Paul Vangelisti

Paul Vangelisti Poems

Paul Vangelisti Biography

Paul Vangelisti (born 1945) is an United States poet and broadcaster. He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, for a year as a research Fellow and moved to Los Angeles in 1968 to attend the University of Southern California, from which he was awarded a Master of Arts in Literature in 1970. Vangelisti has edited a several anthologies of poetry, including one each in Italian and Polish. His anthologies of Los Angeles area poets, such as "Specimen '73", were among the first such collections to begin defining the historical trajectory of post-World War II poetry in Southern California. His first such volume, "Anthology of L.A. Poets", was co-edited with Charles Bukowski and Neeli Cherkovski. Most recently he edited "L.A. Exiles", an anthology of displaced Los Angeles writers. Vangelisti is the author of almost twenty collections of poetry, including "Air" (1973), "Portfolio" (1978), "Another You" (1980), "Villa", "Rime" (1983), and "Nemo" (1995). He was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. Vangelisti is also well known as a translator of Italian poetry, particularly experimental poets such as Adriano Spatola and Antonio Porta. Vangelisti also produced many broadcasts of poetry readings through a long association with Pacifica radio station KPFK in Los Angeles, where he worked as a Cultural Affairs Director between 1974 and 1982. While in that position, he initiated and directed L.A.T.E. (Los Angeles Theater of the Ear), which produced both live and recorded radio theater broadcasts of classic plays by Pirandello and Brecht, as well as contemporary playwrights. Vangelisti is currently the Chair of the MFA writing program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.)

The Best Poem Of Paul Vangelisti

Zebra

My zebra has seen another generation
of pseudonyms thumb that old serpentin
the name of progressor the next Madonna.
Zesty a place as any,
he admits, to poke a golden ring or pistol.
Wouldn't be from out of town? says I.
No, my zebra says, I'm a stranger here myself,
lazy enough to memorize the streets,
aspirin and feminine, and even those
with too many commas,
whose angels wouldn't mind a steeple
or two to straighten up or fly right,
until they were wings enough to squawk
and blind misery, historical or not.
So how, says I, beat the apparatus
of impossibile tenderness and jazz,
the dead notwithstanding?
Your sentences could be more consistent,
says my zebra, finishing off a zero,
or tolerant of zealous voices.
Else there's always guilt and piety
to once again make us realize
there are millions and millions of ordinary people,
adds my zebra, with a listening ear or helping hand,
reaping the odds on the simple life.

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