Harold Enrico

ABOUT HAROLD ENRICO...

Harold Enrico has written poetry since he was fourteen. He was born in 1921 in the small coal mining town of Cle Elum in the central Cascades of Washington. His father emigrated from the Canavese region in the Italian Piedmont; his mother was born in the Graian Alps, but grew up in frontier mining towns in Idaho and Washington State.

From his coal miner father, he received the education of his hands; how to make knives, metal boxes, Trapper Nelson packs, Alpenstocks, and mole-traps. He also learned to love music, to love the rivers, forests, and mountains.

His more gregarious mother gave him the human side of his education. She had many friends among the more than twenty nationalities that made up the mining town where he was born. During his boyhood, he heard as much Croatian, Polish, Piedmontese, Venetian and Lithuanian as English.

At the University of Washington, he studied music and French Language and Literature. World War II interrupted his formal education and he saw active service with the U.S. Army, 1262 Combat Engineer Battalion, in France, Belgium, and Germany. After the war, he received his M.A. in French with a thesis on Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane.

Soon after receiving his M.A., he studied for a year at the University of Pavia, Italy, at the Collegio Borromeo, on scholarship. While there, he became acquainted with Salvatore Quasimodo. On his return to the United States, some of his translations of Quasimodo appeared in The Nation.

He received the Doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington in 1970 with a dissertation on Giuseppe Ungaretti. He studied in two of the first classes which Theodore Roethke taught at the University of WA. He also studied one summer with guest poet, Louise Bogan.

The following years were spent teaching foreign languages, humanities courses, and English in various colleges -- mainly Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, Washington. He retired in 1985.

He is married to Theresa Conroy of New York City. They have five children. They reside in Roslyn, Washington.

Bio from Dog Star, by Harold Enrico, Cacanadadada Press Ltd., Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 1990, pg. 79.

LESSONS

I learn to sleep from a stone
Waking, I learn from the branches
In a bright wood.

Mornings, I go to school with the mole,
And study all afternoon with the beaver.
The hawk teaches me how to soar.
The crow lectures me in the simplest prose.

But my words are not for keeps.
Who I am is not mine to save.
The ant is less ignorant than I.
The sparrow knows more than I do.
His song has no end.

I envy the wisdom of the spider.,
The knowledge of the rose.

At night, in my dreams, I practice
What I learned all day.

c. Harold Enrico, Rip Current, 1986, pg. 75.