by Heather White
The poetry editor of this paper,
who is a poet, actress and
singer-songwriter, is releasing a
memoir in the fall.
Lo Galluccio’s memoir,
“Sarasota VII,” is a prose poetry
piece comprised of numbered
and letter sections, she said.
“I was going to call it ‘Pregnant,
You Left Me with This’
and then a friend of mine who’s
a poet in New York told me that
I should call it ‘Sarasota VII,’ so
I said: yeah, okay you’re right,”
she said.
“It’s a better title,” she said.
Galluccio’s first collection, “Hot Rain,” was published in 2003. “I had two poems called ‘Sarasota I’ and ‘Sarasota IV.’ Both, elegies for my dad,” she said.
I wrote ‘Sarasota VII’ after I worked in a gothic musical as a chorus girl in Sarasota, Fla., when I was still acting,” she said.
Galluccio spent a year at the Alley Theater in Texas as an intern, she said.
“My lover at the time was also an intern, and he was Canadian and his sister had been murdered when she was in college,” she said.
“He was very haunted by her death and he always wanted to avenge her death,” she said. “It
was a conflict in him because he also wanted to be an actor and he was really good.”
The piece is about love and death, she said. “It’s about how we were both sort of robbed of family members and how that affected us and how we felt ghosted by death at an early age and how that affected our relationship and how I saw our relationship through that prism.”
The piece has two themes, she said. “The first half of the piece is more about me and John in Houston. The second half is about my Dad and part of his story.”
“Sarasota VII” is about 70 pages long, she said.
“I had hoped it would almost be a prelude to a longer work,” she said.
“My dad always wanted me to write a book about his life,” she said. Galluccio’s father emigrated
from Italy when he was six years old. He was adopted and went on to graduate from Harvard University.
“He was the last of the convertible era,” Galluccio said.
“To be an Italian immigrant was a really big deal. You know, America moves in waves of letting people in. He knew Jack Kennedy and was involved in his first congressional campaign, he was on the school committee in Cambridge and he always wanted to run for governor,” she said.
“I tried to follow my dad’s spirit—when he died I transformed a lot of my grief into poetry and songs,” she said. “It helped me a lot.”
Galluccio said, “I became an artist because I didn’t really believe in any of the real world institutions anymore. I was very cynical about it all. And I’m saying that’s a good thing, I think I paid a price for it.”
There are many poets to be admired—the job of the artist, she said, is to create order out of chaos. “Unfortunately, we’ve lost some of them to suicide and to different forms of madness and mental illness; there’s a long history of that in the poetry world, but I don’t think you have to be crazy or poor or tortured to be a great poet,” said Galluccio.
“Health and energy are really what you need to have as an artist aside from a vision,” she said.
“You need to have people that you’re connected to believe in you and I understand that really well,” she said.
“There’s an incredible poetry movement, right now—I think there’s an explosion of poetry right now at all levels. It’s interesting given that the times are more materialistic in certainways and more,” she said.
“With the Iraq War and the Bush Administration we are in a more conservative period in the other way,” she said.
“There are so many people who are actually publishing and committing and really devoted to a vision of language and to a vision of what life is in a metaphysical way, in an existential way, in a sensual way, in a visceral way—in ways which are not connected to fitting into society,” she said.
“I’m not a slam poet, that scene is vibrant in Boston and those people—it’s a hybrid of an acting monologue and poetry. There is an emotional river that has to be behind that kind of stand-up poetry and I think that’s vibrant here, but I think that the poetry scene is a little more conservative though it’s had the Anne Sextons and Sylvia Plaths and Robert Lowells,” Galluccio said.
“I got published here rather than in New York and that was kind of a cool thing. But, I was able to go back and work on music projects from here,” she said.
“If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have left the city. I never wanted to live where I went to school; I wanted wings not roots. I think roots are great for some people and some people are roots-people
but I happen to be more of a wings-person. I like to be in the unfamiliar; I like to be in different
spaces because that’s where I see things in a different way,” she said.
Galluccio has been reviewing poetry books in this paper and others for the past couple of years. “It’s non-paid but it’s a privilege to be able to get great poetry books by cutting edge people and get them for free and be able to read them and learn from them,” she said.
“One thing that The Alewife, and reviewing these poetry books has given me is a sense of objectivity. I have to be able to evaluate other people’s work and write articles about other poets and look at things somewhat objectively rather than just what I am feeling today,” said Galluccio. “Joan Didion
has always been one of my favorite writers, I think she’s one of the most amazing journalists that America has ever had—her ability to critique America and still be honest about who she was- if I could be that kind of writer, that’s who
I’d still want to be."
“Sarasota VII” will be released by Cervena Barva Press.Check out cervenabarrvapress.
LOOK AT THE WHALES
I say and she peels apart
the pomegranite.
A God’s head got locked
In the canal of a Goddess.
The child is this fruit,
dead and sweet to eat.
Mostly teeth. Sweet, red.
What trick turned
the teeth perfect
and abundant?
It’s never enough…each tiny
plucked tooth for the
miracle fruit
she is revelling…to hold
my attention from the sorrow
and lust I have for the whales.
Look at the whales.
The ocean breaks cresting.
And the whales, the whales
lumber cold in their darkness,
the magnifcation of a mystery.
Strange moans and lumbering.
Rolling under the waves.
Their blubber will light lamps.
Words are flecked in the thick
smooth turning of whales.
When we make love he says,
It’s like two mammals.”
Loving the sea.
Tumbling in salt tunnels.
Giving birth everytime
to nothing but a wild sorrow.
It is a joy, plummeting
yielding sometimes, a light.
Then I see her hands,
tapered, quick
tearing the pomegranite.
I remember the earth and I cry.
There is a brown field
With red carnations.
I’m a horse again.
Lo Galluccio
WINTER BEHIND A WINDOW OF BROKEN GLASS
I listen to Bocelli sing through my computer
tonight,
facing an old red curtain and the cold
that creeps into this apartment in the City
where I grew up. And Bocelli’s crescendos—
the engulfing vibrato—outlash this cold and
the anti-view, the implicit rootedness of my
transmutation.. For Bocelli, the blind tenor,
promises in Italian wails that we wait for love,
and are asked to wait sometimes for warmth
and snow; the snow that makes the winter
an enchantment. Friends are searching
for friends
missing in deserts, or sunk into coma, sitting
vigil in
childhood homes where fathers have passed on
to ash. It’s ash he will carry to Amsterdam,
the City
his father loved. The blind tenor sings
and coaxes miracles with his voice.
Catch them if you can.
Lo Galluccio
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