James Bertolino Introduces his GREATEST HITS: 1965-2000
by James Bertolino

Introduction to GREATEST HITS: 1965-2000, Pudding
House Publications

Sigmund Freud once said, "Everywhere I go, I find a
poet has been there before me."

When I was fifteen or sixteen I read an article about
self-hypnosis, and decided to try it. After a relaxation procedure, I began to
repeat the phrase I'd been given, and felt myself sink deeper and deeper into my body.
Within several minutes I noticed I was sinking more rapidly--it felt like wind
or water rushing by me--and suddenly it was as though I'd fallen out the bottom.
I had passed through some barrier and was floating in an immense, dark space,
like outer space, with flickering points of light. I was frightened not only
in being completely without bearings, but by a roaring which surrounded and seemed
to penetrate me. Then I understood: that vast sound was many millions of
voices, speaking in hundreds of languages. My body began to shiver with excitement,
and the physical motion quickly brought me back to my bedroom on a sunny,
Summer afternoon.

That experience was a central one for me, because it
demonstrated that the true nature of existence was quite different from how it
had been conventionally described. For over forty years I've believed there
is a transcendence possible by going into the body, just as by reaching into what is
vast and grand we come onto what is particular and personal and precious. I see
the poem as a descent into the transcendental body of language, a process that is
actual, not metaphoric--the poem as a kind of technology for both enacting and
extending the ecstatic world.

Gregory Bateson saw that the structures and syntax of
human language are of the same family as the structure and syntax of the
universe. David Abrams has argued
elegantly that through language we become co-creators
of what exists. As a poet I've tried to enact in my language everything I've
experienced, all that my imagination and intuition have described, and have
tried to exclude nothing. I believe if we give ourselves fully, poetry can bring
us into a magical, alchemical, intercourse with the world

The ancient alchemist Hermes Trismegistus has best
described the scale and inclusiveness I have always wanted for my poetry:
"Find your home in the haunts of every living creature. Make yourself higher than
all heights and lower than all depths. Bring together in yourself all opposites of
quality: heat and cold, dryness and fluidity. Think that you are everywhere at once,
on land, at sea, in heaven. Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in
the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in
the world beyond the grave. Grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and
places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together."

It has always been the work of poetry to give humanity
new images of the world, and new descriptions of what it means to exist. I
take that responsibility seriously.

Biographical Notes

James Bertolino won the international Quarterly Review
of Literature Book Award for his eighth full-length collection of poems,
Snail River. It was published in 1995 by the QRL Contemporary Poetry
Series at Princeton University. His volume First Credo was published by
the QRL Award Series in 1986. Earlier books include Precinct Kali & The
Gertrude Spicer Story, 1982, New Rivers Press (reprinted online by the
Contemporary American Poetry Archive, Connecticut College, 2001); New &
Selected Poems, 1978, Carnegie Mellon University Press; and Making Space For
Our Living, 1975, Copper Canyon Press (reprinted in 1999 by the
Contemporary American Poetry Archive). A collection titled 26 Poems From
Snail River was published in 2000 by Egress Studio Press, and Greatest
Hits:1965-2000 issued from Pudding House Publications.

His work has appeared in several hundred magazines,
including Ploughshares, Poetry, Paris Review, Epoch, Partisan Review,
Northwest Review, Seattle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Notre Dame Review,
Kansas Quarterly, Wilderness, The Amicus Journal and Organic Gardening.
His poetry is widely anthologized--recent and forthcoming anthologies from
Harper San Francisco, New Rivers Press, Pudding House Publications, Kodansha
International, University of Utah Press, Milkweed Editions, Helicon
Nine Editions, University of Akron Press and Andrews McMeel reprint
his work--and he has received many awards, including the Book-of-the-Month
Club Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship, an Ohio Arts Council grant and the Discovery Award.

Besides having been a widely published writer for 35
years, he has served as poetry editor for Abraxas, Quixote, Stone Marrow
Press, Ithaca House, Epoch, Rapport, Eureka Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, the
Cincinnati Area Poetry Project, Cornfield Review and In Context. He has
written many book reviews, as well as essays on such major figures as Thomas
McGrath and Maya Angelou (Yale University's Harold Bloom has reprinted
his essay on Angelou). His chapbook collection of prose narratives,
Goat-Footed Turtle, was published in 1996 by Stone Marrow Press.

Bertolino received his B.S. in English from the
University of Wisconsin (Oshkosh) and his MFA in poetry from Cornell
University. Teaching is how he's made his living, which has taken him to
Washington State University, Cornell, University of Cincinnati, Washington
Community Colleges, Chapman University, the Centrum Foundation, Washington State
Department of Ecology and the North Cascades Institute. For the 1998-99
school year he was a visiting professor teaching literature and creative
writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon and is currently teaching
at Western Washington University. He lives beside a mountain lake outside
Bellingham.