Saturday, May 26, 2007

FRANK POLITE

I mentioned in a recent post that poet Steve Shrader passed away in February.

Now I just learned that another poet I first met at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop c. 1966-67 died a few years ago: Frank Polite.

Steve was a few years younger than me, but better educated at the time, and I learned a lot from him. I never saw him again after the late 1960s and a few readings we did together here and there.

He ended up in Hawaii, where as I understand it he taught and continued to write.

Frank was another story. He was a few years older than me, an Italian-American working-class guy, who I think was also a Navy veteran. His poetry was already published in such prestigious places as The New Yorker and Poetry magazine.

A lot of it was more sophisticated than what I was doing, but he had one poem similar to my stuff, called “Tossing Cats Off the Watertower,” about a childhood friend named, “Johnny Garbagelli.”

Frank encouraged me, and at the same time helped keep me from taking the whole workshop experience too seriously. I was overwhelmed by the opportunities to learn, after my own more than four years in the service, and coming from very little higher education. Frank was just what I needed to not only feel at home but to cut through the pretensions of academia.

I was sorry to hear he had died, from fellow poet and Iowa graduate Bob Berner, but was also grateful for the poem Bob shared with me that he wrote in tribute to Frank and sent to Frank’s widow. So I share it here with those of you who knew Frank, and for those of you who didn’t to maybe get a better take on who he was:

Letter To Dorothea

O tell me that my sweet dear Franco Poletti,
Renowned Italian director
Who longed to film the levitation
Of an entire building
At the University of Iowa,
Whose Carmen Miranda is still dancing,
Whose bush pilot still flies the wilds of Alyeshka,
Whose sad Lawrence Talbot still seeks a cure,
Who immortalized a kid with a name—
Johnny Garbaggelli—
That by itself would guarantee he’d be remembered,
Is not dead.

Or, if he has received
His letters of transit
To that other realm
For which there is no round-trip ticket,
That he dine this night
With his revered Dante,
The two terza-riming until dawn,
Toasting forever
Their Dorothea and Beatrice,
Muses unmatched
This side of paradise.

Frank Polite, In Memoriam

3 comments:

Lally said...

Bob Berner who wrote the tribute to Frank Polite sent me an e mail when he had trouble leaving a comment on the post, so I thought I'd copy and paste it here:

What I wanted to say was 1) thanks for posting my poem and that 2) Frank once told me he was sure he wasn't Italian but that he was Etruscan because, according to him, the Etruscans were not warriors and imperialists like the Romans but singers and musicians, and 3) that Frank was one of the sweetest people I've ever known.
And I hope that your posting will broaden the audience for Frank's poems.
Love and La Bamba,
Bob

Curtis Faville said...

When I was casting around to solicit work for my little magazine L in the early 1970's, I learned that Frank Polite, who had published a great little poem in Poetry (Chicago) -- something about "punish/squash" (in New England), had been an Iowa Workshop attendee a few years earlier than I had (1969-1972), but I had no contacts for him. I asked Marvin Bell, then, who had a little black book with lots of addresses. He said his last contact entry for Polite had been a "Poste Restante" somewhere in Greece. It sounded a little romantic, perhaps like Leonard Cohen, James Merrill, Jack Gilbert, or John Fowles, et al. I think I thought that Polite must be a Greek name--hah! Etruscan, indeed!

There was another name, then, too, Harold Bond, an Armenian "gimpy" (as Harry Duncan called him), who I was able to reach and get a poem from.

Funny, about editing. You see work by someone and then the work they give you is completely different from what you wanted (or thought you wanted). The people acquire an altered significance thereby.

Then, 40 years later, you learn about the intervening decades of living, and finally death. The story truncates into an elegaic fact. Why am I curious about this stuff?

Anonymous said...

I took a poetry class from Frank sometime in the 70's at Youngstown State, in Ohio. One of the most memorable classes from my time there. Frank was a sweetheart and a true artist. I just found this blog post 12 years after it was written. It's a rainy day here in Texas and I was feeling a little low, thought about Frank and his poems and looked him up. I knew he had passed, but am happy to see that his influence lives on in other poets and artists.