Welcome to Letters from Caliban

Generally this is the first page in a blog to be published. Not here.

My name is Carlo Massimo. For the record, I am the Caliban from the title – more of that anon. This blog is where I'll be posting my completed work, and any of you who write know that for every work you complete about a dozen embryos and half-constructed pieces lay buried somewhere in your notebook. The content will change periodically: expect a book review and an essay about poetic form in the next few weeks. You might also find film reviews or essays about matters not strictly literary (though I would argue that films are a kind of visual literature), or academic papers like “Dionysus in the Fin-de-Siecle.” Mostly, however, I hope to put up poems and stories.

Do feel free to leave comments or to contact me by email. If you have any questions I will be happy to answer them; if you have requests I will try to accommodate them. If you are a publisher I will invite you to my house for a bottle of wine, and we can speak further at our leisure.

So: why Caliban? Well, I like the name. It was also Robert Lowell's nickname, or rather Cal, and so I chose it in Lowell's honor as well. But mostly Caliban symbolizes my own aesthetic, my own view of life. He is ugly and monstrous:  am I not?  (Are we not?)  But he is a child of the Earth, a creature of flesh and dirt, and given the magic of the spoken word he howls and swears with it. I have howled; I have sworn; I worship the body and the soil in an age of plastic magic and computerized Prosperos.

Let me tell you a brief story to illustrate what I mean. Maybe you know a folk group from Ireland called The Dubliners. They happen to be a favorite band of mine. Sometime in the sixties they were invited to play the Ed Sullivan show. Now generally, the musicians who played on Sullivan's stage fit neatly into one of two types. There were the “good boys,” like the early Beatles, who wore suits and ties and smiled and wanted to hold your hand. And then there were the “bad boys,” wild and long-haired, who jumped around like animals and leered at girls in the audience and did everything that bad boys must to distinguish themselves from the good boys.

The Dubliners arrived at Sullivan's studio and started warming up for the evening's show. Sullivan came in to meet them, and was dreadfully confused. For here before him were not pseudoadolescents but mature men; moreover their hair was wild and bushy, and they sported long beards, and they were all wearing suits and ties. They were not the good boys or the bad boys. They sang about drinking and courting, and played with careful virtuosity. They wore beards like the bad boy rock'n'roll stars, and suits. They would never not wear a suit. It would never have occurred to them not to wear a suit.

These were children of the Earth, singers of the flesh and blood of man, who needed no disguise, no wild uniform. On Prospero's island they were mooncalves. Really they were Parzifals. They had no agendum but to follow those words of Herodotus, and later of Nietzsche, and Isak Dinesen, which are now inscribed at the top of this page:

To ride, to string a bow, and to tell the truth.

Welcome to Letters from Caliban.