Gianna Patriarca is a poet I've admired for such a long time. I remember in my undergrad years at University of Toronto we were taking a course that heavily included her work, and I was blown away by her way of writing. She said the things that other poets were coy about, or referred to only tangentially. Not Gianna. She has her laser vision set on that thing, and she's going to say it directly, at whatever cost.
Recently, I learned that Gianna Patriarca was having a poetry reading and a book launch at the Columbus Centre, and I thought, "Here's my chance". I called up my longtime friend John Robert Colombo, asked him if he'd like to attend, and even offered to be the chauffeur, to sweeten the deal. He accepted, we marked our calendars in pen, and on the appointed evening we headed over to the Columbus Centre. It has been one of the cultural meccas in Toronto for decades, and it is located very near the street on which the Colombo family lived, so it was their neighbourhood social club. John Robert knows everybody in the poetry world, and of course he knew Gianna, too. She used to visit him and his late wife Ruth at their home, and she adored the pair of them. It was mutual.
I dropped John and his friend, Ann Cameron, at the entrance to the Columbus Centre's art gallery, where the poetry reading was held, and went to park the car. Oof. To misquote Shakespeare's Romeo: "Parking is such sweet sorrow". There is a massive parking lot at the Columbus Centre, and I had no idea where on earth I had parked my tiny white car; I just abandoned it in some random "reserved" spot and rushed back to the art gallery where I'd left my friends. The place was packed. We got seats for ourselves in the second row, mostly due to my telling a seated audience member, in the voice of authority: "my friends would like to be seated in this row, but it will not be possible for them to reach their seats unless you stand up and make it possible for them to do so", accompanied by a look of steely determination. It worked.
Watching Gianna on stage was magical. She's like a floodlight. She lit up the stage, and it was easy to tell that Gianna Patriarca is a born performer. Ciociara/?/Canadese is her 13th book of published poetry - an auspicious number, if you are from Italy - and the very enthusiastic audience came out in numbers that evening to celebrate the birth of a book of poems that were written first in Ciociara, the Ceprano dialect, in standard Italian, and in English. Gianna had that audience eating out of her hand. She used the performer's trick of timing her performance just short of what her audience had come to hear, leaving them hungry for a little more. When she concluded, and left the stage, I slipped up to where she was standing and introduced myself, telling her how much her poetry had affected me. My friend John Robert Colombo sauntered up after me; he moves in a more measured way, but as soon as her eyes locked on him, her arms were open and she welcomed him with loud affection. It was glorious.
On the strength of that encounter, I emailed her the following day and invited her to lunch. Yesterday, that lunch took place and they were pretty much turning off the lights in the restaurant by the time we stopped talking. Gianna very kindly brought me a gift: three of her books that I hadn't yet read, in which she wrote inscriptions, and honestly, I haven't had my nose out of them all my waking hours since.
I'm a fairly reserved person normally. I don't just go up to super-accomplished people I've just met and invite them out to lunch. Well, maybe I do nowadays, but that's a function of getting older, no longer taking myself seriously, and frequently hanging out with people of every age other than my own.
This woman is a force, and I am so glad I met her. I already have a long list of things that I forgot to ask her, or didn't have enough time, but there's always next time. And there will be a next time.
