Growing up in Denver is its own motif. Underneath the clash or harmony of cultures, there’s always the sound of a train, no matter what corner of the city you’re in. Counterclockwise Beat meta-hero Neal Cassady’s face is among all those of local notables adorning the parking lot wall of the DCPA, and as a teenager a friend and I retraced route from the flophouse he lived in as a boy to his grammar school, Ebert Elementary, just a few blocks south of Muddy’s Java Cafe on 22nd and Champa Sts, where once a week they had an open spoken word reading. Local poet Jerry Smaldone’s collection All Flesh Shall See It Together opens with this quote from one of my personal favorites, John Fante: “To write one must love, and to love, one must understand.” (though primarily associated with Los Angeles, where the bulfk of his life and his death occurred, like Smaldone, Fante was another Italian son of Denver.)
I started going to readings at Muddy’s when I was eighteen. Smaldone was familiar with my parents’ imprint, Red Earth Press, and the anthology of Southwestern poetry edited by them. Recently another local poet I met in those day, Carson Reed, highly recommended All Flesh . . . describing it as “The best stuff about growing up in Denver ever written. “ Jerry gladly sent me an autographed copy to review, warning, “Carson’s not a critic,” and an insert reading partly, “You don’t have to read it . . . all I suggest is that you place it in a frame, preferably gold, and hang it prominently with little klieg lights playing off the gilded edge.” The same incisive wit informs the poems in this volume.
Long a dedicated participant in the round of small-press publication done for love instead of money, Gerardo Antonio Smaldone is an excellent representative of Denver’s enduring poetic consciousness. His works are carried at the Tattered Cover, and his publishing group is called Turkey Buzzard Press.
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