Paul Violi
Paul Violi was an influential poet and editor born and raised on Long Island, New York. He earned a B.A. from Boston University in 1966 and married Carol Ann Boylson in 1969, with whom he had two children. Violi worked as the managing editor at Architectural Forum and served as an adjunct professor at New York and Columbia Universities. His first poetry collection, *Automatic Transmission*, was published in 1970, and he gained recognition for his unique blend of absurdity and humor in poetry. Over his career, he published eleven books, many of which drew from popular culture to bridge everyday experiences with profound insights. Violi's work is characterized by its accessibility, mixing traditional poetic forms with innovative genres, such as the sitcom poem. His poems often transform mundane situations into universal reflections, exemplified by his piece "Extenuating Circumstances." Violi is celebrated for deconstructing conventional poetic structures and is recognized as a quintessential New York poet, whose work resonates with both humor and depth.
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Subject Terms
Paul Violi
Poet
- Born: July 20, 1944
- Birthplace: Long Island, New York
- Died: April 2, 2011
- Place of death: Cortlandt Manor, New York
Biography
Paul Violi was born and raised on Long Island, New York. He attended school in and around the New York area. He received a B.A. from Boston University in 1966 and married Carol Ann Boylson in 1969. The couple had two children. Violi worked as a managing editor at Architectural Forum from 1972 to 1974 and taught as an adjunct professor at New York and Columbia Universities.
Violi published his first collection of poems, Automatic Transmission, in 1970. He earned a limited but impressive reputation as a poet of the absurd and high comedy. His eleven books of poetry, all with small presses until Coffee House Press published Breakers: Selected Poems in 2000, draw heavily from popular culture in order to show links between quotidian events and extraordinary insights.
Indeed, like many poets who take childlike glee in poking fun at, and holes in, somber poetic states and devices, Violi won the praise of critics and poets tired of avant-garde experimentalism on the one hand and mind-numbing existential meditations on the other. A mixture of Les Murray, Russell Edson and Ogden Nash, Violi offers his readers poems that are immediately accessible even when, as they often do, demand further contemplation. Despite the dizzying array of traditional and non-traditional poetic devices and genres he used—including, as one reviewer noted, the sitcom poem—Violi was very much a traditional poet. Indeed, his yoking together of seriousness and comedy, sincerity and satire, is less a gesture toward the grotesque than it is an exploitation of epiphany. Thus his poems satisfy the pleasures of “closure” so many readers equate with the function of poetry.
For example, “Extenuating Circumstances” operates in just this fashion, beginning with an ordinary occurrence: a car pulled over by a cop for speeding. The first line of the poem—“I don’t know how fast I was going”—becomes the motif on which Violi improvises, concluding with a sentiment worthy of Robert Frost: “Can’t tell how fast I’m going,/ Don’t care how far I’ve gone.” The closed loop that signifies the transcendent circle—the staple of the epiphany—is a dominant feature of many of Violi’s poems. They begin with the particular, often the ridiculous or silly, but soon transform into pithy commentaries on the universal human condition.
Violi is credited, and rightly so, with deconstructing traditional poetic forms. He used haiku to write a ransom note, sonnets to narrate a robbery, and so forth. Few contemporary poets had as wide a range of subject matter as Violi, who had at least one poem about crossword puzzles to his credit. Like Frank O’Hara, Violi was a quintessential New York poet, celebrating and thumbing his note at the world of art and culture he secretly loved so much.