When Can I See You Again: New Art Writings

by W.S. Di Piero

Literary Nonfiction. Art. WHEN CAN I SEE YOU AGAIN is a collection of the poet and essayist's recent short art writings on subjects ranging from Morandi to Rembrandt to Pre-Columbian marine animal amulets. Di Piero has great zest for looking and a prose style equal to what he sees.

300 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2010

About the author

William Simone Di Piero was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and earned degrees from St. Joseph’s College and San Francisco State College. A poet, essayist, art critic, and translator, Di Piero has taught at institutions such as Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, and Stanford, where he is professor emeritus of English and on faculty in the prestigious Stegner Poetry Workshop. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, Di Piero was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2012.

Di Piero’s poetry is known for its gritty realism. Populated with characters and settings reminiscent of the South Philadelphia neighborhood of his boyhood and the Italian-American working-class families he grew up with, Di Piero’s poetry frequently makes use of colloquial language and diction.

An award-winning translator of Italian poetry, Di Piero’s first translation, Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri, was nominated for a National Book Award. Other translations include Sandro Penna's This Strange Joy, which received the Academy of American Poets Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, Leonardo Sinisgalli's The Ellipse (1982) and Night of Shooting Stars (2011), and a translation of Euripides’s Ion.

W.S. Di Piero has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Eric Xia]

Great book. Gave it to the wrong person

[Lyra Montoya]

I read the first half or so and haven't finished it but I do think I got the insight I wanted from this book. Maybe I'll come back to revisit it at some point.

What captivated me about this writing is that the art di Pierro writes about are extant and real and clearly defined, yet to me having never seen them or even heard of some of the artists, they exist in a solely fictive state. The relationships between experience and the fictive were really interesting to me to explore in this writing, with some of the artists familiar and some not.

There is an overall air of stillness in the writing that signals to me the aesthetic incompatibilities between me and di pierro. The art and the exhibit are somehow static, and unchanging in a way that I don't personally view as the state and affect of art. Seeing and reading these aethetic differences was really insightful.

[Keston Ellars]

This one took me a minute. I am quite new to art readings and spent a lot of time going between wikipedia pages of artists and Di Piero's criticisms. He doesn't write with a pretentious tone which I found to be quite admirable, especially for a book on the lucrative art world. I didn't feel intimidated, I got to investigate art on my own time!