Interview: Grace Cavalieri on her Italianitá, Poetry and Why It Makes Sense to Read a Poem a Day

Click on the Wikipedia bio on playwright and poet, Grace Cavalieri, and you will get an arm’s length of credits and an impressive list of productivity enough for several writers. If you think it tells you all you need to know about her, think again.

In the 1970’s when the blood of the country ran hot with Black nationalism, gay rights, and the cultural revolution, an Italian-American Cavalieri, suburban housewife, mother of four, living on a Naval base was one of the founders of an all jazz radio station WPFW-FM, the first Black managed public radio station in America, the fifth of the Pacifica chain of progressive broadcast entities. 

Best known for The Poet and the Poem, which is celebrating its 36th year of being on the air as an hour-long radio program Cavalieri founded, produces and continues to host on public radio. Her programs include every Poet Laureate since 1989 and a significant collection of African-American poets, all of which are archived at the George Washington University Gelman Library Special Collections, the Library of Congress and The Pacifica Program Service.

Cavalieri has written 16 books of poems and 26 produced plays. Her newest publication is a chapbook of poems, I Gotta Go Now (Goss:183, Casa Medendez 2012). Another recent work is Millie’s Sunshine Tiki Villas (2011, Casa Menendez). Cavalieri's play, Anna Nicole: Blonde Glory, opened in New York City, 2011. Her play, Quilting the Sun, opened in Beaufort, S.C. 2011. Among many other accolades she holds the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, A Paterson Poetry Prize, a Pen Fiction Award, the Bordighera Award for Poetry, The CPB Silver Metal plus others. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland, and is married to metal sculptor, Kenneth C. Flynn. They have four children and four grandchildren. 

Of Sicilian and Venetian descent, American-born Cavalieri talks to Feile-Festa about her first forays as a suburban housewife interviewing major national poets, how her italaianitá impacts but never limits her work, and her advice for writers and readers about why poetry is as necessary as air.

How did you come to write? Writers are born with their brains wired to see language as the way to understand the world. I’ve interviewed more than 2,000 poets who each say they wrote as children. So did I. Bad stuff but it arrived from a need to express what I observed. I started writing daily after my fourth child was born. It was now my time. Discipline is not a punishment; it means you are a disciple … I am a disciple of writing.

What did you write first, poetry or drama? Poetry. Poems take on an urgency that was available to me as a full-time working mother of four. The plays take a longer period of dedicated time and energy. This may be the reason my first 10 plays were one-acts that were fashionable in the 60’s, to my good fortune. When life allowed vacations with my husband, I was able to devote the entire time to writing for the theater.

What is poetry’s role in society? Poetry is the way we rinse off language. If it were not for poetry, we would all talk in slogans and TV commercials. We would use the language of politicians — words with no meaning. Poetry is, as Allan Grossman said, the way we preserve the beloved. Joseph Brodsky said it was the only record of human sensibilities through the ages. I see it as the great equalizer, the democratic ideal, the way every person can speak with an inimitable voice, the miracle that each one of us has our own breath and cadence and it cannot be stolen. We [poets] are holders of the record of what it is to be alive at this time in history.

What, if any, advice would you give to emerging poets? You absolutely cannot have more going out than is coming in. This means we need to read a new poem every night (preferably one from this decade) and jot something down every day. Ideally, each day we collect images, note what people say, see colors and shapes around us, collecting, always collecting. We are not the sources of anything, just beautiful funnels.

Is editing a large part of your process? They say poetry and plays are not written, they are rewritten. This is true. Even typing a poem from script is a form of editing. Reading aloud is editing. But shifting lines and words around — absolutely. That’s the fun of it. Moving all those pretty colored beads until they make emotional sense to me.

How do you replenish yourself? Other poets and the work of other poets fuel my life. My four daughters give me humor and stability because each one is so beautiful, and sweet and funny. My friends are the blood in my veins. I cannot exist as a solitary, and since reading and writing are alone times, I love to get together with friends.

What would you like readers to come away with from poetry? I wish they would come away, from listening to writers and think: I felt that same way but just didn’t say it. … I'm so glad someone said it for me. I feel less alone now.

How do you harness social media? I manage to stay sane by answering e-mails and inquiries and not initiating them. Yet if it were not for the capacity to get words from one place to another, I would not have been able to transmit poetry through the air for 36 years. So I bless the cable, the wire, the cloud, the satellite, but in my private life I limit Facebook to 1% of my interest and time. I’m sure I’d be a more successful marketer if I tried to tame the wild beast of Twitter etc. but I would rather have a little time to catch my breath around my productions.

How did you come upon the interview/radio format? Pure stubbornness. I didn’t care that poetry was not popular, I didn’t care listeners were used to commercial products, I didn’t care whether or not anyone listened. I would not allow cornflakes and hygiene sprays to take over the airwaves when poetry was available. I said, ‘So sue me if you don’t like it,’ and went ahead with my obsession. I worked three years to get a radio station on the air in order to establish a platform for poetry — this meant fundraising and sweeping floors but in February 1977 WPFW-FM went on air with Sterling Brown reading poetry with Duke Ellington’s “A Train” as our anthem.

You have said, “My heritage is my strength and my weakness….” I always felt there was a secret class war in my household, as there is a real feeling of superiority from northern Italians about their Sicilian counterparts. The Cavalieri family had aristocratic roots (James Joyce said, “All our cousins were kings in Ireland.”). I am so enriched by my lineage yet I never wrote as an Italian nationalist. I have yet to make enough use of it, but the past is all still in my future.

If you could be the Minister of Literature in America, what would you legislate? That every child would be given permission to write and every adult would be given a chance to tell his/her story.

Cavalieri’s monthly series, “Poetry Exemplars,” appears in The Washington Independent Review of Books and she has just begun a poetry column at www.danmurano.com/poetry. The Poet and the Poem, can be heard online or via Pacifica radio stations, such as KPFA-FM/KPFB-FM Berkeley, California, KPFK-FM North Hollywood, California, KPFT-FM Houston, Texas and WBAI-FM New York City.