deacon in his Baltimore church. So when Jesus says to his Uncle Lazarus “Don’ talks ta me maw like that, you fuckin’ lushy’ or ‘If he’s resurrect where the fuck is he’ for a moment things got tense. But it was a great experience. I got to feel what Lenny Bruce or Dick Gregory felt when they did their more risky bits.
Sometimes I was flat out banned. A Christian biker bar outside of Annapolis proved inappropriate. I also was blocked from the stage at the Bossa Bistro round robin performance in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington DC. I did the ‘Gesmas’ mono and then was physically blocked from retaking the stage.
This is notable because the MC was Shahid Bhuttar, the same who ran against Nancy Pelosi for the democratic nomination for Congress and is one of the country’s premier FIRST AMENDMENT, FREE SPEECH attorneys.
Now, I know it wasn’t the government suppressing my speech, but still I couldn’t help feel that I was on to something when I got the bum’s rush from that bar with Bhuttar just letting it happen. No hard feelings. Shahid is a good man.
There are dozens of other stories arising from experiences around the Canaanite Gospels and the more recent monologues of which there are legion with titles like ‘Henry Colburn Writes His Solicitor Concerning the True Authorship of ‘The Vampyre’’ or ‘Satan’s Imp in Milton’s Ear’ or ‘Jonathan Swift’s Letter to his Friend. Alexander Pope, Upon Lady Montagu’s Rejection of the Latter’s Protestations of Love’ which left a crowd of amateur poets slack jawed in a motel conference room in Darnestown Maryland.
BE: Who are some of the poets who have influenced you?
CP: Homer, Dante, James Joyce, Virgil, Hipponax, Sophocles, Ovid, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Pope, Swift, John Wilmot, Holderlin, Catullus, John Milton, Villon, Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Mel Tolson, Charles Olson, David Jones.
But since my work, especially my earlier work is so heavily referential other influences include Adorno and Horkheimer, Hans Blumenberg, Bruno, Hegel, Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Turing, Godels. Bohr, Heisenberg, Paul Feyerabend, Smedley Butler, Francis Jennings, Richard Drinnon, Noam Chomsky, Lenny Bruce.
Negative influences include John von Neumann, Nietzsche, Willard van Orman Quine, La Mettrie, Leibniz, Descartes, Karl Popper, Edward Bernays, Philip Larkin, Walt Whitman, Allen Dulles, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Nobert Wiener, Marvin Minsky etc. ad nauseam.
BE: What bugs you about the poetry/poets of today?
CP: Their lack of ambition in and for the work itself. No interest in keeping an audience awake. Poetry that looks for nothing more than self-affirmation. Reliance on feeling, sentimentality.
Dominant poetic paradigms that exclude outsider work. The CG flies in the face of current literary thought that the best poetry is written at elite institutions. There, I just made the ghosts of Pound, Eliot and Byron laugh.
BE: What are some of your greatest accomplishments?
CP: Predicting the global apocalypse of climate change THROUGH POETRY. Being on the right side of history when it came to the Vietnam War, Iran Contra, the Gulf Wars etc., Seeing America for the murderous, imperialist, bloody shithole that it is. Turning down an invitation to meet the Dali Lama. Being named Beat Poet Laureate for Maryland.
BE: Any advice for young aspiring poets?
CP: Don’t let your resume be your best poem.
