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Anthony Piccione died on November 18, 2001, in his cabin at Prattsburgh, Steuben County, New York State, aged 62. He was a poet and a Professor Emeritus who taught for twenty-five years at the State University of New York at Brockport (until his retirement in 1995). He founded Upright Hall: A Place for Poets in 1999. This creative centre was built on land near his Prattsburgh farm, which he and his wife, Ginny, bid for in 1997. During his career he published three wonderful books of poetry Anchor Dragging (1986), Seeing It Was So (1987) and For the Kingdom (1997), all from BOA Editions (Rochester). Anchor Dragging was specifically chosen for BOA by American poet Archibald MacLeish. Anthony Piccione was born in Sheffield, Alabama and raised on Long Island.

Regular readers of The Coffee House will know Tony’s work from the many poems and writings he contributed. We were lucky enough to publish selections of his work in four out of our six previous issues. These included the poems ‘Local Writer’, ‘Town Meeting’, ‘Standing Still in the Pole Barn’, ‘Trading Places in a Poem’, ‘His Face’ and ‘Neighbours and Exiles’ and a prose polemic (on the subject of poetry and teaching). The latter piece was titled ‘A Few Notes on Sky Climbing’ and was a piece in which he said that the important thing about what writing does for the reader happens via content: ‘what the reader is left with, alone, holding the book in his hands.’ What happened when our readers were left alone with Tony’s article in their hands was that they finished reading and wrote to me, praising a piece which seemed to sum up passions for real poetry (that go above and beyond literary theories destined for their fifteen minutes of fame). As readers responded so much to Tony’s work (American poet, Lucien Stryk, praised ‘Sky Climbing’ for its vitality), I thought a short piece celebrating his legacy was in order.

I first met Tony when I was an M.A. student at Brockport in 1985 and our friendship lasted until his death. I looked forward to his regular letters (on distinctive bright yellow paper) and the poetic energy that bubbled to the surface in them. When I first began the magazine, he wrote full of enthusiasm, advice and contributions. His ideas on what makes a poem sing still inform my choice of poems, as I look for work that moves, challenges and makes music for the reader. What I love about Tony’s poetry is its apparent simplicity and the underlying complexity of it. I think he asks the big questions (What are we doing here? What are our responsibilities?) which can be found in the works of poets such as W.B. Yeats but asks them via straightforward images from his own life.

In his poem ‘Local Writer’ he described the process of creativity, saying ‘imagination is just a remembering I from the other side, of course.’ It is this remembering from the other side that I’ll cherish about Tony’s work. He often gives wonderfully physical descriptions of ‘spiritual’ moments, such as in the poem ‘Standing Still in the Pole Barn’, where manual work results in the the poet saying ‘how strange to ache and wrestle through time I starving for home.’ He referred to poetic arrivals such as this as ‘the deep image path’. There seem to be echoes of other great American voices in his work: Thoreau, Frost, Bly and MacLeish among them, and his poems possess curiously timeless qualities. Likewise, in his teaching, this poetic ‘voice’ always rang distinct and clear.

With the founding of his poets’ centre, Upright Hall in 1999, Tony began a new phase of his career. He kept me regularly updated on ‘the hall’s’ progress and on all the readings that celebrated its opening. It is a great regret of mine that I never got to visit it. I heard of Tony’s premature death with the greatest sadness, for work left undone and in sorrow for Ginny and his children. Yet, as I sit here, writing about his poems, his ‘place for poets’ and his boundless enthusiasm for the teaching of poetry, I think of how much of value he has left behind. I also remembered a poem that he sent me (on the holly red paper he reserved for Christmas) in December 2000. This was called ‘When Love Moves Us’ and ended: ‘And, being human, we know about exile and belonging. / The way is suddenly clear. We’ll need heart, hands, feet, / and the sacrament of whatever-happens-next!’

In conclusion, I think I’ll try and recall this whenever I’m compiling issues of the magazine. I’ll think of it because it reminds me of Tony and his enthusiasm for life (as expressed on yellow paper) and also as it recalls his poetry, the gift so generously given. Perhaps it will also come to me because it reminds me of why, in the twenty-first century, it’s good to produce a little magazine and read poems that are about ‘being human’. Poems concerning life and all its revelatory moments, poems that contain the sacrament of whatever happens next.

February 2002