Becket — By my recollection, it was not long ago that I last had the pleasure of reading a slim volume of poetry penned by David Giannini, who—for five decades—has called the undulating Berkshire hills home. A bit of digging reveals it was January of last year when his last full-length collection was published; this time around, I am writing of his newest opus, “Already Long Ago” (Dos Madres Press), in the month of its publication (which gives me great pleasure). As to what continues to inspire the local poet after a prolific (my word, not his) career spanning 50 collections? “I have to breathe and I have to write,” Giannini told The Edge, drawing on the etymology of the word inspire (which derives from the Latin inspirare meaning to breathe). In other words, like air, “[p]oetry is always available if I am receptive or available to it.”
Of the poet’s own volition (here I borrow liberally from the “Author’s Note”), the poems included in “Already Long Ago” were selected from a year’s worth of work in writing lyric and narrative poems, songs, prose poems, hybrid haibun, as well as short- and long-lined haiku. The collection is arranged in five sections, “discrete sets of concerns working together toward an overall envisioning.” Gianini is certain an intuitive reader will know how the poems work with and off one another, set-to-set. It is one work, whole, a year within it, but not in terms of its chronology. Every part, each poem refers in some measure, to every other part. As Jean-Luc Godard said of his medium, “A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.”
Perhaps chief among Gianinni’s talents is that of observation—a skill he employs each day upon rising from sleep at 4 a.m. only to find himself occupying a liminal zone in which anything seems possible. “I often step outside in the dark and listen,” he says, evoking the magic that comes as “first light” begins. As such, his poems are rich with evidence of bearing witness to myriad events—from a bear lumbering through the woods and a railing slick with rain to a grandson toting driftwood from a nearby lake. “One time, for instance, I noticed a squirrel frozen to a tree limb where it had died [which] became an image I use in the book,” Giannini points out.
As a writer myself, I am always fascinated by others’ daily writing practices. Hemingway purportedly stood while he wrote, while Stephen King hits 1,000 words and calls it a day. “I am jotting and writing all the time, on and off throughout every day, often working on several potential poems at once—revising, honing, trying to find some envisioning,” explains Giannini of his own daily practice that involves both drinking coffee and discarding many drafts, ever with a keen eye trained on “words or phrases that may be cleaned and grouped later.”
This reader recognized familiar themes, as if a conversation—begun in an earlier collection—continues on cue. Giannini’s “Riffing on Xanadu” is rife with historical allusions to Kublai Khan and his legendary capital city, north of the Great Wall (a pair of subjects made famous by poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge), while “Darwin Never Knew” gives voice to the sheer magnitude of a galaxy containing both the “tiniest snails” and “dreams inhabiting facts.” So, too, are there myriad meditations on the quotidian, as evidenced by “Neighbors,” which, in its irregularly spaced lines, denotes the everyday pleasures of back-country living, and “A Sense of Eternity in Winter,” which—especially in these parts—if you know, you know. Giannini balances all of this with ever-present artifacts of our current world, from hospital beds and COVID masks to my personal favorite, a quintessentially (and perennially) June image:
For the peonies’
eyelids to open ants lick
the sticky petals.
Amidst these enduring details, challenges persist (from false starts to limitations of craft), none of which ruffle Giannini’s feathers. “Only the quality of the writing matters,” he assures fledglings in the proverbial field, before offering an anecdote as solace: “I once spent most of a morning with commas, failing to find the right pause for rhythm. It seemed that I was wrestling with a millipede, ha!”
Still, after all these years (and over 50 collections of poetry), Giannini has never needed a prompt. “It sometimes feels like ‘channeling,’” he says of this process that is writing poetry, one which culminates in “shap[ing] the thing at hand, craft[ing] it” as opposed to it being a subject merely to be taught in careerist MFA classrooms.
“Poetry is always there to catch as it is occurring,” says Giannini who rarely begins with ideas but rather builds upon single words, phrases, and images. “Anything is possible,” he says, citing his own environs—located on a back road with acres of trees and animals—which naturally inhabit his poems, often in close proximity to others’ poetry which “can serve as a catalyst or even inspiration.” As such, Giannini not only poses his own question but also answers it: How much actual credit does a poet take for writing? “The first few words of a draft inspire what comes afterward. In a very real sense, most often poetry inspires my poetry … I append my name to a process that first begins off the page.”
NOTE: Award-winning poet David Giannini’s work has appeared in national and international literary magazines and anthologies. He is the recipient of myriad awards including a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship, The Osa and Lee Mays Award For Poetry, and one for prose poetry from the University of Florida. Giannini received the 2009 Finalist Award from the Naugatuck Review and a 2020 James Hearst Poetry Finalist Award; his book, “The Future Only Rattles When You Pick it Up” (2021) was nominated for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. At present, he lives among trees in Becket, Mass. with his wife, Pam, (to whom “Already Long Ago” is dedicated) and their two cats, Mina and Maya.
