Meditating on a Poet's Words

Priest Pier Giorgio Di Cicco envisions through the heart and human condition

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco may not have been writing for 15 years while becoming a priest, but instead turned his creativity to capturing nature on video, hours of it. In 1998 he ran into Denis DeKlerck (they first met in 1986 during a course at the University of Toronto), who convinced him to share his art again.
Di Cicco can be the epitome of surprise. An ordained priest who celebrates mass in Woodbridge and lives in the countryside north of Toronto, his deep vocal tone sparkles with ideas that stream like barzellette. He comes up with these ideas discussing the world in an instance that gives light a whole other meaning.
Born in Arezzo, Italy in 1947, he emigrated with his family to Montreal, moved to Toronto in 1956 and then to the U.S.
His father Giuseppe was a barber, and during Di Cicco's interview with Tandem, his example of the accordion as an Italian cultural symbol mirrors his father's passion of the instrument. Like many Italians, they had left Italy after the war and landed at Pier 1, in search of rebuilding the spirit, of finding happiness.
He grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and readopted Canada in 1968 as a base of operation, where he lived with his sister.
Out of a need to be rescued from loneliness and isolation he began to write at the age of 16 and continued this into university. Soon he was writing until dawn and running the university bar.
By 1978 De Cicco had two or three books under his belt, and published one with McClelland & Stewart. After a visit to Italy, he banded 17 poets together and made the first Italian-Canadian anthology, where three or four can now be found. He was sort of a green sign for Italian-Canadian writers to come out of the closet as it were, to write and explore their roots.
Di Cicco was living via poetry, but felt a religious call in 1983. His peers thought this was strange, and although known as a man of extremes, this move was just absurd. He joined the order of Augustinian monks, but after four years, when he saw that the contemplative tradition was being dismantled, he joined the Archdiocese of Toronto. He began to minister to Italian-Canadians because, as he puts it, he had "a sentimental devotional streak to the immigrants that came over."
It's a romantic story with a lot of unrivaled turns. As a child who was scared of the word metaphysics, he has transmuted gracefully in his path, with lots we can ponder about.
Maybe we can start back in the 70s. I came across your name in an issue of Impulse, when it still was a literary magazine published by Peter Such. What was that time like for you?
"That's funny you mention Impulse. Impulse might have been the first or second literary magazine that I published poems in, and if I remember correctly they were love poems. I was an undergraduate at Erindale College and had not quite started publishing. I gave my poems to a writer in residence in 1969, Peter Such, who went on to be an editor and I worked with him in the late 70s. He felt obliged at the time to preen some literary feathers so he started publishing Impulse, and published Dennis Lee and others. After a few years it went over to Eldon Garnet. I started publishing in 1972-73 with a vengeance and had a bartending job where I had dropped out of school to pursue a career in writing. By the 80s I had published in some 300 to 400 magazines, periodicals, appearances, apart from books and anthologies. I thought it was good to appear in magazines before compiling a book, strategic as well."
Was that uncommon?
"In those days I suppose the publisher would look at you more seriously. But then as now, there's some truth in the old proverb 'It's not what you know but who you know.' I found that it got you to know the scene, and editorial feedback of any kind to a young writer is a good idea."
How did you return to the written word?
"In 1998 I ran into an old friend, Denis DeKlerck, who started the publishing house Mansfield Press in Toronto. He said there's a whole new generation of people who would like to see my work back in circulation. This prompted a new and selected volume [Living in Paradise] from my books that are out of print. At the same time Dennis Lee, who was a good friend many years ago, offered to edit the new and selected works. So I saw it as a good opportunity to get together with a couple of friends in a no stress situation. In 98 I started writing again to keep the brain going. There wasn't a whole lot of fluency, discourse and idioms in Parish life, so my brain was getting a bit mushy."
Do you feel your writing has changed after entering priesthood?
"People say that the fruits of contemplative silence or prayer manifested themselves in the sensibility. Well naturally I was 15 years older. Having seen a lot more tears and a lot more grief, having buried and baptized a lot of people, brings a people experience. Fifteen years later there is less anger; the postmodern landscape was already vexing and terrifying most people including the poets -the alienation, the isolation, and consumerism of living in postmodern times. The 60s being over and the heartless 80s coming in, made me respond as a poet with a lot of social anger. After 15 years, especially living in a contemplative environment, you calm down and let the world do its thing, let the world go on with its folly and madness. I still get angry but it is more to do with the question of human evil and the inequity of the human heart."
These ideas carry through in your recent work: the human heart and ideas of love, and of what people encounter.
"Well the heart is what's disappearing in our time, as far as I can tell. The 'heart' will be a word that will be a question of mythic concern as the years go by. Already there are many words like heart, passion, that are used in a kind of hollowness. There's less of an understanding of questions of what 'heart' really means. Heart was always seen as something separate from the mind, we always lived in a dualistic climate of ideas in which heart and mind, spirit and matter, reason and intuition were antipodal to each other, and people are still that way. There is no understanding of the human heart as the seat of true mind, and the heart as evaluative mind implicitly."
Did Italy influence any of your writing after returning in 1974?
"It brought home the fact that I wasn't at home in the cultural climate in America, although I became an all-American boy. It alerted me that my chromazone had been dipped in the Mediterranea for many centuries. My spirit gestured into words in a Mediterranea way; the body invents language and not in contradistinction to mind. It responds existentially and ontologically to the world, weaned on having done so in a Mediterranea climate in the world. It is the way one's body was approached by the sunlight in the Mediterranea, not just from one's lifetime but from ancestors as well. What ancestors hand down to you is an existentialism you don't shake off by a simple migration."
Do you like writing?
"I don't like writing myself, I don't find it a pleasurable activity at all. I think anyone who says they enjoy writing is mad or hasn't really become a writer. Let me go on a limb, I don't see any real artist is so dumb to say 'I love being an artist'. People who tend to say they 'love doing this', easily tend to be people who have some measure of control over what they're doing. 'I love going to the movies.' Well, you can choose to go to the movies, but you can't choose to love art, you can't control it. It has as much control over you as you have over it. Like Yates said you're wrestling with a god when you write, and you don't know what the outcome will be. I love the fruits of writing often, but the approach is full of humility and trepidation."
Does the church support your art?
"The church has never been generous in North America regarding the arts. They have a Philistine attitude, thanks to subscription to the Scholastics instead of the Mystics, however it may be changing. I've received a lot of encouragement, and there seems to be a lot of understanding as time goes by, as ministries are various and require imagination in today's age."
As a Goggio Visiting Professor of Italian Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, what are you doing?
"I've been teaching since January in the first graduate course in Italian-American literature in North America. This involves three public lectures, the first was The Drama of Rupture, next is The Call of Passion, and the third Journeying from, towards and within Ethnicity, which will be compiled into a publication. Basically to be present and available to students, and a reminder that the phenomenology of being ethnic is real and dynamic. It must be looked at and addressed in a postmodern climate in which the ethnic is disappearing. One of the theses of my discussion is that ethnos is disappearing where English will become the new Esperanto. People migrate, but not as much as ideas migrate to them. Culture is based on lived traditions. The cultures we have now are those that have been bought up and being sold on television, radio, internet and advertising. So ethnos depends on a lived tradition. You have to have people to be doing pilgrimages, carrying Madonnas and playing the accordion. If you live in Woodbridge and bring the kids to Wonderland, you may be a good family person, but that's what everyone who is not Italian is also doing. So you've left ethnicity and joined the postmodern identity."
A new culture and tradition...
"Yes, but I wouldn't call it culture and tradition. They rely on values and time in which to identify yourself. You have to be alone by yourself for a while to identify who you are, but we don't have that kind of time anymore. Consequently identity and cultural identity is not possible. Sounds bleak, but everyone wants to hold on to where they came from. But if you don't live where you came from, say goodbye to it. Tradition is a way of thinking and feeling. A lived tradition does not evolve by eating Angelhair Primavera pasta at a College Street bistro. Wearing designer or Gucci clothes does not an Italian make. The Italians in Italy have to ask themselves the same thing. Is it a way of thinking? It better be..."
The lecture you did on the Drama of Rupture, what was it about?
"It was about migration, trauma, the shock of the human ecosystem. The Meditteranean ecosystem going into a different ecosystem. A minority and mainstream culture, which no longer exists in Canada. It was also about how the arrival never took place just because you arrived on the shores of Canada and bought houses in Woodbridge. The arrival is not about being materially and physically more comfortable, it was about how to be happy, and that project is still ongoing. Poets, artists are helping us arrive, because art is the ongoing journey. Art is the intelligence that knows that the journey isn't over on disembarkment. The next lecture is about how passion is generated not just by having been ripped away from something that one knew."
What are you working on now?
"I'm working on a book about the 50s for Mansfield Press. Memory projects on Connie Francis, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra to Doris Day, some of the delicious icons of Italo-Americana that are more than old, forgotten iconographies. These people represent an ethos, a way of life, and a way of speaking. They were part of a culture and time that still moves through us, either wistfully or as an energetic ghost."
Di Cicco has a lot of irons in the fire right now and that includes capturing nature on video. However a time out to read the words he has put to paper is meritorious of the landscape of metaphors that unfold.
Di Cicco lectures on the subject Meditterranea: Poetry & Poetics in Italian/Canadian Culture at the University of Toronto April 1. Call 416.926.2345 or email italian.studies@utoronto.ca for more information.

Publication Date: 2004-03-21
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3780