A legend lost

Vincent Ferrini, Gloucester’s poet laureate and a figure renowned in literary and local circles for his radical, political, economic and social opinions of America and enduring passion for things authentic, especially his adopted city, died Monday. He was 94.

According to his daughter, Sheila Ferrini of Chelsea, the cause of death was a heart attack and pneumonia. He had resided at Den-Mar Nursing Home in Rockport since last May, after returning from a reading at the Beyond Baroque Literary Art Center in Los Angeles.

“He was the conscience of Gloucester,” said his friend, retiring Mayor John Bell. “He was the one who asked us to think about who we are.”

“He was more alive than anyone I have ever met,” said the painter and former city councilor, Joseph Kaknes.

“He was totally without inhibition,” said his close friend, author Peter Anastas.

Together with his friend and ersatz sibling rival, Charles Olson, Ferrini demonstrated to the world that Gloucester was as fertile an environment for poets as it was for painters.

From his arrival here in 1948, Ferrini dedicated himself to seeing that it should always be that way.

In Gloucester, he became a dashing, ebullient, living legend, an undersized, overpowering force, predictably found under a broad-brimmed hat. He had a well-known weakness for dancing.

He attracted admirers, and constant, affectionate attention from a seemingly endless line of newfound friends, often less than half his age.

Women, especially, found Ferrini irresistible, Bell said.

Ferrini produced an enormous range of poetry that seemed to want to be organized into three distinct chapters and styles that roughly matched the phases of his life.

During his life, Ferrini published more than 30 volumes of poetry, including an autobiography written largely in verse and volumes of verse that seem more political and social criticism than poetry.

At his death, another volume, “Invisible Skin,” is being prepared for publication in the spring, Sheila said.

Ferrini’s blurring of the distinction between poetry and prose was intentional, Anastas, a former Times columnist, insisted yesterday. He theorized that Ferrini, who was born into an anarchists’ home, from the beginning enjoyed breaking down formal structure he found unnecessary and stultifying.

“He never made a distinction between prose and poetry,” said Anastas.

Published in 1941, his first volume, “No Smoke,” is a brutal piece of eyes-open reporting on what the Great Depression, the excesses of the Industrial Age, did to the industrial city of Lynn, where he was raised.

“No Smoke” and “Know Fish,” his climactic, epic four-volume, 1,142-page rumination on the need to save the oceans and the ecology on which Gloucester was built, are widely considered his most important works, said Anastas.

The first was “very much a narrative poem,” but “Know Fish” is “a poem of fragments, written to be read in pieces, backwards as well as forwards,” Anastas commented.

According to Anastas, the first chapter of his canon could be called the “political and social” poetry, produced during his early years in Lynn. Then came the “personal” poetry of his early years in Gloucester, when he matched and shared the stage with Olson, a luminary who also expressed fierce anger at injustices but did so with a bit more finish, polish and education (Olson went to Harvard) than the more elemental Ferrini had or cared to muster.

Olson’s death in 1970 liberated Ferrini, Anastas said, to synthesize the political, social and personal elements into an expansive cosmic whole.

As his own death began to draw near, his friend Susan Frye said, Ferrini visited Olson’s grave site in Gloucester and began speaking of “pleroma,” a Greek word that literally means “fullness” but can also be understood as the dwelling place of the spirit, the nonmaterial reality that permeates all existence.

“Vincent has passed into the pleroma,” Frye said yesterday.

Vinanzio Ugo Ferrini was born in Saugus on June 24, 1913, to Christian anarchists John and Rena Ferrini, emigres from Italy. Working in the shoe factories of Lynn, they sought a better life for their children, and like many other immigrants along the industrial North Shore, saw those dreams pounded down by the Great Depression.

Ferrini had recently turned 16 when the stock market crashed. He graduated from Lynn Classical High School and without money for college, educated himself in the Lynn Public Library.

“The mightiest empire on earth is useless, stumbling on three crutches/Not even the broken down shadow of a job,” he wrote in his 1988 autobiography, “Hermit of the Clouds.”

He set out to disprove his father’s admonition that the son of a shoe worker could not become a poet, working as a teacher, joining the Communist Party and writing “No Smoke.”

The sensational nonaggression pact of August 1939 between Hitler and Stalin soured Ferrini on Soviet communism, so he quit what he called “the Church of Politics,” but not the class struggle.

He was a conscientious objector during World War II, working at the General Electric plant making airplanes

“It was not a popular decision, but he stuck by his guns,” Sheila said.

He married Margaret Duffy, a schoolteacher, in 1942, and had three children, Sheila, Owen and Dierdre. In 1948, while working at Lynn’s General Electric plant, he brought his family to Gloucester, setting up at 3 Liberty St. and opening a frame shop.

Being in Gloucester, he told the Times in 2006, “I felt an explosion in my mind ... I’m mad about the quality of a sea city.”

In the late ‘40s, the poet Charles Olson read a Ferrini poem in a small magazine, and decided to meet the writer. He first addressed the “Maximus Poems,” Olson’s opus, to Ferrini.

The rivalry proved volatile, but they seemed to need each other, as they exchanged bitter written criticisms. The University of Connecticut, which has Olson’s collected works, described the conflict as assuring Ferrini’s place “in literary history.”

It was a place of special honor with no particular financial reward.

“Ferrini gently rebukes Olson, who had swarmed upon him with perhaps unnecessary vehemence,” the commentary on the University of Connecticut’s Olson Web site reports.

Ferrini’s first marriage ended after the death of his daughter Dierdre from leukemia. He later married the artist Mary Shore. When that marriage ended in divorce, he moved to his frame shop at 126 East Main St., which was his home until his departure for the nursing home.

He often appeared at public meetings and wrote letters, in the form of poetry, to the editor of the Times to warn that “Gloucester had to be careful or it will sell itself out to the mighty dollar,” Sheila said yesterday.

She recalled that in 1963, he led the funeral procession for Dierdre around the Back Shore “so they could take one last look at the ocean.”

Along with Sheila, Ferrini is survived by his son Owen Ferrini of Gloucester, and two grandchildren, Ben and Cara Ferrini.

A celebration of Ferrini’s life will be held at a date to be announced. Requests for information may be sent to Sheila Ferrini@aol.com.

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