Cid Corman: "Sun Rock Man"

Cid Corman

Sun Rock Man, of all the many books of poetries, is the work that is the most closely of a piece with Cid Corman's "complete abode" poetics. The unembellished language of observation in which Corman excels can fuse easily with the "poverty undisguised, unmitigated" of Matera (capital city of the province of Matera in southern Italy). As how couldn't it? The poetry is a work of meridional heat and sun, of ancient rock and village customs: the accustomed materials of the poet with some one hundred poetry publications to his name. And there isn't just the outline of Corman's poetical landscape but the balzante of eye and language rhythms , the very teeming of "place" with its own distinctive "livingdying".

To feel as Corman does the "rain rot/rock" ("THE TUFA") of this "inland region between the Ionian sea and the Adriatic" (more particularly "where the/valleys/cross/winds//thrash and/the sun/pales/weeds") is certainly a distinctive type of poetry writing. But it's important to feel how Corman feels the place & keeps to the forefront the exquisitely alluring mystery of the "rock" whereon sun and (wo)man trudge together. Observations begin and end with the "paleolithic" and must range beyond the senses into a sort of collective psyche from which the poet who can only see will be necessarily excluded. His rhythms--and they are superb!-- succeed in quieting the terrors of cultural aloneness, and this only for the sake of preserving the dignities of his temporary Matera home. The poetry's in the details of oppressive heat and the intractability of "carved rock" everywhere, perilous "pits/under the piles of hay" ("the barn") and empty temples to the sun and yet the result is always a deepening friendship, a confraternity perhaps or certainly unfeigned sympathy with the lifecycles of a place Corman has grown to love.

Place grows into love and from love can arise, among other things, the effortless motion of rock-dwellers who avoid and yet self-create in the sun, getting easily out of and into the commonplaces of "sun/on sun" and "stone on/stone" because they are peculiarly born to it :

to get
out of the sun
these rocks
blatant rocks

kids hop-
ping hot cobbles
flip coins
under carts

of sun
whose leadpoles un-
harnessed
hail the sun

women
ages of old
cramped black
mend shadows

men and
mules and sun creep
down to
the bottom

a sun
on sun on sun
stone on
stone on stone

bottom
building for them
a dry
common well (from NO WAY)

Familiarity with language and customs (and Corman knew both very well) discloses the outside and deep interior thrum of village life, as does a poet's own sympathetic heart. Corman never wrote what he didn't love. "I do not know them. I love them./How can I not?" (I Contadini) Nor did he write anything that he didn't thoroughly see as it was, in life as in his own poetry.The buckled and black-vested old people ("The Old Men") soiled in the life of Matera, the "carter/cursing his horse" (reading Vico) or the man on the "jogging mule" (The Geographer), children who "irk each other" (the porch) because of the heat or the sidewalk artist copying the saint of Murillo in chalk (the sidewalk)--if any of these are to be accessed only through the usual literary sensoria, it's little more than ornate traveller's reportage. Corman also had to be 'there' and move with it.

Matera, if anything could personify it, can be a type of  Friday night ritual (Serra Venerdi) or a scene of men working in the hills (The labors), a walk through almond groves (The Almond Trees), a visit to the town square ( The Stars at Piazza Pascoli): it can be not just these but, in fact, any one of a number of myths or remembered collectivities, provided only that the town always form a backdrop to a narrative as ancient as its rock, cruel as the hodiernal heat. Rock, sun and (wo)man--and a town's personages vary as much as "La Signorina", "Professor Nitti" and even the cave-dweller counseling Corman in spices-- are a poetry's constants here. Even in death (certainly an "occasion") the town pauses for only a moment:

when one man dies
all go

the town dies a
moment

at attention
head bared

the procession
goes on

one studies not
to breathe

or breathe with the
earth's breath

sharing a plot
of grass

returning to
seeming

perhaps less than
ever

There's a quiet dignity to rock whose presence is both maternal and ontic, culling Matera itself  from 'madre' (mother)  and 'terra' (earth), the ground of life in both of those uniquely literal senses. Shall we call it a drama as well? As see in the name "La Calamita" both the forces of a cafe ("The place to be seen") and  a sense of the irreality of life outside it: or the even more remarkable reenactment of "I Promessi Sposi"in a sunlit square. The square, cave-home ("prehistoric slum/from whence they come") and parched valley are each not a stage so much as a proscenium where action is more than viewing and tragically less than direct engagement in the forces that shape & wither. Or is the whole essentially operatic: with the usual accompaniments of "Marta Marta" or squealings of an "idiot-daughter" or festival musicians dressed in "navy-blue"?

The town is continually prey to the double 'mother'/'earth' movements, which it is the poet's duty to record. Sun Rock Man is this durable drama and song wrenched out of rock, erupting into the occasional form of the carnevalesque (Luna Park) or religio-bacchanalian (La Bruna). They live by the one inescapable force--call it poverty, piazza, the interminable "landscape of stone"--that, like it not, makes them cling to each other. The religious import of "Rock"--because Italy is a deeply pious nation--is not just stone cold tabernacle to a collective psyche that has nowhere to go but "over and over/the same ground" (the monologue): it's essentially the hope of a return to an abyssal dark night that will be a little more bearable the next day :

People and night, night
and people. To get
out. To get together.

They walk under the
arched white posts under
laced lights as if married.

They pass the skulls carved
on the shoals of the
Church of Purgatory.

They pace to the bleat
of the old bland or
wait at the edge. For what?

For whatever it
is. They want the sound,
of it, the deafening,

and then they go on
over and over
the same ground, half-embraced

for fear of nowhere
to go and nothing
to find whey they get there. ("the monologue")

Corman who both knew and loved Italian people and their literature--among the many he'd promoted or published in Origin were Nobel poet Eugenio Montale, novelist Ignazio Silone and philosopher Giorgio Agamben--also knew because he himself would embrace self-exile as a literary vocation. Matera and Kyoto have produced similar poetries for knowing Cid Corman. I've never known a writer (certainly as evident in his letters) more estranged from his native home: born, it seems, to the poetics of i forestieri. Sun Rock Man is a distinctive type of "livingdying" he'd heard in the quarries and caves, marketplaces and Aragon churches. Whether it's the peculiarly moldy rock of Matera and "white-moustached" souls of its backlands, Corman's is a work that could anthologize any peoples and places. He had the genius and heart for it.