Frank Samperi's "sanza mezzo": the poet, book and God "without intermediaries"

I never receive a gift without acknowledging gift and giver, and when it's a book of poetry gratitude will always take the form of respectful tribute to poet & work. The tribute I pay is to poet Frank Samperi whose work sanza mezzo (New Rochelle, NY: The Elizabeth Press, 1977) lately arrived as gift by Claudia Samperi-Warren when I'd purchased Samperi's major works Quadrifariam, The Prefiguration and Lumen Gloriae. It's a delightful little hardcover edition, barely 20 pages in all, one of 400 copies printed in Verona, Italy "from Dante type on Magnani rag paper" that comes enclosed in its own cardboard slipcase. I'm grateful to Claudia for an opportunity to reflect, again, on a book and poet.

I'm tempted to see sanza mezzo, above all, as a microcosm of the poet, his life's work as well as literary influences. Perhaps each of Samperi's works is closural in that sense: as John Martone remarks in his "Introduction" to Spiritual Necessity, "[Samperi] wrote but one long poem with structural complexities reminiscent of Dante's Commedia". The minimalism and spacing clearly derive from the years of his Eastern apprenticeship with Cid Corman or, at the least, show a deference to a more contemporary, objectivist style with which he had to compete (Ron Silliman's ungraciously referred to it as as "stripped down poetics of Cid Corman or the shorter works of Louis Zukofsky"). The title, a phrase taken from Dante's Commedia: Paradiso (Canto VII:  "sanza mezzo" appearing twice in 67-72) is the impetus for this and perhaps most of Samperi's writings; from it derives the origin of divine goodness and the clear hope that divinity can be found in the world, sanza mezzo, directly, eschewing earthly avenues.

The book searches for the divine but not just among the verses: there are also the silent illuminations of blank pages generously interposed, serving to give quiet meditative "pauses" to the act of reading. Samperi envisages an "other shore" poetics where the world masks the "source/veil/without/medium", & the heavenly ascent is always preferable to a cold intellectualism. The academic or certainly the mainstream crowd was to Samperi what the Renaissance 'mafia' were to Dante, and in places that disorientation of the pilgrim-poet in a hostile secularist setting gives us a distinctive type of 'inferno'. Poet-pilgrim "passes over stream/into/dream while human and natural processes whirling round him offer only a precipitous view of the road ahead:

other life
pauses
water
other shore
smoke
from
flame
snuffed
steps
to
base
of
hill
plucks
rose
light
leaps
falls
dead

A text that's epiphanic in this way might be said to depart from Dante's own allegorical design: in any event, even in Dante allegory may be just another of those "intermediaries" that contact with God will make superfluous. Divinity is a participatory event, direct, unimpeded by the usual literary figures, always nourished by the poet's verses. With Martone I'd gladly announce sanza mezzo as a complex Dantean aesthetics that isn't interested in tracing medieval tropes (a sort of scholarly navigational tool), & confidently argue for a self-contained text to be read along the lines of a sutra or surah. It's perhaps this mistaken identification of Samperi with a staid medievalism that made poet look unapproachable and irrelevant in his own day. But God is accessed—directly and through the text itself. Samperi's book of poetry, operating at the level of both spirit and text, means to be the illuminated image of divinity itself. If anything this bold can be done how insignificant, after all, the reigning Objectivists, & the Language & Fluxus opponents must look!

In a single narrative stream made up of untitled and predominantly disaggregated places (city mixing with country scenes, the bucolic with a lower Manhattan cityscape, hieractic with vulgar: rivers and darkening skies sometimes set as backdrop to "starlight" & "perfectly modulated song"), only a single capitalized letter separates verses.  Someone (unnamed) who "goes to the window", looking out onto a cityscape of storey houses & skyscrapers, moves, or is indeed moved, or is a poetic principle of motion moving

From room
room

moon

road
screen

haze

hillside
hazier

Since he begins from a place of silence & inwardness, objects & events in Samperi's world clamor for his attention, whether "Lovers leaning against oak" or the clanging of rock falling down the fire escape. He does look out from a "Tower solitary", ennobled by the God quest, and looks among the ruins for the idealized landscape of "white gowns", "plenilune" and, again, the "perfectly modulated song/heard from grove". The verse beginning at "Lovers leaning" captures particularly well, in both meter & imagery, a process of divine-mirroring as bodies and branches, river and "sky darkening" become first a shadow spreading languidly over land & then a sort of sacrificial immersion in water whose gentle rippling in the lovers' palms is now indistinguishable from garment folds. Image of the divine sparkling in the hand turns majestically into the figure of the poet-prophet:

Lovers leaning against oak
watch their shadow
lengthening
river few steps below
mirroring hill
not their body
not branch
sky darkening
reflected
neither
they move
angling
gold their
element
stoop
cupping
water
worlds
folds
their
very
garment

And that the poet sees divinity doesn't seem to be compromised at all by the fact of an omnipresent New York city that he leaves only in religious rêve. Purity of heart required for the journey to God may have supposedly come as the fulfilment of an earlier (unstated) atonement for earthly sin, Samperi the poet himself becoming the allegorized traveller. Samperi does not, in Augustinian fashion, simply contrast earthly and divine cities, & make the latter the more desirable choice. The city is itself a terrestrial paradise where the light of vision itself can leap and fall dead, pulled sometimes upwards, sometimes downwards: and any religious symbology worthy of the name that can't substitute a "crown left" for an "eagle right", "Tower" for "sea/valley", that can't invoke the very freedom of poetry, will risk sullying the celestial object. Anything posing as obstacle to God is shown to be in itself weak & transitory: language without God clearly in its sights cannot achieve Hopkinsian ectasy. And as to the ultimate question of the poet's relationship to his own inspired book, Samperi lets the great Florentine give the answer in a passage from the Commedia (cited in Quadrifariam):

Maraviglia sarebbe in te se, privo
   d'impedimento, giù ti fossi assiso,
   com'a terra quiete in foco vivo ( Canto I of Paradiso:139-141)

It's remarkable, indeed, that as regards the poet, he can see the object of his heart, without impediments, sanza mezzo,as if he were a quiet principle of poetic composition as intent to pursue God as water pursues land and fire sky. I believe that the unnamed viewer & creation of his work he oversees from his tower window are emanations of a divine source to which the poet, book in hand, aspires.