The Fat Man Arpeggios

By Pellegrino D'Acierno

In The Fat Man Arpeggios, Pellegrino D'Acierno presents a ludic portrait of the Fat Man -- a metaphysical dandy and “foolosopher” -- who voices, through the lightness of arpeggios, his existential and amorous dilemmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771830096

Book preview

PELLEGRINO D’ACIERNO

The

Fat Man

Arpeggios

with illustrations by

Lucio Pozzi

and with a preface by

Frank Lentricchia

GUERNICA - ESSENTIAL POETS SERIES 228

Toronto • Buffalo • Lancaster (U.K.)

2014

Contents

Preface by Frank Lentricchia

I. The Fat Man dreams of thin writing

II. Alba transiting in whispers into aurora . . .

III. After the gorgeous adagios of mid-morning

IV. Sleeplessness is the only infinity

V. The Fat Man, a fierce music-lover,

VI. In the magnetic dream of the odalisque

VII. In the nightmare of the aphasia-man,

VIII. The Fat Man has refused the book

IX. Ensconced in the Garbo strip

X. The buzz from one Old Cuban too many

XI. The Fat Man cuts a fine figure on the dance floor.

XII. Be advised, dear beholder,

XIII. Those that dream of him say of the Fat Man

XIV. Distracted and abstracted

XV. In the dream of the thousand and one nights

XVI. ’Round Midnight

XVII. The death of the dandy

XVIII. Yet once more:

XIX. For the Fat Man

XX. Masking his anticipation

XXI. As the old dream books prognosticate

XXII. In the dream

XXIII. The Fat Man’s cocaine:

XXIV. In the dream of the false steps that begins

XXV. In the dream of a cyclical night

XXVI. The Fat Man

XXVII. After the two rounds

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Illustrator

Copyright

Preface

THE PUBLICATION of Pellegrino D’Acierno’s extravagantly original volume of poems—with illustrations by the incomparable Lucio Pozzi—deserves and demands praise that is simultaneously extravagant and true. I have seen no single book (or corpus) of poetry in contemporary poetry written in English that can stand with The Fat Man Arpeggios. By contemporary poetry I mean poetry since the death, in 1956, of Wallace Stevens. D’Acierno is Stevens’ best heir, as Wordsworth was Milton’s. In other words, a loyal son who honors the father’s imagination while, at the same time, honoring the father’s deepest humanity, which hopes nothing for the son except that he prove the father’s originality by achieving, as D’Acierno does, his own.

The vein of Stevens exploited, then extended onto new literary terrain, is the Stevens of Harmonium. Recall Stevens’ exotic and occasionally erotic diction there, his wildness of language, and you will be prepared to read D’Acierno’s wildness vividly grounded in the world’s body and more erotic and available than Stevens, whose home made allegories of the senses are often difficult of access. In a word, D’Acierno’s radical writing is readable.

Like the Sicilian wonder, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who burst upon the literary scene after many years of silence, with his late masterpiece, The Leopard, D’Acierno’s creative burst (he has published importantly as a scholar) comes after the middle of his journey. We give ourselves the favor of historical insight by recalling that if Yeats had died at 50 and Stevens in his mid-50s, we would know