The Wordshaker

Home of the Brave

Scott Carrier

Society And Culture

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2020

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

His real name is Alissandru Francesco Caldiero, born into the old world on the island of Sicily, he came to the U.S. on a boat when he was nine years old, sailing past the Statue of Liberty. When I first met him, nearly 30 years later, he was screaming a Dada poem at a sandstone wall in southern Utah—repeating the same line, “This is not it,” over and over, faster and faster in a near epileptic seizure. In that moment our lives became intertwined.

I think of this story as a song, a lament for not fitting in and feeling like you can’t make sense of the world around you, which is how I’ve been feeling lately. The story was originally broadcast on NPR’s Day to Day in 2003, right around the time we went to war in Iraq.

To learn more about Alex Caldiero, check out this excellent documentary, The Sonosopher. Photos by Ashley Thalman.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	My friend Alex called Yarrow came by the other day.
0:03.3	What's going on?
0:04.4	He's a poet and a scholar, a man who knows every story that's ever been told,
0:08.8	and usually he's in a good mood, making jokes,
0:11.8	but this time he was looking like he just seen a
0:14.2	ghost I don't know or maybe he'd shot somebody you know I it's a sense of
0:18.8	frustration I apply for grants and I and I can't and I can't describe the categories I can't fit
0:26.4	the category he'd been turned down again by the Utah Arts Council you know I sing and I'm not really a singer.
0:35.0	He's missed it three years in a row now.
0:37.0	You know, I do poetry and I'm not really a poet.
0:40.0	I know the Director of the Arts Council,
0:42.0	and he told me one reason Alex's proposals get rejected
0:45.9	is because he won't call himself a poet.
0:48.8	He makes up new categories like Wordshaker and Sinosifer. This confuses the selection committee.
0:55.0	They give money to fiction writers, dancers, photographers,
0:59.0	but what's a Word Shaker?
1:01.0	You know, they have to think in sound bites. They have to think in thought
1:03.9	bites and everything has got to be two-dimensionally stated, you know, and real art and
1:11.2	real poetry is not like that.
1:13.0	Then, according to the director, there's also a problem of giving public money to individual
1:18.7	artists because the individual artists sometimes do things that upset the public.
1:24.8	The director didn't come right out and say that maybe what Alex does upsets people, and
	...

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