Vincent Ferrini Papers Finding Aid - CAM Library & Archives Digital Collections

Creator:	Vincent Ferrini
Dates:	1932-2007
Quantity:	31.5 linear feet (35 containers, 83 manuscripts, 250 books/pamphlets)
Acquisition:	Accession #: 2000.46 ; Donated by: Vincent Ferrini (Further detail in ‘Acquisition Note’)
Identification:	A16 ; Archive Collection #16
Citation:	[Document Title]. The Vincent Ferrini Papers, [Box #, Folder #, Item #], Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives, Gloucester, MA.
Copyright:	Requests for permission to publish material from this collection should be addressed to the Librarian/Archivist.
Language:	English
Finding Aid:	Peter J. Brown, 2001-2003.

This finding aid represents a preliminary description of the papers and letters of Gloucester poet and philosopher Vincent Ferrini, (1913 - 2006). Additional materials and their subsequent sorting will continue in the future as we receive them. Addenda to the finding aid will be included as needed. Ferrini’s personal library, also held in part by the Cape Ann Historical Association, is not described as part of the papers but should be regarded by researchers as an important primary source.

Vincent Ferrini, who has been called “the last surviving Proletarian Poet” (according to George F. Butterick in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 48: American Poets, 1880-1945, quoting Walter Lowenfels), was born in the shoe-factory town of Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1913, the son of a sometimes-employed shoemaker and his wife who had emigrated from Italy in 1909. His childhood was a tough one; a baby sister was killed in her high chair by an exploding stove, and Ferrini, sitting next to her, was seriously injured. As a youth, he was actively discouraged from writing poetry by a high school English teacher to whom he had shown his verses. His father, too, discouraged him, telling the boy that he came from the wrong social class to be a poet.

Ferrini took a series of jobs unrelated to writing, including a nine-year stint at a General Electric plant in his hometown beginning in 1941. However, he continued to write and read during his free time. His early poetry was protest writing. His first book, written in the late 1930’s and published in 1941, was No Smoke, a study of the people and scenes of Lynn, which Butterick compares to Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Given the time and place, the central subject of the book is the dismal, impoverished life of the inhabitants of a factory town. Ferrini’s second book, the 1943 Injunction, reflects the historical shift to wartime factory production on the home front. Butterick, who calls Ferrini “the authentic representative of the industrial worker, one of the most perfect examples of the proletarian poet possible,:: singles out the final poem, “Talking Tenements,” for praise. As well, praise came from Depression novelist Mike Gold, who called the book “genuine as a soldier’s wound or a row of stamping machines.” Critic David Daiches, writing in the New Republic, found “skill and effectiveness” in many individual lines, though he complained of a lack of closure in the poems. Pearl Strachan, in the Christian Science Monitor, found the work to be “provocative” and “food for thought.” Poetry reviewer Leo Kennedy, commenting about the poems’ fierce energy, wrote that Ferrini “has an astonishing facility for making successful poems about workaday institutions… Ferrini thinks clearly about himself and other American working stiffs, and about what there is in it for them, and the words mostly fit the thought with the clarity and emphasis of a bursting grenade.”

Ferrini continued in the proletarian vein until 1949. Shortly thereafter he moved from Lynn to Gloucester, Massachusetts. In that year, he met the poet Charles Olson, who had sought him out after reading one of Ferrini’s poems. Ferrini came under Olson’s influence, and the two men formed a tempestuous but enduring friendship. In the books Sea Sprung (1949) and The Infinite People (1950), Ferrini celebrated the sights, sounds, and individuals of the seaside community of Gloucester, often in short, imagistic lines. The “special charm” of this middle period of Ferrini’s work, according to Butterick (in comments in connection with the 1952 The House of Time), “is Ferrini’s ability to achieve mastery through mystery, and mystery through simplicity.”

The 1950’s and 1960’s continued to be years of literary experimentation for Ferrini. An unprovoked literary attack by Olson in Letter V of the Maximus Poems caused Ferrini to become a public figure, and therefore, ironically, to be recognized by a larger segment of the reading public. Ferrini took a forgiving stance, and the two men resumed their friendship. The 1950’s and 1960’s were also times of personal change for Ferrini. In the latter decade, his first marriage ended, his second began, and his youngest child, Deirdre, died of leukemia at age sixteen.

When Olson died in 1970, it may have contributed to Ferrini’s emergence into a third period of his work, one in which social and personal preoccupations were combined. According to Butterick, Ferrini was now free to become “the poet of Gloucester, the Dante of his city, and to create a new world of authority about himself.” He became an active participant in the civic life of Gloucester, and sometimes worked with local artists on the visual aspect of the production of his books. He became, as Butterick puts it, a “psychic explorer,” for whom “heart cries give way to multiple mysteries aching for definition.” Ferrini’s Selected Poems, published in 1976, gained him still more readers. As Daniel L. Guillory deemed in a Library Journal review of Selected Poems, Ferrini had become “a visionary celebrant of the mystic sea and stars, albeit one who hasn’t lost his keen perception” of the world’s economic pain. Connie Fletcher, assessing the volume for Booklist, emphasized the earlier social protest poetry, which she claimed had been “too long neglected,” and found the snapshots of shabby street characters “startling.” A Choice reviewer, commenting on Ferrini’s distinct progress through a series of artistic stages, commented that the poet had “escaped[d] categorizing at last.” While admitting the poet’s didactic tendencies, the reviewer added that “he has toughness in him and some first-rate poetry … in many of him poems Ferrini exhibits both the wrath and tenderness associated with Blake.”

Ferrini spoke for himself in the form of prose in the 1988 autobiography Hermit of the Clouds: The Autobiography of Vincent Ferrini. Critiquing the book in the American Book Review, poet Paul Metcalf called the sections on Olson particularly well written; as a whole, he termed the autobiography a “lovely book.” Peter S. Kidd, a reviewer for Small Press Review, found the chapter on Deirdre “the best piece of writing in the book.” Kidd found the book’s lack of linear narrative to be a weakness, but called the work as a whole, “a bony little book, insightful, not brooding, easy to read.”

At that point, Ferrini had begun publishing his magnum opus, the multi-volume poem Know Fish, a substantial study of Gloucester and its people. Individual sections were markedly distinct from one another: the second section of the first volume is written in Italian-American dialect, while another section consists entirely of letters to an editor. Reviewing the third volume, which was subtitled The Community of Self and included Books IV and V, Terry Kennedy of Small Press Review gushed, “Not since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson has an American poet so successfully expressed the universal themes of love, death, and immortality with such passionate personal feeling. The result is a mystical directness comparable to that found in the work of William Blake. There are some that would say Ferrini is Blake reincarnated!” It was rewarding praise indeed for a poet of perseverance, whom Butterick called “a model of endurance.” Ferrini, according to Butterick, had produced “a perfect handful of honest and enduring poems,” and had successfully transmuted himself from angry protester to sensitive mystic without giving up the positive traits of his former role.

The Magi Image was published in 1995 and heralded as a poetic diagram of the conveyance of the unio mystica (mystical union) from Persia to Gloucester. The Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion by W.L. Reese, defines unio mystica as “the mystical experience in which the soul of man is said to enter into union with God.” Kenneth Warren, writing in House Organ, related that Ferrini “uses the natural phenomena of Gloucester to further the enactment of myth in daily living.” Having no academic or “modernist” credentials, Warren asserted that Ferrini instead provides us with his “sharp tongue raised heavenward [and] prepared in simple measures.” Warren felt that Ferrini was, at the age of eighty-five, searching for the extreme within the lines of The Magi Image, the definitive place for his work, as he neared the time of his own death.

Vincent Ferrini died December 24, 2006

Biographical Note