What are we going to do with Jim Ciletti?
In his new collection of poems, Sunfire, he writes in an almost old-fashioned way—that is, with emotion. Naked emotion. He can’t put pen to paper unless something, as Auntie Emily would say, has taken the top of his head off. This can make for some sloppy verse—though almost always sloppy in a good way, like eating a big slice of watermelon bare-handed.
Remember William Carlos Williams’s plum poems, “This Is Just to Say” (12 short lines) and “To a Poor Old Woman” (15 short lines)? Well, Jim—I have to call him Jim because he’s an old friend—must have run his crafty eye along the smooth contours of the Williams poems and said to himself, This man never tasted plums the way I taste them!, and then sat down to celebrate his particular experience of plums. The 28 sensuous lines of his “Ode to a Ripe Plum” are delicious, even—or especially—when he’s onomatopoeticizing (“Ssssssslllllllllpp,” he tells us. “Slobber if you must…”). Here, as elsewhere in Sunfire, language becomes a kind of Silly Putty, shaped by bodily pleasure, sensational (in the root sense of the word) past all thought.
Among the many delights in this book are rhapsodies in praise of all kinds of food (life is not simply a bowl of plums, after all), including but not limited to: tangerines, peaches, onions, Italian omelets, bread, cheese melts, tomatoes, and Don Garlic (capo di tutti capi of the Onion Family). Beside these ecstatic praise-songs Jim places a number of heartfelt love poems to his wife Mary and exalted evocations of landscape. My favorite of the latter is “Colorado Prairie with the Best of Miles Davis,” a poem that—characteristically for this poet—combines a variety of modes: the ode (to a landscape), the polemic (against developers of the land), and the meditation (on the inadequacy of the mirror art holds up to nature). These, as Wallace Stevens wrote in another context, are merely instances.
I mentioned earlier that Jim is an old friend. The advantage this connection gives me is that I hear Jim’s voice in every line of his work. It is beyond description, and attaching the adjectives that leap to mind—warm, intelligent, funny, sly, dreamlike, etc.—will mean nothing to anyone who hasn’t had the privilege of hearing Jim speak. I once tried to capture his voice in a poem—a rather poor poem, as it turns out: one I never tried to publish. But I offer it here—ripped from the headlines of a gone era—in the hope that it may woo a reader or three to give Sunfire a try. The occasion was a gathering of poets at Moordale Ranch near Bailey, Colorado, back—i.e., thirty plus years ago—when the Poets-in-the-Schools program was flourishing in our state and the Vulcans had yet to crush public support for the Arts:
A Private Reading
Attentive, we sprawl
near the popping hearthwood,
sput of hot resins under
black, splitting bark. Your
poem comes: moth-grey words
flutter like empty hands
into the blue flame of your
voice, around which our
hearing huddles—
their wings burn green
and henna, blaze primrose,
crimson and plum. You breathe
hundreds into our bodies,
our chests swell like
ripening pods. Then
the poem bursts and we
break open: our new hearts
are glowing coals, fire
seeds planted in grey ash,
among charred bones. We say
nothing. From the hearth,
up through the chimney,
the pinewood smoke grows
slowly toward the full moon.
Believe me, I did not notice until this moment, but there is one of Jim’s plums in the fire!