Seeking the Divine
Toronto’s poet laureate rediscovers prayer through poetry

BY STACEY GIBSON
University of Toronto Magazine

The hallway of the University of Toronto’s department of Italian Studies is oppressively still. Behind closed office doors, professors may be deciphering the allegories of Dante’s heaven and hell or ruminating on the writings of Boccaccio, but the main hallway contains a damp silence.

That quietude is dissolved, if only for a moment, by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Toronto’s poet laureate and a professor of Italian-Canadian Studies here. He is slipping away from his office for a walk and brings along his digital recorder. The voice of 1950s crooner Jerry Vale strains through the speaker. “This is the night, it’s a beautiful night and we call it bella notte…” Di Cicco hums happily.

Outside the building, he lights a cigarette. He is down from the two-pack-a-day habit of his youth to one pack. Students scurry past, heads down, intent on getting to class. From beneath his moss-green brimmed hat, Di Cicco watches them curiously. He notes, in an almost injured tone, “Everybody is always hurrying. Always going somewhere.”

It’s not the going somewhere he objects to, but the manner of the journey. He believes people need to “see their daily lives as a poem” and this requires incorporating art and poetry into the business of living. “Art is not out there. How can they see it if they don’t know it is in here?” he asks, pointing to his heart. “If they don’t see themselves as writing the poem of their life, their daily life, why should they read a poem?”

Di Cicco was appointed poet laureate of Toronto, a position of cultural ambassadorship, in September 2004 and will hold the post until 2007. At the age of 57, he has produced 17 books of poetry, each one radically divergent in scope and voice. From the powerful neo-surrealist images that first emerged in A Burning Patience (1978) to philosophic meditations incorporating science and art in Virgin Science: Hunting Holistic Paradigms (1986) to the exploration of spirituality and faith in The Honeymoon Wilderness (2002), his work constantly shifts shape.

His latest collection, Dead Men of the Fifties (2004), reveals another departure in voice. With the mirthful energy of a swing dancer and the comic timing of Jack Parr, Di Cicco jitterbugs his way through the landscape of the ’50s, casting an eye on Hollywood stars, musicians and the everyday people of the postwar decade.

Like his poetry, Di Cicco’s journey is filled with a series of radical turns. He was born in 1949 in Arezzo, south of Florence, Italy, where he lived until age three. His father was a barber who played the accordion in dance bands. His mother, a homemaker, sang him arias and love songs.

Di Cicco never knew his brother, who was killed in an Allied aerial bombardment during World War II. Di Cicco’s mellifluous voice turns low and staccato when he speaks of it. “My brother…died…from a shell. I had a brother who I never saw. I think he was 13, maybe 12.” He takes a deep breath and shifts to another subject.

The family moved to Canada to rebuild. They lived in Italian communities in Montreal, then Toronto, where, Di Cicco says, “the culture remained encased in amber.” But that refined Italian ambience was swapped for a steel-town existence when the family moved to Baltimore when he was eight. There, athletics trumped literature. Blue-collar workaday concerns left little room for arias and poetry.

Di Cicco adhered to the social climate, excelling at baseball and lifting weights. At 15 he found the book The Art of Thinking, a paperback in a grocery store. Written by “Voltairian” freethinker Ernest Dimnet, it championed the idea of independent thought. “It started Socratic kinds of dialogue in my head,” says Di Cicco, “and got me questioning and getting philosophical.”

Shortly after, he stocked up on the poetry of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. He would take his books to the cemetery, sit on the tombstones and read “forever.” In the quiet space, he found solace in his readings, in his philosophical musings and in his inceptive attempts at writing rhymed verse and sonnets.

At 18, Di Cicco left Baltimore and moved in with his sister in Toronto. He enrolled at the University of Toronto’s Erindale College, immersing himself in the theatre scene. As part of the university’s Poculi Ludique Societas, a group of touring medieval and Renaissance players, Di Cicco performed in plays on campuses across North America. “I did so much theatre that I failed,” he says. “I didn’t pay any attention to zoology and botany and whatever else.” Later, at University College, he stitched together a curriculum composed entirely of poetry courses.

After graduating, Di Cicco continued with a job as a bartender at the Graduate Students’ Union pub. After closing up the bar, he would return to his apartment and write poetry until the early morning hours. A two-finger typist, he would pound out poems on his Olympia typewriter, emptying bottles of eraser fluid. “Today’s generation can’t comprehend the aggravation of having typewriters and eraser fluid,” he grumbles. “It was a physical, manual labour of love.”

His poetic output was enormous. Within a few years he had been published in numerous Canadian and international magazines, including Critical Quarterly, Descan, Poetry Australia and Quarry. He wrote his first collection, We Are the Light Turning (1975), in two weeks. He produced enough material for 13 collections of poems in less than a decade. He edited Roman Candles (1978), the first anthology of Italian-Canadian poetry. And then, at the age of 33, he stopped cold. He wouldn’t publish another poem for 15 years.

“First days. I remember continual tears. Tunnels of lightless light. The invigorating blessed air. The clear and prolonged vistas.”
From “First Days,” Living in Paradise

Who can ever truly know what propels a spiritual quest far from the world one has always inhabited? In 1984 Di Cicco arrived at the door of Marylake, an Augustinian monastery outside of Toronto. A prior named
Father Cyril opened the door. Di Cicco asked, “Have you got any use for a middle-aged literate such as me?”

The father said, “Sure, come on in. Put our library in order and do some dishes and pick up some garbage.”

As “the low man on the totem pole,” Di Cicco washed and dried hundreds of dishes daily and served the 30 residents at every meal. He kept the library tidy. He attended community prayers. He acted as a translator for the largely Italian-speaking groups that made pilgrimages to the grounds on Sundays. His room was a brick cell with only a sink, a bed, a desk.

The duties and servitude were welcomed by Di Cicco. “It was discipline. And it was in the spirit of service, not in the spirit of ‘My rights are being infringed upon.’ The smaller you made yourself, the closer you felt to God.”

Di Cicco’s shift away from a temporal existence allowed him to embrace and explore his fascination with prayer. “It was through language that I discovered prayer. It was through poetry that I rediscovered prayer. I didn’t stop writing poems. I didn’t stop creating. I didn’t stop singing. I just sang in a different direction.”

There was a need for priests within the Augustinian order, so after a year at Marylake, Di Cicco began theological studies at the University of Toronto. In his fourth year at the university, he observed that young directors at Marylake began replacing some of the orthodox religious traditions that he loved with more liberal and contemporary practices, so he transferred to the Archdiocese of Toronto. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1993 and began ministering to largely Italian-speaking parishes in nearby Woodbridge and Mississauga.

Today, Di Cicco balances his liturgical duties with professorial and poet-laureate obligations. “Part of why I became a priest was to help people finish the poem of their lives, and to help write it with them, or they write mine,” he says. “Because the poem on the page wasn’t enough. I wanted the poem on the page and the poem of life to be interconnected.”

At the age of 50, Di Cicco ran into Denis De Klerck, the publisher of Mansfield Press, who persuaded him there was a generation who wanted his poetry back in circulation. Di Cicco produced Living in Paradise (2001), a series of new and collected poems. The collection captures the contours of his poetic journey—and life journey. Throughout his books there is a struggle to bridge chasms—whether it is between art and science, the Italian culture of his childhood and the culture of North America, or between the intellect and emotion.

Indeed, the idea of being caught between two worlds is often a topic that governs their conversations, says his friend Monsignor Robert Nusca, rector of St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto. “You find that idea in Biblical writings. Certainly it’s behind Saint Augustine’s City of God—the two cities: the city of the world and the city of God, and how people feel themselves caught between these two realities.”

Outside the Italian Studies department, Di Cicco lights another cigarette and reminisces about a recent trip to Arizona. He speaks about his love of travelling through deserts: the meditative nature inherent in their landscape, the solitude, the chance for reflection.

But then he mentions how much he likes the bright neon cities that often surround them. And yet, the contrast between the garish Nevada cities of Reno and Las Vegas and the spiritual, almost godly, desert landscape is so glaring. But, yes, of course, this would be the marriage of two worlds. This would be the marriage of heaven and earth.“It was through language that I discovered prayer. It was through poetry that I rediscovered prayer,” says poet laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco.

Have you discovered, or rediscovered, prayer? Tell us how.