Joseph Salvatore Salemi

Joseph Salvatore Salemi Poems

Joseph Salvatore Salemi Biography

Joseph Salvatore Salemi (born 1948) is an American poet and educator. Joseph S. Salemi is an Italian American born in New York, NY, where he lives and works. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University, and in the Classics Department of Hunter College, C.U.N.Y. His poems, essays, scholarly articles, and translations have been published in over 100 journals internationally. He is also the editor and publisher of Trinacria. As a translator, Salemi has rendered into English a wide selection of Latin & Greek authors ( Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Horace, Propertius, Austonius, Theognis, and Philodemus), Provençal and Sicilian poems, and his scholarly work has touched on writers as diverse as Chaucer, Bembo, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Blake, Kipling, Crane, Ernest Dowson, and William Gaddis. He has won several awards including the 1993 Classical and Modern Literature Award. Salemi was four times a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Prize sponsored by The Formalist, a journal in which his work has frequently appeared. He is also active as a journalist, writing on current academic issues and controversies for the publication Measure in New York, and for Heterodoxy in California, as well as a monthly essayist and columnist for the on-line journal The Pennsylvania Review. Salemi is a grandson of the Sicilian poet and translator Rosario Previti.)

The Best Poem Of Joseph Salvatore Salemi

The Missionary's Position

I maintain it all was for the best-
We hacked our way through jungle and sought out
These savage children, painted and half-dressed,
To set their minds at ease, and dispel doubt.

Concerning what? Why, God's immense design,
And how it governs all we do and see.
Before, they had no sense of the divine
Beyond the sticks and bones of sorcery.

Granted, they are more somber and subdued,
Knowing that lives are watched, and judged, and weighed.
Subject to fits of melancholy mood,
They look upon the cross, and are afraid.

What would you have me say? We preached the Word
Better endured in grief than left unheard.

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