Gil Fagiani: Our Competing Attentions For The Soul & Heart

An essayist, short story writer and poet, this Tuesday night’s featured speaker at Curley’s, Gil Fagiani, has filled his ouvre with accounts of the ups and downs of close to seventy years of life, shaped at different times by discipline, despair and rediscovery.

Several of his poetry collections cover his middle class upbringing in Stamford, such as Chianti in Connecticut (Bordighera Press, 2010) and Grandpa’sWine (Poets Wear Prada, 2008; a bilingual version forthcoming, translated into Italian by Professor Paul D’Agostino of Brooklyn College). Rooks (Rain Mountain Press, 2007) concerns his military college years at Weider University in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Now living in Long Island City in proximity to the streets of his time as a heroin addict in the 1960s, Gil grew into a social activist in response to the discrimination he witnessed by the police when dealing with drug users of different backgrounds and, by his forties, found poetry and fiction the most affecting forms of communicating awareness of the injustices he saw. As he says in a 2015 New York Times interview with David Gonzalez, “You don’t change people with political rhetoric.”

Following on such titles as the state hospital-situated Serfs of Psychiatry (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Gil’s latest book from his time at a South Bronx heroin treatment center, Logos (Guernica Editions, 2015), emphasizes the need for wider understanding of the complexity of an issue too often dismissed judgmentally by extending his internal struggles (including the confusing mix of hope and potent illusions of empowerment) to those of all of us in times of crisis.

En route, and instrumental to Gil’s recovery were his rekindled ties to his heritage upon learning that the Fagianis hailed from a line of dialect-specific poets in Lanciano: “These towns in Italy were their own universes,” he told Gonzales. “When I asked someone for directions to the street named after my uncle, he started reciting one of his poems.” This has culminated in his current co-curation of the Italian American Writers’ Association, based in Manhattan.

Below is his contribution with Stephen Siciliano, reading, respectively, from Stone Walls (Bordighera Press, 2014) and The Goodfather at a 2015 IAWA event held at the Cornelia Street Café; musical accompaniment by Peter Dizozza:

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Additional Reading:

Hari, Johann, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Hart, Carl, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society (P.S.) (Harper Perennial, 2014)

Mate, Gabor, M.D., In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (North Atlantic Books, 2010)