Imagine being invited to an intimate dinner party, where the host sings opera, tells jokes, shows himself to be an extraordinary raconteur and gives you his personal attention throughout the entire meal. This is the atmosphere that English Professor Emanuel diPasquale creates at his book signings.
“I always wanted to be a singer, but I was scared as a kid,” said diPasquale, which makes sense, because poetry is lyrical; his talent emerges as a spoken aria. Having just recently published two poetry books within a few weeks, “The Ocean’s Will” and “Love Lines”, Poet in Residence diPasquale is quite a prolific writer, and his own thirty-two works include a children’s poetry book, a translation of Dante’s “La Vita Nuova”, and an award-winning collection that allowed him to travel to Rome for six weeks, along with a $20,000 prize.
On the occasion of one of his readings, dressed in a suit, with his silver hair not quite brushing the collar of his jacket, and his passion salient to those present, he explained how translations must accurately determine the context of a word. He used the examples of “woman, lady and girl,” to support his claim.
In “La Vita Nuova”, he describes a love that others may find futile; it is one that may never be returned, but that does not disappoint the suitor. His joy is just in “loving.” “A man can become obsessed with a woman after one meeting,” he said. “It is a struggle to understand and articulate animal desires; we become more fully human and it’s a breakthrough.” The audience contemplated this unusual premise.
“I fall in love with a sunset; it does not mean I want to sleep with the sunset,” he said. In the poem from “Love Lines”, “Love Poem for Faye Dunaway” diPasquale explained that one can take pride in feelings, admire, fall in love, but not act on it always. He felt like he was “channeling Dante”, and often laughed humbly at his own genius. Beatrice was Dante’s muse in “La Vita Nuova” and he reveled in his sweet preoccupation with her, diPasquale explained.
“The Ocean’s Will” has an indigenous quality and uses streets and scenes from diPasquale’s hometown. He selected a poem about a man picking berries along the bluffs. “I harvest a bunch” he said, reading the line with crisp pronunciation. He invited English Professor Mathew Spano to one of his lecterns, who read an inspirational poem. A ship has the power to turn even 10 degrees which can make the difference between landing on a country’s shore or a continent’s shore he said. In “Once You Set Out to Sea”, the reader is reminded to “stay the course because a journey has many hazards”, much like life itself. The cover is a Van Gogh painting of a boat, and Spano said,” It has a beautiful sensuous quality. I had a wristwatch like that.”
English Department Chair Michael Nester read a poem from “Love Lines”, about a woman who is running from a mental clinic. As he approached the front, diPasquale turned to the audience with a broad smile and said, “I love Michael.” It was a poignant poem that Nester found; and reminded him of personal events in his life, as he said, “It spoke to me.” The concept of normalcy was questioned in the poem, along with how each individual defines “normal” and what sometimes becomes “normal” within a family.
Another reading found diPasquale focusing on his childhood in Sicily. “My mother was a poet,” he said. “Instead of saying it was six o’clock, she would say, ‘The sun is slanting through the blue window’.” His father died in a mining accident when diPasquale was a baby, so his 14 year-old brother, who diPasquale said was an intellectual, had to go to work as a baker. diPasquale soon left school at 11 to join his brother . However, he said his mother was clairvoyant and had a vision about her youngest son. If she took diPasquale to America, he would do very well. So in 1957, mother and son arrived here and settled near the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York.
“I mastered English, it was like food to me,” he said, after an audience member asked about his assimilation to a new country, and the task of learning a new language. “How did you settle in school?” diPasquale said he read “like crazy”, and had a teacher who stressed pronunciation. “With her blond hair, blue eyes and red lips, they [the students] fell in love with her,” he said. He continued to read a book a week in English. “You can’t write if you don’t read; to be a great writer, you had to read. Drink and digest it until it goes through your blood, until it becomes a part of you,” he said.
After high school, he went to Adelphi University and to New York University for his master’s degree. “I started writing poetry, because I found out girls loved poets.” The audience laughed.
As diPasquale read he emphasized words like “thick”, pausing for the audience to grasp the meaning. “The ocean’s been great the last few days,” he said to no one in particular, but the audience knew exactly what he meant. “A lot more birds over the boardwalk.”
He weaves nature, religion, and desire into many poems. In “Sacrament at Night”, from “The Ocean’s Will”, he gives the image of a fishing boat out on the ocean, providing the only light on a dark boardwalk. He said that God used to be out there, explaining the light. He also read his daughter’s favorite poem, a simple, but symbolic expression about a seagull that died.
“How am I doing, OK?” he said to the guests. There were small chuckles. “I like to embrace locality,” and he did, emphasizing similar sentiments from the previously mentioned reading.
DiPasquale held the audience’s attention for the half-hour reading, and they seemed disappointed when it ended. “My art is my life” he said as the program concluded.
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