Bruce Ario’s Selected Poems (1980 – 2022) is now available for purchase from AUTOMACHINATION publishing. It features a major, 150-page essay from his literary executor, Dan Schneider, examining Bruce Ario’s life and work. Our film, From There To There: Bruce Ario, the Minneapolis Poet, is also available for streaming on Patreon. You can watch the film’s latest trailer on our YouTube channel or learn more about the film here. The first part of Dan Schneider’s introduction to Bruce Ario as writer is reproduced below:
*****
Introducing Bruce Ario
The Man
Bruce Ario was a poet, and this essay will argue and prove that he was a great poet, for I am here to introduce Bruce Ario to the average poetry reader and into the pantheon of great poets.
Of course, like all things in life, he was also many other things: a writer of plays, novels, articles, essays, journals…. He was a friend, brother, son, employee, volunteer…. He was the survivor of a traumatic car accident and brain injury (TBI), mentally ill—and an exponent for that ill, an alcoholic, drug addict, sexual fetishist, and a formerly homeless person. He was a Born Again Christian, and a lifelong bachelor—not necessarily by choice—but most of all he was a poet: a great poet. Despite his varying senses of self, being a poet—and a Christian—were the two Twin Towers of Bruce’s life.
In the rest of this essay I will refer to Bruce Ario simply as Bruce, as I and all about him knew him; not in the impersonal sense of Ario. Bruce lacked pretense and was personable to all he met, so referring to him by his first name seems correct and natural. Besides, as Bruce was the creator and master of the ario poetic form, which I shall show, and which will become manifest in this selection of his best poems, that word is far more cogent as a poetic form than a surname. Oh, I’m also the person that named the form after the man.
I knew Bruce for almost 30 years, having met him in 1993—either at a poetry reading at a long defunct cafe called the Coffee Gallery, at the southwestern corner of Franklin and Lyndale Avenues, in Minneapolis, or at a Saturday morning poetry group called Ophelia’s Pale Lilies. I cannot recall which venue was the actual genesis of our artistic acquaintance and friendship, but it was one of those two. Bruce had been born and grown up in the city of Minneapolis, and its surrounds, and loved the city like he only also loved God and Bob Dylan. St. Paul? Eh…. Bruce was one of many Minneapolitans who rarely ventured to their city’s twin. Of course, he did not drive, because of his accident, had no license, and bus schedules between the cities, even in the 1990s and early 2000s, were somewhat sketchy. In late 2003 I and my wife Jessica Schneider, after some personal and professional setbacks, moved from the Twin Cities area and down to Texas.
I had run the Uptown Poetry Group (UPG) for 8 years, at that point, meeting every 2nd and 3rd Friday of the month, and we ended it with 200 consecutive meetings in toto. Other than myself, who went to all 200 meetings, Bruce was the most steady UPGer, attending 180+ meetings. Overall, the UPG was unique amongst poetry groups, in the Twin Cities, or elsewhere, for we actually practiced good, fair criticism. If a poem was bad we openly stated so, explained why, and this sometimes led to people coming and going, because most arts critique groups are less about critique, and more about the participants needing an ego boost, or people just trying to use them as de facto singles groups. No poetry group I’ve ever been a part of elsewhere came close to the UPG’s ability to produce great poetry, by individuals like me, Jess, Bruce, Don Moss, Art Durkee, Dave Nelson, Robert Newkirk, and a number of others. That’s because I set the tone for both critical and poetic quality that defined the group as something different and better than other poetry groups. Many poets, including Bruce, hit their zenith in the art form while going to the UPG, and Bruce seemed to maintain that quality, and improve on it, in later poems. His pre-UPG corpus is far inferior to those poems written during the UPG’s run (1995-2003) or even well after its end. In his last decade, it seems Bruce’s poetic batting average increased, as quality work made up a larger percentage of his output. Not only that but all his post-UPG poems were better initially formed. The greats were still great but his lesser poems were also much better than earlier non-great poems. They had a higher floor of sound fundaments, if not ceiling; and this became evident not long after the bulk of this book was done, when I hired someone to look into Bruce’s PC so I could uncover more of his verse. What I found will be contained in a second book of poems I will call Final Poems, and includes 198 more poems; including 9 more great arios. But few poets ever want to work hard enough to improve, especially if they have real talent. They often just try to cruise and end up wasting their gifts. Bruce didn’t mind working on his poetry, and while he rarely changed direct criticisms of poems proffered, he sometimes did embody the critique and employed them in later poems he wrote. But, Bruce’s most famous poems, in terms of those talked of in the UPG and other circles where Bruce was known as a poet, were those that were featured on Cosmoetica’s UPG page.
Jess and I, however, were not the only folks leaving the Twin Cities. Inside of 6 months of our departure, Bruce was the only original and core UPGer left in the Twin Cities, and from what he told me, he bounced around from bad poetry group to bad poetry group, often lamenting that none of them came close to the UPG in terms of quality poems and criticism, even as Bruce often fucked up his own poetry in order to please whatever groups and people he interacted with—a negative trait of people-pleasing that led to the later bowdlerization of his great novel Cityboy, by a vanity press he hired in the 2010s, as well as an incident at a UPG meeting, wherein the idiotic owner of the place where Bruce worked, the Steeple People thrift store, where we held the group quite often, illegally towed one of my cars after years of allowing UPGers to park in its parking lot. We sued the owner and easily won the towing costs back, but Bruce was too scared to testify that we had always been allowed to park there after the owner threatened his job. Over the years since that incident, Bruce expressed regret for not having stood up and told the truth, but we forgave him, as this was simply how Bruce was. It was also one of the reasons, aside from poetry and personal issues, why Bruce admired me—I stood up for things and to bullies, even if it cost me; which it often did in art, life, and work. Bruce did not really stand up for things, and this was why and how many people, in and out of the arts, took advantage of his nice people-pleasing nature, and occasional inability to process things in a normal manner.
This brings me back to the subject of the vanity press Bruce got involved with late in his life. They bowdlerized his great novel, Cityboy, to such a degree that Jessica and I will have to restore the novel to its original state, as the third step in establishing Bruce’s literary merit and reputation, after the release of these Selected Poems, and his Final Poems. The mutilation started with the novel’s title, which changed from Cityboy to City Boy, for no real reason, and which is especially egregious considering the main character’s identity is totally tied up in the city of Minneapolis, hence the merged word and title makes sense. Even the subtitle given the book, as A Memoir, is wrong, as the book is clearly not a memoir, but a novel, a roman a clef, for the main character is named John Argent, Jr., not Bruce Ario, and while there are many parallels to Bruce’s real life in his novel, there are also significant parts, perhaps a third of the book, that are fiction, as told to me by Bruce himself. Then there is a bad opening paragraph added before the original ending, which utterly mutes the original version’s great, poetic, and gripping start—typical of the edits and additions that altered Bruce’s very vision of the work. There are numerous other additions that are typical MFA hackery, such as explaining too many things in the narrative to make obvious things painfully obvious, overdescriptions just for the need to ‘unpack’—an MFA weasel word—a work for the illiterate; things wholly added to the original great novel, things which often mute Bruce’s clarion voice and genericize the work, including, especially, the memorable beginnings and ends of many chapters. The book’s last page, mirroring the bowdlerized start, has even more larding on of unneeded and generic writing that makes the original version’s great ending something far less than it was. Fortunately, the same PC that unlocked Bruce’s Final Poems also led me to an annotated text by the vanity press that included specific changes guided by constant references to (ugh!) the wretched and inane Chicago Manual of Style.
Over the last few years of his life, Bruce, in talks and emails, often regretted letting the vanity press destroy his great novel. Jessica recalls that Bruce once said, ‘I don’t know how I let them talk me into changing my book,’ to which I comically replied, ‘They used words, Bruce, they used words;’ only to have Bruce sigh in disgust of himself and his people-pleasing nature. Jess and I will, though, right this great literary wrong done to Bruce, just as this essay and book will right the wrong of Bruce’s poetic neglect. But, let me be clear, as great a novel as Cityboy is, it is Bruce’s poetic corpus and place in world poetry history that is the foundation of his literary output and reputation. Above all, Bruce was a poet first—a great poet. All the rest is, as the saying goes, just icing on the cake. This book will ultimately and definitively rest on my making the case that Bruce Ario is one of not only the English language’s greatest poets, but one of the world’s greatest poets.
To return to the issue of the UPG’s end, though, after the lawsuit, the UPG started rotating venues between participants’ personal homes and public places, like coffee shops and book stores, and this fact also led to the eventual end of the group; not to mention that from 1995 to 2003, the UPG’s lifespan, poetry went from one of its periodic upswings in cultural consciousness back to near oblivion; hence there were less people writing poetry about town.
After we moved, Bruce stayed in touch with Jess (whom he always had a crush on) and me via my Cosmoetica email list, and, later, Skype. A few times I did video interviews and shows with Bruce for my Cosmoetica and Alex Sheremet’s automachination YouTube channels. Bruce was, in a sense, always there in our lives, as if just around the corner—and yes, as he aged he put on some weight and his posture and intellect suffered a bit. Fortunately, after the debacle of the vanity press’s horrid editing of Cityboy, Bruce seemed to realize that he was not the person capable of making literary decisions about his work, and, along with his religion, this was paramount to him, as Bruce rightly viewed himself as a representative of not only himself but of all mentally ill people. He desperately wanted his work to survive him, to show that the mentally ill could be productive citizens, and he knew that, as I once said, I would take better care of his work than he could. Bruce therefore made me his literary executor, rather than a family member.
This choice proved all too true and cogent when, on the 6th day of August 2022, Bruce somehow fell in his own condominium, hit his head, likely on his radiator, bathtub, or bath counter, according to his kin, and never saw the light of living again. Ironically, when I later hired a computer tech to get into Bruce’s PC I not only found more poems (as elaborated upon in other parts of this essay) but a June 2022 bill for new glazed bathroom floor tiles—meaning, more shiny and slippery than most, as opposed to the tiles Jess and I have, which are rough and slip resistant; ironically meaning Bruce likely slipped and died on a new bathroom floor less than 2 months after paying for its installation. The 6th was a Saturday, and the next day, a Sunday, Bruce did not show up to his beloved church service at the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church. The day after that he failed to show up at his mailroom job with Tasks Unlimited. Bruce’s surviving family was contacted and they, and the property representatives, entered his condo and found Bruce’s body, as well as a very disheveled living quarters, accompanied by a foul smell. This led to the building owner coming in and tossing stuff, as he had the condo cleaned. It is unknown what, if any, of Bruce’s artistic works, may have been purged in the initial cleanup. What was left of Bruce’s work—written, typed, digital, and his desktop PC—was sent to me by his brothers. I already had a good bulk of Bruce’s most valued writings sent to me by him on CD and online. In looking over these poems, which ranged from doggerel to great, I again feel I was always in Bruce’s presence. Not that he was ever far—just an email or phone call away; but in these poems many things I thought about Bruce were confirmed, while others were revelations.
But, before I get too far afield from the man, himself, I reprint herein the obituary published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and other venues, by his family, with minor alterations:
Bruce Dwayne Ario, age 67, of South Minneapolis, died unexpectedly after falling at home on August 6, 2022. Bruce was born on April 29, 1955 in Virginia, MN, the second of four boys born to Frank and Georgette Ario.
Bruce spent most of his childhood in the Washburn High School neighborhood. Bruce graduated from the University of MN with an economics degree in 1978 and attended the University of Minnesota Law School, though his struggles with mental illness prevented him from completing his final year.
Bruce lived a remarkable life despite his illness. After a traumatic brain injury in 1979, caused by a serious car accident, Bruce struggled to find appropriate mental health services and went without effective treatment and medication for five years, during which he endured bouts of homelessness while pursuing his legal studies. He hit bottom in 1984 and finally found the therapy and medication he needed to turn his life around.
Bruce went on to become both a beneficiary and public advocate for Tasks Unlimited, where he led various work teams for the last 35 years of his life and won multiple awards, including the John K. Trepp Innovator of the Year Award in 2013 for ‘creative thinking that carries on the spirit of the Fairweather philosophy to help people reclaim their lives from the limitations of mental illness.’ He was a frequent public speaker for Tasks, NAMI, NASW, law enforcement, and other groups on how best to understand and support people with mental illness.
In his spare time, Bruce wrote poetry, plays and novels (his four novels are available on Amazon), and frequently read from his work at local writer workshops. He also ran seven marathons in the 1990s, learned karate, managed a used clothing charity, made mission trips to Haiti and India, and was a lay leader at the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church.
Bruce was still going strong when tragedy struck on August 6. Bruce struck his head and died shortly after posting this on social media: ‘Greta Thunberg gives me hope.’ His remains were cremated.
Bruce was beloved by his family and loved to write poems for birthdays and other family events. He is survived by three brothers, Joel (Diana), David, and Kevin (Paula), and six nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, Frank and Georgette.
A memorial service will be held at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, 511 Groveland Avenue, on Friday, August 26 with visitation at 10:30 AM and Service at 11:00 AM followed by a light lunch. Memorials preferred to Hennepin Avenue UMC or Tasks Unlimited. Condolences, memories, and photos welcome to the guestbook: startribune.com.
Note the typical way the most important and memorable part of Bruce’s life is handled in the obituary: In his spare time, Bruce wrote…. Of course, this is how such things go with artists. His family had no idea of Bruce’s stature as a poet and writer, good nor bad, and had I not been appointed his literary executor, who knows what would have become of Bruce’s great verse, and other works of varying quality that avoided possible trashing? That stated, my dealings with his kin have been positive, and hopefully when this book is available for purchase they will recognize that Bruce is as intimately tied to his time and place as any other artist has ever been tied to a time and place.
Bruce Ario is THE Minneapolis Poet!
Art, writing, and poetry, especially in his ario form, is THE most important thing Bruce ever did. Yes, Bruce was a good man, and religious, but no one would know of him for that alone. His art, though, is his immortality, and I will demonstrate this in the bulk of this essay. In fact, all great artists become their art. Many a man has been good and religious. Many a man has been the fan of a pop icon—in Bruce’s case, Bob Dylan. But only Bruce invented the ario. Bruce made up a de facto 10-line free verse sonnet form I dubbed the ario, which narratively often mirrors the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet form with its 3-3-3-1 vs. 4-4-4-2 stanza line formatting. In a sense, this unique form may one day even prove as important a technical breakthrough in poetry as Walt Whitman’s long lined breathiness which birthed all of Modern Poetry across the globe. More on the import of Bruce’s poetry in a bit, though.
Bruce was not merely an artist, nor a victim of circumstances; he was also human. I have listed some of his flaws and foibles, and many of his poems written over about a 40-year period or so, display these. Bruce himself was not sure when he actually started writing poems and other genres. What was his first adult poetic effort is a mystery, but given what his obituary claims, and from what Bruce said to me and others, I am pretty sure his start was after he got into therapy and off of living on the street. It is worth noting that Bruce had a rather dim view of the bulk of the mental health profession, as he felt many of his doctors (some court-appointed) were quacks, or cruel, or utterly uncaring; but he did what they said, more often than not, and he slowly recovered his sanity and semblance of well-being. Poetry was just a part of that part of his life. To his credit, though, poetry was NOT just therapy, as it is in many other bad poets’ works. Bruce transcended art as therapy into art—great art—ever so slowly, and with a resistance from within, as well as without.
While there may have been some germs of Bruce’s verse before 1984 (hence why this book’s Selected Poems are dated back to 1980, to be more inclusive), I think 1984 was the first year Bruce would look at himself as both a Born Again Christian and a poet. But, Bruce was almost 30 when he took off into the arts. That he achieved greatness at all is incredibly rare, especially given his addictions and mental woes, and that he did so with such a late start is alone is even more remarkable as anyone who has been as immersed in the arts as I have for almost four decades knows that most artists peak in their early to mid-30s, and then soon drop off and just repeat themselves till death. Bruce, however, got better with age. As I mentioned, virtually every steady and long-term member of the UPG did improve, with the best of their work occurring during or after the UPG years. While Bruce’s insecurities and damnable desire to please others often led him to allow a work—novel, play, poem—to be bowdlerized by a know-nothing, he also was writing more and more small collections of verse, and poems of quality. Yet Bruce could write a great ario, then write 20 pieces of doggerel in a row, and not fully understand why one was great and the others terrible and trite.
This Selected Poems, therefore, is unlike any other published in that I will use this book as Walt Whitman wanted: to help build great audiences for great poetry—Bruce’s, and hopefully others. The poems are divided into 4 sections: great arios (46), great non-arios (8), publishable arios (265), and publishable non-arios (59), for a total of 378 poems. I have decided that, since the poems Bruce sent me digitally when he appointed me literary executor (as well as those written in ink, magic marker, in notebooks, on old computer printouts from the 80s and 90s, and so forth, tallying 800 or more poems) work so well, this will be his Selected Poems volume of quality poems. The aforementioned later poems I discovered on his PC will be a Final Poems volume, making the total 576 poems, 63 of which are great.
The poems herein are not arranged via collection nor date of writing—hard to pin down specifically, other than broad eras based on the medium the poems were written on, but by movements of theme, style, and other things. They are generally in this volume due to quality, although a few merely passable poems are included to give the reader a broader view of Bruce’s life, thus aiding in the appreciation of the rest of the poems, as well. No bad poems appear here, although there are clichés that are in poems that overcome or undermine them with subversive tactics—barely or well—in ways I will demonstrate.
As for the personal aspects the poems reveal, let me briefly speak of three aspects that I will go into greater detail in when I speak of the poems themselves. All of them revolve around sex. As far as I know, Bruce was wholly heterosexual, but even before his accident he had a rough go of it with the opposite sex. This manifested itself in Bruce’s fetish for women’s nylon legwear. From what I recall, Bruce, at his low ebb, sometimes indulged in pornography and prostitution, and this led him to the discovery of women’s nylons. Not that he was indulging in transvestism, he just, as he said several times to me and Jess, liked the feel of nylons on his legs. The funny thing is Bruce would always say this and look at us and then look down or away. But we never judged him on this harmless indulgence. As he aged, and we had long accepted Bruce’s fetish with no care of it, Bruce seemed to still feel queasy over it, as if it was a personal failing he was eternally vexed by; yet he still wrote poems of it, which he knew would be in the public domain. He would send an email or post about it—and other personal and familial matters—on social media, then remove them. He would write me long and odd emails trying to psychologically justify the fetish, as if it mattered to me. It did matter to Bruce, though. Maybe he was able to quell his urges only by explaining or damning them to people he knew would not label him a pervert or worse.
During the same era that he developed his women’s nylons fetish, Bruce also got into far more troubling things: drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes—no pun intended. He spoke of these endeavors sometimes openly, and other times with more circumspection. Seeing his final years, and how Bruce’s body and mind seemed to decay, I am certain that these things ever affected Bruce, even as he was drug-free and sober the last few decades of his life. These things affect the body adversely, and even later abstinence cannot heal the damage caused completely. I think of the death of writer and Nuyorican Slam Poet, Maggie Estep (1963 – 2014), an old friend and acquaintance from my New York art days, by heart attack at just 50 years old, and recall all the alcohol and drugs she took in her youth, see later photos of her bodily decay, aged far beyond her years, and know it likely played a large role in her premature death by weakening her body and heart, even as other so-called friends and acquaintances glossed over such failings. I got the same deteriorating vibes in mind and body from my last few years of dealing with Bruce.
Then, after finding poetry and God—and I will maintain that THAT is the correct order for Bruce’s life’s latter half’s import—there came his great loneliness. Bruce’s poems, often his best, qualitatively, subjectwise, and so forth, are dominated by aloneness, lonesomeness, and loneliness, especially in his best poems, and often tucked neatly under more seemingly joyous themes. This abject, sexual, and existential loneliness is embodied in a publishable ario called In The Bushes, wherein mid-poem, Bruce declares: I haven’t had sex for 30 years. / There has to be a happy medium. Having known and spoken with Bruce, I feel this was not just a poetic statement, as this is a later poem, and its sentiment just feels true, however sad. Moreso than sexlessness, though, Bruce yearned for true and romantic love. Was his fervor for religious love a substitute for sexual/romantic love? Almost assuredly. Even Bruce would likely admit so.
I stated above that aloneness, lonesomeness, and loneliness dominated Bruce’s best poems. Ironically, yet predictably, God dominated his worst and unpublishable poems—well, God and women. Despite being a Born Again Christian, Bruce was not a great formally religious poet in the manner of John Donne (1572 – 1631), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889), nor Countee Cullen (1903 – 1946). He was, instead, a great spiritual poet, and much of what masques as religious poetry in his oeuvre is quite secular in its approach to what many would term sacred. His spiritual poems are generally more sacred and much better wrought than his overtly religious Christian poems.
Yet, through it all, in most ways, Bruce Ario lived, he thrived, through terrible times; be it what his brain inflicted on him, what addictions left him, or through the long decades of lovelessness—at least in the sexual realm. I know that Bruce would have preferred a life as a husband and father, even at the cost of most or the whole of his artistic achievement, but that was not to be. For the culture of the world, at least, I am grateful Bruce lived the life he lived, even at the personal costs I have mentioned. The truth is that the car accident likely irrevocably altered Bruce. Without it, and the changes wrought to his brain, I fully believe the world would not recall Bruce as a poet, much less a great one, for he would never have been a poet. The very thing that robbed Bruce of any chance at personal joy and fulfillment made him an instrument and also a creator for art’s and poetry’s power. The cognitive limits the accident forced upon Bruce made him utilize other ways to see and think of all the cosmos offered—and some of them were better ways! Call it what you will, but that instinct or intuition came to the forefront and made him hit and miss in verse, because reason was less important—yet when he hit, he really hit it!
In some ways, Bruce was a living embodiment of the term that English poet John Keats (1795 – 1821) proffered: Negative Capability. Generally thought of as the way Keats described it as ‘….being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,’ I have refined the term to mean what is more explicit in art: when an artist is able to see connections between things and ideas that most people, those sans creativity, cannot, yet which, after being pointed out, seem obviously connected to even the least creative, as if the connection had always been made.
This was Bruce. He may have personally lost the battles of life, but the poetic war was now his to win, and this book is the study of how Bruce did win, and how even his personal losses better all who read this book.
Yes, Bruce Ario thrived in the arts in ways he could not in life.
This book is the first step in making his art thrive after his death.
And Bruce did thrive in the arts by becoming something else I neglected to mention in this essay’s opening. He became a weirdo. Well, specifically a weirdo poet, and in a bit I shall explain that and compare him with other notable weirdo artists and poets.
But first, and most importantly, it is important to take a look at some of the poems that plant Bruce Ario’s flag on a soil that only a few dozen others in human history can claim.
That of simply great poet.
Excelsior!
The Poems
Let us now look at the body of Bruce Ario’s poetic corpus, and how and why I can easily make a claim for Bruce’s greatness as a poet, and likely his place, at minimum as a Top 20 to 25 English language poet of all time…
[Read the rest of the essay and read Bruce Ario’s poems by purchasing the book here.]