I started My Last Resume with the Postscript, and I’m glad I did. In this short concluding essay, Di Prisco lays out a career in and out of writing, and his starts and stops as a poet. For those unfamiliar with his work, Joseph Di Prisco has been a novelist, a poet, a memoirist, a Catholic novitiate, a professional card player, a restauranteur, a high school teacher, a Ph.D graduate, an entrepreneur, and a founder of a nonprofit literary foundation. His resume is varied, full, and fascinating. That / mark in the book’s title spans a lot of ground and a life lived in service of others, as well as the written word. Di Prisco writes, “The explanation for the arrival of any poem or poet is or is not to be found, for better or worse, in the poem itself. Beyond that, maybe nothing can account for the rupture that creates the opening for a poem—or for that matter, the lifetime of a poet represented in his Collected Poems.” I was struck by the word rupture, and I realized Di Prisco’s collected works kept bringing me back to the joy and wisdom of the momentary, as eloquently championed by Robert Frost in his 1939 essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Frost writes, “Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” This is an apt way to enter the world of My Last Resume.
