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. 

In this volume, DI Prisco finds his muse in a wisdom gained by sorrow, by humor, by love, by learning, by exasperation, but most often by the surprises faced in life.  His rapturous works balance his continued, lifelong fascination with the many forms of writing, and how he has pursued his craft from poems, to novels, to memoirs, and back to poetry.  And while Joseph Di Prisco is nowhere near the end of his writing, there seems to be a nod back to T.S. Eliot here from “Four Quartets”: “In my beginning is my end. In succession/ Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,/ Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place/ Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.”  These poems joyfully recount journeys into what we build and what we destroy, and how it pays to keep a sense of lightness and openness to the world as you try to understand its slippery, mysterious ways through language. 

The title for this volume comes from a poem in Sightlines from the Cheap Seats (2017).  I’ll include “My Last Resume” in its entirety, so you can sense Di Prisco’s playfulness and perceptions:

When I was a troubadour

When I was an astronaut

When I was a pirate

You should have seen my closet

You would have loved my shoes

Kindly consider my application

Even though your position is filled.

This is my stash of snow globes

This is my favorite whip

This is a picture of me with a macaw

This is a song I could almost sing.

When I was a freight train

When I was a satellite

When I was a campfire

You should have seen the starburst

You should have tasted my tomato. 

I feel sorry for you I’m unqualified

This is my finest tube of toothpaste

This is when I rode like the raj on a yak

This is the gasoline this is the match.

When I was Hegel’s dialectic

When I was something Rothko forgot

When I was moonlight paving the street

You should have seen the roiling shore

You should have heard the swarm of bees. 

I love the use of anaphora throughout this poem, energizing the reader with the vast ruptures and dislocations we feel through life’s journey, from the early occupations here in troubadour, astronaut, and pirate, to the hints of melancholy in lines like: “Kindly consider my application/ Even though your position is filled.”  One other word that struck me from this opening poem was “starburst.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the new volume of poems closing this collection echoes back to stars. 

Di Prisco moves his readers carefully through his collected works—this isn’t a chronology from beginning to end.  He starts with poems from the aforementioned Sightlines (2017), then takes us back to Poems in Which (2000), from there we go back in time to Wit’s End (1975).  We conclude with The Starlike Express: New Poems (2023).  I love the flow he creates between past, present, and future here, blurring and playing with lines, which bring a sense of joy that life is never a straight and narrow line after all.  This work, like life, tacks its course with the winds and tides, back and forth across time and space.  In “Starlike” (from Wit’s End), we see the wisdom of this rapturous moments at play in these stanzas:

You have disciplined

Yourself to expect nothing, or

Only a little. Suddenly,

Everything is offered and 

Nothing suffices. You have given

Dominion back to the world.

The world ignores your gift.

You resign yourself to your

Limitations. The ocean

Mocks you. You tell yourself

I’m free. A cabdriver says,

Where to? You know how it is.

But then this morning something

Starlike enters you while

You creep in the wilderness

Between sleep and wakefulness.

Everything telescopes.

A star is sent from a great distance.

There’s a powerful beauty in the juxtapositions here, between expecting nothing and resigning yourself to mockery, to that sudden flash of almost divine intervention and a reverence for gift giving. It’s these surprises and wonders which serve as guides for the reader throughout this excellent volume.  

The final poem of the collection, “Last Leg on the Starlike,” brings us full circle from 1975’s “Starlike.” I love this line particularly: “You lift an arm—you know how it is—and wave back.”  The concluding poem depicts a train moving forward through possibilities and finding destinations elsewhere, through endless sunsets, stars, and amusements and brings us to this to these concluding lines: “…And at the Ferris wheel top/ It has to be you, holding your breath before the drop.”  I was struck with the moments of rupture throughout this collection, a poet surveying the ground that has been covered in those rapturous moments when we see through the existential questions of life, and quite simply, present the reader with some wit and wisdom to weather the rises and drops as we all compile our resumes for the inevitable fall. 

***

My Last Resume: New & Collected Poems (1971-1980 | 1999-2023)
by Joseph Di Prisco
Rare Bird; 312 p. 

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