{"id":365,"date":"2012-02-23T16:30:03","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T16:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sealitsearchable\/?p=365"},"modified":"2022-06-24T21:16:41","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T21:16:41","slug":"ferrini-vincent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/f\/ferrini-vincent\/","title":{"rendered":"Ferrini, Vincent"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"ferrinivhatlg\"by Joseph Flibbert<\/em> (2000)<\/p>\n

FERRINI, VINCENT (1913-2007). Vincent Ferrini was born into a blue-collar, immigrant family struggling to earn a living in the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts. His first volume of poems, No Smoke<\/em> (1941), records the depression-era deprivations of his early years. A reluctant graduate of high school, Ferrini read voraciously from the public library collection until World War II brought him work in a General Electric plant. Drawn by the beauty of its harbor and by the Italian fishing community, he moved to Gloucester in 1948 as his fifth book of poems on working-class life, Plow in the Ruins<\/em>, was being published. Since then, his writings have focused on the changing destiny of America’s first fishing port. His first collection of verse on Gloucester, Sea Sprung<\/em> (1949), evokes scenes of the port, its vessels, and its fishing community.<\/p>\n

In 1950 he began a lifelong friendship with Charles Olson, who wrote the first Maximus poem as a letter to Ferrini. In the same year, declaring his hands extensions of his poems, he began a career as a picture-frame maker, pioneering the use of driftwood as a framing material for the seascapes and harbor scenes of local artists. Among the thirty volumes of poetry he has published, the seven volumes of Know Fish<\/em> (1979-1991) chronicle most effectively his portrait of the decline of the fishing industry in his adopted home. With Whitmanesque verve and a consistently proletarian voice, Ferrini chides government bureaucracies for their inept management policies in such poems as “Fresh Fish Industry Thrown a Bone” (1976) and “The Savior” (1979) and local business interests for their shortsighted greed (“Gloucester: Why It Is As It Is,” “Squid” [both 1979], “Gloucester Aroused” [1986]). In other poems, he celebrates the glories of its seagoing past (“The Flood Time of Fishing” [1979]), the resilient strength of its Italian fisherpeople (“Da Family Dragga” [1979], “At Sea” [1984]), and the achievements of its more visionary citizenry (“Brahma” [1984], on Philip Weld, “Gus Foote: At the Fo’c’sle of City Hall” [1991], “The Luminist of Gloucester” [1991], on Fitz Hugh Lane).<\/p>\n

In Sea Root<\/em> (1959), the son of a sea captain returns from twenty years at sea to release his family from the guilt and anguish of incestuous bonds. Undersea Bread<\/em> (1989) contains two relevant verse plays: Nightsea Journey,<\/em> in which a fisherman whose boat sinks in a blizzard leaves behind a son struggling with a heroin addiction in a sinking fishing economy; and The Fisherwomen, <\/em>in which the wives and daughters of drowned fishermen discover inner resources of strength without their men. Ferrini’s second verse play, Telling of the North Star<\/em> (1954), uses the tradition of the returning ghost ship as a commentary on the ethical compromises forced upon fishermen faced with a depleted stock. The play is the text for a one-act chamber opera composed by John Corina and performed at the University of Georgia in 1981.<\/p>\n

Ferrini, who considers himself a “deepsea Fisher of Words and Souls,” continued to write from his conviction of the unity of life and art out of his home in East Gloucester.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

“Forester, Frank”<\/p>\n

See Ballou, Maturin Murray<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Know Fish<\/em> (1979-1991)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a><\/p>\n

keywords: white, male, immigration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Joseph Flibbert (2000) FERRINI, VINCENT (1913-2007). Vincent Ferrini was born into a blue-collar, immigrant family struggling to earn a living in the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts. His first volume of poems, No Smoke (1941), records the depression-era deprivations Continue reading &<\/span> text links<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":498,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25919],"tags":[53756,53775,53767,53766],"class_list":["post-365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-f","tag-20th-century","tag-fishing","tag-plays","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/498"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6313,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions\/6313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}