Felix Stefanile: Outsider Poet

Felix Stefanile would be a distinguished poet, translator, editor, and critic. He released seven books of verse in addition to three significant volumes of verse translation. For forty-six years (1954-2000), Stefanile and the wife Selma also edited and released Sparrow, among the liveliest poetry magazines from the era. Throughout this lengthy editorial tenure, he grew to become a spokesperson for that “little magazine” movement. In 1961 Stefanile, who was simply being employed as a civil servant in the New You are able to Condition Department at work, started teaching at Purdue College where he eventually grew to become a complete professor. He won a Balch Prize, a Pushcart Prize, as well as an NEA literary award. In 1998 he grew to become the very first person receiving the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in Italian American poetry. Despite his many achievements, however, Stefanile never grew to become broadly referred to as a author. He was less than obscure, but he continued to be an outsider towards the poetry establishment.

Personable, gracious, and particularly generous to youthful authors, Stefanile nevertheless cultivated the identity from the amiable but uncompromising outsider.Stefanile’s outsider status was less accidental as deliberate. Although he'd certainly have loved greater visibility in literary circles, he was too independent, frank, and contrarian for much success in literary politics. Personable, gracious, and particularly generous to youthful authors, Stefanile nevertheless cultivated the identity from the amiable but uncompromising outsider. The function suited him mainly because it exactly fit who he actually was-a author of high standards who didn’t bend them for their own or anybody else’s sake.

Like a poet, Stefanile presents a number of interesting paradoxes. He was both a nationalist along with a cosmopolitan. Although he purposely labored in “the American grain,” his poetry was nourished by its deep roots in European literature. He championed free verse but additionally authored healthy. From his earliest work till his final guides, he was reluctant to stop one way of another. Within The Dance at St. Gabriel’s (1995), for example, you find a prose poem, a sonnet, free verse, blank verse, and rhymed quatrains alongside. Sparrow started mostly like a home free of charge verse poets, for example Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, John Haines, and George Hitchcock, however in 1992 Stefanile relaunched it as being the sunday paper from the sonnet. Since free verse was the dominant style, he desired to serve the embattled side. A long term student of Italian Renaissance literature, Stefanile was an unapologetic traditionalist, but he seemed to be an advocate from the avant-garde who converted and released the very first anthology of Italian Futurist poetry in British, Nowhere Moustache (1981). Finally, Stefanile would be a determined individualist who nevertheless always seen themself included in a residential area-ethnic, social, political, and cultural.

During these contradictory characteristics, Stefanile was quintessentially an Italian-American artist, the merchandise of the culture that mixes tribal loyalty with anarchistic independence, reverence within the last with a love for innovation. Born in 1920, he was a part of a pioneering generation of authors born within this country to immigrant parents, elevated speaking a language, emotionally and imaginatively formed through the Roman Catholic Chapel (even when they departed it), endured through the Great Depression and The Second World War, educated beyond the amount of their parents, after which set loose upon the planet. Both streetwise and book-wise, these teenagers and ladies joined a literary culture that concurrently appeared both foreign and familiar. They made a decision to assimilate only up to and including point. As kids of stoical and clannish Southern Italia, they never entirely reliable the institutions of authority.