DolceVito• Show poetry

Okay, there’s no such place as Illinois, Italy. What that means is that I was born and raised in Italy. That makes me a 6.4” Italian American with fair skin and light hair—an oddity in my old country and a puzzle in my new, the USA. People say, “You don’t look Eyetalian….You look more Irish than Eyetalian.”

Like most Italian Americans, I enjoy opera and all type of music, and, as a particular mood dictates, I will listen to any song, from classical to hip-hop.

I began writing after reading “Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes. Writing always was and is my passion, but, to put lasagna on the table, I had to work many years as a heavy construction laborer—you know the type—one who may shout catcalls at women jogging several miles away from the construction site

My views about life are as follows: Eat it, absorb it, learn from it; else you die, in body and in spirit.

Some of my favorite authors:

Joseph Conrad
Henry David Thoreau
D. H. Lawrence
Ernest Hemingway
Joyce Carol Oates
Raymond Carver
Flannery O’Connor
Franz Kafka
James Joyce
Edgar Allen Poe
Robert Frost
Emily Dickenson
And my all-time vaforite Dave Barry

As far as poetry goes, I prefer writing narrative, free verse poems, though I’ll do rhyme if it’s a humorous poem or if the poem is a blues. In my opinion, there are too many abstractions, bad rhyme and irregular meter in contemporary poetry. That is not to say that I’m a meter guru myself; I swallowed my metrical feet long ago. What it means is that contemporary poets are paying less attention to bounce, rhythmic flow, etc. Rhythmic narrative is, to me, the best way of conveying truthful language—emphasis is on emotional story-telling rather than on rhyme or close-metering.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“I was the best I ever had.”
—Woody Allen
“I’m a good housekeeper, darling; whenever I get divorced, I keep the house.”
—Zsa Zsa Gabor
“Whatever you can do, or believe you can, begin it.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“An old man is a nasty thing.”
—Ernest Hemingway