Aquinas in Brooklyn: Frank Samperi’s “Objectivist Poetics”

Frank Samperi is a neglected twentieth-century American poet who produced a large body of poetry. Affiliated closely with Objectivist poetics through the mentorship of Louis Zukofsky, Samperi’s work is significantly influenced by the Catholic writings of Aquinas and Dante. With a commitment to linguistic self-reflexivity, an ethics of otherness, and a resistance to abstraction and identity thinking, Samperi’s work enhances and expands our understanding of the key traits of Objectivist poetics, often regarded as relying heavily on Judaic ideas and philosophies. As an Italian American Catholic, his poetry also demonstrates an immigrant’s compromise with Americanization, but an equally clear alignment with the emerging American poetic counterculture in the 1960s.