Justin Vicari

Dear Readers,

I am proud to say that recent poems of mine have been published here

http://www.blazevox.org/BX%20Covers/BXSpring21/Spring%2021%20-%20Justin%20Vicari.pdf

and here

https://www.rattle.com/

I have always been primarily a poet, and I have been focusing on writing poetry for the past several years, my own and poems I translate from French, German and Spanish. This does not mean that I have totally abandoned writing critical theory, but I do feel that it's slightly immoral to write only about culture when the world is so epically messed-up. It remains to be seen whether we can pull the U.S. out of the rightwing fascist flames that are trying to consume it, as well as the literal flames of global warming. Until life significantly improves for the longest and hardest suffering people in this country (minorities, the poor, workers, LGBTQIA), I feel that poetry has a better chance of giving voice to the changes that are needed, and to the yearning of so many Americans for those needed changes to come.

Anyone who has practiced left-wing critical theory, as I have done, must feel discouragement that our work has failed to reach a significant percentage of the population (both left and right), and was particularly impotent when it came to stopping Trump and his blood-red tide of followers. Theory is a vacuum; for those within the vacuum, all social problems have been resolved intellectually. But in the real streets of the real U.S. (as anyone knows who lives in poverty) these problems rage daily and are still being hashed out. Cloistered academics often fail to understand this, or to include it in their worldviews. I think it's important to stay grounded.

I may write about films and the arts again; I have some ideas that might be worth pursuing. And of course I do not disown my previous work, and I hope that it helps, even if that means just helping other theorists within the vacuum. We do what we can.

My two books of poems are still available mainly from their respective publishers: The Professional Weepers (2011) from Dave Baratier's Pavement Saw Press, and In Search of Lost Joy (2018) from M. Scott Douglas's Main Street Rag Publishing Company.

In the coming six months to a year, I hope to have my new website up and running, www.justinvicari.com.

Best,

Justin Vicari

2021

Dear Readers,

My new book of poems, In Search of Lost Joy, is forthcoming next month from M. Scott Douglass' Main Street Rag Publishing, and can be viewed and ordered here: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/in-search-of-lost-joy-justin-vicari/

This book was in the works for ten years. Some poems in the book go back even further. The book as a whole is a sort of exorcism of my frustrating, indeed often joyless early years, lived in the shadow of the AIDS virus. This is my second book of poems, but in some ways it is like a debut: a strong coming-out about my life as a gay man, filled with deprivation and hesitation in my youth, and finally finding fulfillment, more recently, as a middle-aged adult.

These poems also have a theme of looking wistfully at the state of culture: bedraggled, secondhand, post-human, culture of all sorts has never seemed as forlorn and threatened as it does today. Whether we're talking about mourning the record album as a discrete statement, or trying to discern the efficacy of journalism in a post-print world, those of us who "live for Art," as Cavafy wrote, have less and less to live for. This quandary has made me attempt to write poems more urgently, with greater punch and clarity. I want poetry to be a kind of speech that survives into future conversations.

I have never forgotten Etheridge Knight, the first poet I heard read and subject of a poem in this book. He had an exceptional lyric gift, even though he was and is very marginalized within the academic-poetry community. His brave lone voice as he stood up and sang to us, back in 1984, has been an abiding inspiration to me. In so many ways, his note of elegy typifies that 80s era, for me, an era when I could have easily died, when many others did die, and when we emerged to leaner, meaner times and attitudes.

Justin Vicari

May 2018