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Frank
Paino
Poet
Like
the young Keats and Shelley, whose work inspired Frank Paino
to begin writing poems in the mid-1980s while still an undergraduate
at Baldwin-Wallace College near Cleveland, Paino (pronounced
Pye-EE-no) found a compelling and powerfully authentic voice
early. Within only three or four years, at the same age at
which John Keats was writing “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
and “Ode to Autumn,” Paino's work was beginning
to turn up in anthologies of strong new American writing like
The Pushcart Prize XV: Best of the Small Presses (1990)
and New American Poets of the 90's (1991) and such
nationally respected journals as The Iowa Review, Spoon
River Quarterly, Crazyhorse, and the
Missouri Review, where “Horse Latitudes” won
the prestigious Tom McAfee Discovery Feature in poetry (1991).
When
Paino's first collection, The Rapture of Matter, was
published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center
in 1991, poet Paula Rankin wrote that it was “almost
impossible, reading these poems, to believe they are the ingredients
of a first book. So wise, so full of experience and concrete
details, they hook us, as few early poems do, into sitting
up half the night, rereading. There is no doubt in my mind
that Paino is already one of America's best poets.” Paino's
work was subsequently included in the important anthology
American Poetry: The Next Generation, edited by Gerald
Costanzo and Jim Daniels (Carnegie-Mellon University Press,
2000).
With
good reason. Novelist Roger Weingarten has spoken of a “riveting
narrative gift” and “hellbent. . .gattling-gun ear”
and poet Richard Jackson has noted Paino's “infinitely
tender hand.” The citation accompanying the Cleveland
Arts Prize, awarded in 1992, recognized not only a distinctive
voice, but an impressive “command of the poet's craft.”
However, it was Paino's poetic vision that drew the most enthusiastic
praise. “In an age in which ancient myths and traditional
formulations of great spiritual truths have lost, for many,
their power to convince and to persuade,” read the award,
“you have shown us in the powerful and vivid language
of your poems that we still long for truths that do not pale
in the light of what we know, or deny that hard-won knowledge.”
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decision to reject a Catholic upbringing that taught,
Paino said in a documentary video made for the Arts Prize
ceremony, “that you can't be both spiritual and sexual,”
had led to a vigorous re-exploration of the religious
imagery of that tradition-from Saint Sebastian thicketed
with arrows to “Saint Theresa's Ecstasy.” In
Paino's second collection, Out of Eden (1997),
the poet brings the same sensibility to portraits of such
anti-saints as Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan,
and Virginia Woolf, while a Cleveland teacher perishing
in the 1908 Collinwood School Fire experiences a Pentecost-like
revelation of the meaning of her life. “We/will never
turn back toward any paradise where there/is no fire,”
writes the poet in “Desire,” “and we have
nothing, nothing to lose.” |
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Variously
described as “passionate,” “edgy,” “fervent,”
“seductive,” and “heretical,” Paino's
best poems are sublime collisions of the erotic and the spiritual,
the poignancy of death and the redemptive power of the human
spirit. Poems like “What the Heart Tells Us” and
“The Wisdom of the Body” reconfirm for us that our
bodies, and all living things, are holy; that love is rooted
in our sense of our own impermanence and the loveliness of
the finite; and that love, whatever form it takes, is beautiful.
Several
of Paino's most affecting poems deal with the ultimate mystery:
death. Several concern the painful death from cancer in 1990
of the poet's father, Francesco (Frank) Paino, an eminent
and well-loved physician who had been instrumental in establishing
both the intensive care unit and cardiac surgery program at
Fairview General Hospital on Cleveland's southwest side. "The
Truth" pictures him, unhooked finally from life support, seeming
to "hesitate between two/worlds, the way a child learning
to swim glances from/a parent's hand to the pool's blue-green
shimmer, then back/again. . .as if, already, he were looking
back/at us from some vast distance."
In
another poem, Paino suddenly recalls him shoveling out the
driveway on a snowy morning, "the muted/huff of metal striking
snow like a gasp. . . ." It is in the earnestness of our lives
in their brevity, the poet seems to be saying, and the way
we touch one another, that we can find our redemption.
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Pieta
So
much for the angel with a voice like fat spoons of wild
honey.
So much for the dove who opened his coral beak
against
the tender flesh of her right ear and brought forth
a
globe of blood, bright and heavy as a pomegranate seed.
It
is not only gods and men who fall in love
with
flight. And she was not afraid, only tired of the petty
arguments
of virgins who hugged the slim air between
their
hips and dreamed of being chosen while she yanked
the
tails off lizards which clung to the well’s cracked
sides
those
eternal, fiery afternoons. What else would she
have
said to the angel whose name sounded like a sigh, or
somewhere
succulent and cool, when he pressed his dusky face
against
the plane of her breast and plucked, as if it were
a
stringed instrument, the shredded hem of her favorite
dress?
Thirty-three years she spent in silence, her husband
caressing
satiny chests of sweet cedar in his workshop,
her
strange son perfecting illusions beneath the olives'
leathery
leaves-water to wine, wine to blood hooked from his
own
thick veins, while she listened to the hot wind murmur
never across the dusty floor, each moment strung
together
like
whispered threats which lead to this. A mother. A son
in
the cradle of her arms, and broken. Fiat. Not
what
she'd
meant at all. There is no word she knows to take it
back.
Whatever
he tried to tell her, weight sagging against iron
nails,
was burned away by the sour sponge pressed to his
parched
mouth, those lips which once asked, Who is my mother?
like
any rebellious son. Now she must let the falling dark
undo
his
furrowed back, glimmer of unclothed ribs, the useless,
pale
curve of his sex. There is no way to say the word
strangled
in the clotted mouths of his wrists. No way to form
the
phrase his shattered bones write against her thigh.
This
is not what she’d meant at all. And the young soldiers
who
fought over the tunic she wove for him by candlelight,
left
it, after all, a small pool of shadow like a dog at
her
feet.
The space where his body once was filling with night.
-Out
of Eden (Cleveland
State University Poetry Center, 1997).
Reproduced with permission
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text
by
Dennis Dooley
Winner
of the 1986 Cleveland Arts Prize
for Literature
Spring
2003
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