Joseph Maviglia’s debut verse collection, Movietown, appeared in 1989, 36 years ago. That was only the start of a rhapsodic career. Since then, Maviglia has published seven books (chiefly of poetry), plus two compact discs – musical recordings of original compositions. His new book, In a Cage of Sunlight: The Works of Joseph Maviglia, Selected and New (Guernica 2025, 284 pages), offers a generous selection of poems from previous outings, plus poems brand new, poetic song lyrics, and a half-dozen, prose musings on the difference between song lyrics and poems. The volume is hefty—284 pages—and rightly so. Maviglia grants access to nearly four decades of city-slicker poems (betraying a hipster or odyssean perspective) and catchy lyrics. Still, to weigh Maviglia’s accomplishment, we must entertain a look at poetic form.
Crucially, there is a pitfall for the lyricist cum poet, and that is suffering the slippage—or fault—that occurs when the relaxed, elastic—even slack—formats of song get transferred over into—and disjoint—a poem’s necessarily sterner construction. Naturally, music carries and bears up a song’s words. In contrast, the poem is purely its words, bare-boned, unadorned, save for intrinsic ornaments of rhyme, image, cadence, and form, even if the poem seems to eschew metre and rhyme. (And that’s how free verse looks “free”). In song, words play second-fiddle to the music (usually), which furnishes the piece’s emotional dressing—gravitas and/or grace. Consider “And I Love Her,” by The Beatles, which is a supremely beautiful ballad, but whose lyric is insipid and cliché. Nevertheless, even irrefutably “poetic” songs such as Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” with its surreal, rollicking, yet scathing verses about a starlet who’s fallen on hard times, may yet lack the creative tension—pressure-cooker discipline—that poetry requires to allow a poem qua poem—no musical support—to withstand the withering force of passing time and changing tastes.
Fundamentally, poetic form mandates a severe struggle between content and constraints—such as rhythm, repetition of sounds (alliteration, assonance, consonance, full rhyme, etc.), line-lengths, and stanzas (verse paragraphs). In song, the struggle is placid; I mean, it’s strenuously relaxed, for music yields each composition’s fluid boundary—like water flowing over and around (and subverting, dissolving) outcrops of rock. Maviglia says there’s little difference (“Not a lot really”) between poem and song, but also observes, “A song can mean absolutely nothing and sound fine,” but poems miss “the exterior music to fall back on,” and that’s a limitation. A 1992 Juno-award-winning songwriter-poet, Maviglia credits that “knowing how to listen is probably the [essential] similarity between a song sung and a poem being read or heard”: This sensibility befits a guitarist who often composes—or performs—with his “axe” on call. Certainly, Maviglia showcases gifts in both modes of lyric—poem and song. Even so, the songs—as words printed on paper—lament the omitted element crucial to their existence…
Unsurprisingly, in Maviglia’s poems, echoes of other troubadours—poet/singer-songwriters—such as Dylan and Leonard Cohen, abound, yes, but also intimations of go-to Beats: Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an influence perhaps specifically pertinent to male Italian/Canadian poets. Deborah Verginella’s fine short film featuring her late husband, that one-man Renaissance who was Corrado Paina (1954-2024), presents him enjoying a day-trip to Coney Island while Lou Reed’s pop song, “Coney Island Baby” (1976) accompanies. My viewing of the film at an April 2025, Toronto celebration of Paina’s life sent me back to Ferlinghetti’s Beat classic, Coney Island of the Mind (1958). Upon re-reading it, I began to sense affinities with the urban—and urbane—verses of Italian/Canadian poets of masculine persuasion: Not only Corrado Paina, but also Len Gasparini (1941-2022), Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (1949-2019), and, yes, Signor Maviglia. Thus, for me, the first poem in In a Cage of Sunlight,—“Movietown”—sets down the insouciance, the casual, city reality (of a cineplex), and the simplicity of precise observation, yet relaxed diction that manifests in Ferlinghetti and in most Beats: “My foot gummed to the floor / I hear lovers’ twitters from the furthest row. / Afterwards / “coffee cups sulk alone.” I don’t think that all of “Movietown” succeeds, though the last line is superb: “Jokers jingling light like castanets.” But that’s okay: Maviglia is easing us into his poetics, his psyche; too, his superior, Beat-style poems lie ahead. So, from his second collection (1994), note “Man Pulling a Star from his Throat: Poem for a Refugee,” and its arresting, image-rich opening:
He pulls the moon down through a jug of wine.
The twenty-first century
now at his feet
he opens his palms
and shows the scars of labour
the blood of his heart
his empty hands
never holding anything for long.
This proletarian is marginalized by class, by tongue, by accent: “his boorish wife / and obese children / … never eat in the same restaurants / as you.” Though editing would benefit this poem, the line, “and the howl of a woman is never complete,” is just exquisite, is pure gold. The conclusion? Equally impressive:
so don’t tell me [….]
you don’t see this man
vomiting
dropping his hands to his thighs
wishing at first
your eyes were a long jug of wine
but needing you to hold him
and tell him
he is no longer on the water.
Marked by Marx as much as he is by the Beats, Maviglia’s poesy foregrounds workers. See, for instance, “The Song a Shovel Makes”:
The song a shovel makes
knows the years gone by
in a boat from Reggio
Messina.
Cosenza and Catanzaro
is a song of armour against
the death of rural harvest
[…] mothers in endless black
and the cold wind of arrival.
The brutal dynamic—poverty, emigration, and labour exploitation—is stark:
Shovels can move mountains
with blood running the hands that hold them.
and a mountain
can cry through time
empty of its iron and gold.
Like poems number “Asphalt” and “Sledgehammer”; all merit enthusiastic welcome: Too much of Anglo-Canadian verse is writ by PhDs—white-collar proles, expressing caustic irony and depressed by corrosive ennui. Maviglia’s blue-collar-oriented poems are, in contrast, ennobling and refreshing. His “On Winning a Juno Award” reminds us that the poet is both an intellectual and a worker:
But here I am free
a builder of words
that wash out my soul like the rain
on a road that falls gently behind me
a guitar raised in tune toward the sun.
At this juncture, Maviglia reproduces Juno-award-winning song lyrics, and they are fine as song, if still prone to cliché:
And father I see you’ve been crying
and father you seem so alone
I remember, it was your mother dying
And a heart that was singing sank like a stone.
As it happens, I first encountered Maviglia via purchasing his 1998 collection, Winter Jazz, whose contents include, “Mitla,” a poem that—yes—requires editing, but whose parts are formidably exquisite: “The baby christs // they bring for Christmas blessing / are of good plaster / but undetailed….” Identical applause—and second thought—must greet the poems of freakin’ palamino blue (2002), wherein “dixie train non-sequitur (leaving little italy),” for instance, is laudable, but in discrete parts:
the shoes of joe dimagio
the tired atavism of tony quinn
the dooneys’ bunch like a bad mind-western
the many friends who act an act
the monotony of internment
the woppy politicians and benevolent builders
the tarantellas sung
the fans who hear them
Similarly, I’d start “for saro” at the third stanza, cutting the opening two: “you chose / the road your pain insisted on…. // your voice always off key / mused at the sorting of your soul.” Generally, the poems from 1989 to 2002, though striking here-and-there, yearn for editing—to become excellent throughout.
In his section on the Joseph Maviglia Songbook (2003 & 2010), Maviglia differentiates between song lyric and (printed) poem, but his discriminations ain’t definitive, nor do his song lyrics constitute poems, whatever their probable power as sung verses. Maviglia’s own work proves that the two lyric genres are qualitatively distinct, though each may be respected in its own mode of utterance and/or performance.
Maviglia’s new work, his “jazz dharma,” commences authoritatively with an eponymous poem, celebrating Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956): “and the TV reeling with three limbed children [….] mothers / tender as saplings” and “why howl? [….] because the good still die and the bad dance.” The stream-of-consciousness stanzas offer hallucinogenic pyrotechnics. The poem, “migration”—about “hockey town toronto”—stages compelling images: “we came bringing [Gordon] lightfoot’s pussy-willowed dream / stan rogers’ seasalt hymns / children ourselves […] adamant in making it / defining the grey city with all that heats our blood.” Terminating the collection, strong poems abound: “how you never,” (for Luciano Iacobelli [1956-2022]), “the pitch” (for Gasparini), “man swinging a cane at a pear tree,” “the angels have stopped crying,” “invasion of the scorpion wind,” “Scorpion and Sand,” and “The Fire in a Blue-Green Shell,” with its homage to Arthur Rimbaud: “The sea is green and the storm is smirking in its cave of thunder.”
A few, forgettable prose poems also occupy the last section of the book, mais tant pis! The conclusion of the matter? Maviglia has won the right to assert that his work is “where light makes of itself its lasting.” Well, what does this mean? That songs—suiting their highest calling—wish to be poems; and poems, at their best, say no more than what they must, while perhaps awaiting an obliging composer. Can I get an amen? And another amen? Or another?
George Elliott Clarke is a poet and a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. His latest books are an essay collection, Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (Véhicule Press), and Canticles III (MMXXIII) (Guernica Editions), the concluding tome of his six-volume verse-epic, Canticles.
