Frank X. Gaspar, at Arts Letters and Numbers, June 29

Back in October 2018 I attended a reading at HVCC by poet Frank X. Gaspar & I have enjoyed reading his collection of poems titled Late Rapturous (Autumn House Press, 2012) that I brought home from that reading. So when Bonnie Cook from HVCC recently contacted me about Frank’s upcoming reading back here again I agreed to help her publicize the event. The reading was held at the Arts Letters and Numbers studio at an old mill in Averill Park, NY; one can find out more about the organization at www.artslettersandnumbers.com.

Frank Gaspar grew up in Provincetown, MA of Portuguese parents. Tonight, he began with selections from the 2020 The Poems of Renata Ferreira (Tagus Press), “transcribed  and annotated, with a forward by Frank X. Gaspar.”  Purportedly, “[p]resenting the poems of this Portuguese-­American writer and detailing their surprising rediscovery in 2015… Renata Ferreira's poems were composed in the final years of Portugal's fascist regime, exposing and subverting the government's draconian edicts against women's rights, sexual freedoms, political dissent, and progressive thought.” Ferreira is obviously a “heteronym” created, or channeled by Gaspar like those poets created by the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935) whose poems Gaspar has translated.

Gaspar bounced around in his reading with poems from different collections, including some of his “black notebook poems,” the jottings that so many of us poets collect over time, from Los Angeles, from NYC, the Canadian Rockies, from Lisbon. The title poem from Late Rapturous, which he described as his ars poetica, is a walking-around-New-York poem meditating on the painter Willem de Kooning's technique of working his canvasses over & over.

Indeed, many of his poems read like pieces from a novel or collection of short stories, with a “he” (sometimes addressed to a “you”) observing the world around him, written in a strong narrative style. In the following Q&A session he talked about his friendship with the late poet Mary Oliver (1935 - 2019) often visiting her in Florida. He also described his latest book discussed above, The Poems of Renata Ferreira, as the “best book I ever wrote.”

It was good to hear his work again, & having recently enjoyed the massive biography of Fernando Pessoa by Richard Zenith, I am looking forward to reading the poems of Frank Gaspar’s heteronym Renata Ferreira.