The 26th of August 1994 brought the sad news of the untimely death, at the age of fifty,
of poet, painter, teacher Joe Cardarelli of Baltimore. Only a few days after Joe’s return
to the city from his summer residence in Maine, a heart attack cut him down. On the
last day of his life, Joe had supervised the installation of a show of his visual art works
at the gallery of The Maryland Institute College of Art, including a large painted wood
and canvas sculpture of a mythical Snake God Canoe. He had told me about this in a
letter, saying it was to be a “decoy for bigger canoes in the sky.”

A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, Joe taught poetry, literature, and
writing at the Maryland Institute for twenty-seven years.  The visiting poets’ series he
founded and directed at the Institute made this school one of the liveliest centers for
poetry in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area.  In his “Black Mountain Poets” series in
1983/84 he gathered material for a documentary video, Black Mountain Revisited—a
historically invaluable collage of interviews and readings given by Robert Duncan, Robert
Creeley, Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, and Jonathan Williams—in the case of Duncan
and Oppenheimer, some of their last readings on record.  Over the years, Allen Ginsberg,
Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Maureen Owen, Ed Sanders,
and many other representative writers of The New American Poetry were frequent visitors
to the Institute—thanks to Joe Cardarelli.

I first met Joe in 1970, while teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when he visited Iowa
City in the company of Geof Hewitt (who had anthologized Joe’s work in Quickly Aging Here,
Anchor Books 1969), but only got to know him well five years later when my peregrinations
took me to Baltimore.  We became close friends and remained in touch through the late seventies,
eighties, and early nineties. On and off, for almost a quarter of that recently ended century, we
shared thoughts and words and bright moments.  

Joe paid his first visit to Boulder and The Jack Kerouac School of Poetics at The Naropa Institute
(my home base since 1989) in April 1994. He gave a radiant reading in Shambhala Hall, sharing
the evening with Lyn Hejinian who had come from the other coast to give a weekend workshop.
We walked, talked endlessly, drove up to the old mining towns of Nederland and Central City
(the latter sadly taken over and hollowed-out by slot-machine enterprises), and on to Lookout
Mountain above Golden, to pay our respects to the last resting site of another long-gone longhair,
Buffalo Bill Cody.

When the grievous news came, Jane and I went to Baltimore for Joe’s memorial service.  It was
festive, with many former and present Baltimore poets eulogizing him, and graced by great performances
by singer Aleta Greene, sax player Bob Gray, and John McCruden on the bagpipes.  All of that followed
by a big party, as Joe had always wished.

Joe and I had corresponded about my editing a circa 100-page selection of his works, with a view to
publication by an unspecified press he thought might do it, and in April he had brought a big batch
of mostly unpublished manuscripts to Boulder. In August, I sent him my suggested selection from
this material; according to his wife Marta, he had seen it and approved of it, but the grim reaper
deprived us of an opportunity to discuss it by any terrestrial means of communication.

That selection forms the core of the present “Main(e) Book.” A number of earlier texts from this phylum
of Joe’s work appeared in 1983 in a small limited edition, called “From the Maine Book,” from Charlie
and Marylu Ross’s Smithereens Press in Bolinas. The very “sixties style” 8 1/2 by 11 stenciled
chapbook was carefully typed up by that legendary town’s poet laureate (and national treasure) Joanne Kyger.

Besides being a personal magnet for so many out-of-towners, Joe was also a frequent performer of his
works at various local venues, either solo (warm resonant voice only) or accompanied by saxophonist
Bob Gray.  He wrote a number of poems specifically designed for such public performance, adopting a
talkier and more topical mode than the one characteristic of his Maine, “main” — and to my mind, “core”
— works.  In the present selection, The Three Trees may serve as a formal example of that mode; it does,
of course, set the stage for the poems from many summers in the North.

In the present volume, the Maine poems are preceded by a meditation on Odysseus, Homer’s Fox:
Onward thru the Fog, dedicated to Robert Creeley, and by the sequence Blue C, which derives from
sojourns on Assateague Island. The poems in Maine 94 near the end (quite literally) were taken from
the notebook of Joe’s last summer, and The Unknown Story of Orpheus (A Work Unfinished), first
published in the Spring 1991 issue of Alice Notley’s and Douglas Oliver’s magazine Scarlet, provides
a grand finale. 

In the last letter I received from Joe, dated 6 August 1994, he refers to his work — with typical wry reticence —  as

    “[...] mixed comic philosophic rustic surrealism & sage quips. 
    There must be something in there but I’m not sure what —           
      indeterminate understated side images suspended
    around the clearing.  Ah well.” 

And the poem Joe contributed to Andrei Codrescu’s and Laura Rosenthal’s anthology American Poets
Say Goodbye to the Twentieth Century (New York, 4 Walls 8 Windows, 1996) ends with the following lines: 

        It’s too bad sometimes I think
        too bad we can’t see the air
        too bad the air’s invisible
        too bad the air’s not clearly there
        say as it is with just a little smoke
        we’d find ourselves new eyes
        taken up by the shapes of air tides
        the multi-layered, striated, tunneled
        twisted rolling wave shaped
        moving patterns the air makes
        no more or less substantial
        than one hundred or thousand years.

That, indeed, is an integral part of what one sees/hears in Joe’s poems: the “moving patterns the air
makes,” “suspended in the clearing.” There are, of course, many “things” in that air — porcupines, canoes,
mummified snakes metamorphosed into “Apollo Python,” weather, lots of weather, friends and idols and
family — brought onto the page in a language both consciously “unimproved” (let’s leave a little bark on
this log) yet delicate. 

To wander and alight in the clearings of these pages, to savor their blues (resignation + wisdom + humor)
balanced by moments of almost archaic ecstasy (Sappho, Arkhilokhos: Ed Sanders dedicated his Hymn
to Archilochus to Joe), is a singular pleasure, time spent in “an actual dome-shield of frequencies / making
all within hearing range secure”. There have been moments in the making of this selection when I
have sensed Joe’s dear presence somewhere just off to one side — not unlike the companionable creature
in "Visitor."  I sure do miss him.
                       
Anselm Hollo
22 January 1998