Joe Cardarelli

Joe Cardarelli (1944–1994) was a poet, painter, graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and teacher of writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art for 27 years. Cardarelli pushed generations of MICA artists to incorporate writing into their creative repertoire, and regularly collaborated with his faculty colleagues on projects and performances.^{[citation needed]} He is noted for establishing poetry series such as the Black Mountain poets, St. Valentine’s Day Poetry Marathon, and the Spectrum of Poetic Fire at MICA.^{[citation needed]}

In his “Black Mountain Poets” series in 1983/84, he gathered material for a documentary video, Black Mountain Revisited — a historically invaluable collage of interviews and readings given by Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, and Jonathan Williams — in the case of Duncan and Oppenheimer, some of their last readings on record.^{[citation needed]}

Known as the “Godfather of Baltimore Poetry,” he died at the age of 50 in 1994.^{[citation needed]}

A poem that Joe contributed to Andrei Codrescu’s and Laura Rosenthal’s anthology American Poets Say Goodbye to the Twentieth Century (New York, 4 Walls 8 Windows, 1996) ends with the following lines:

• Phantom Pod, (Hollo, Joe Cardarelli, and Kirby Malone. Baltimore: Pod Books, 1977.)
• The Maine Book – Selected Poems
• Black Mountain revisited. Cardarelli, Joe; Skipper, Jim; Maryland Institute, College of Art, and Viridian Productions, producers. [Baltimore, Md.]: Viridian Productions of the Maryland Institute, College of Art; 1990. 1 videocassette (54 min.)
• KUMQUAT #3 (Hewitt, Geof, Editor, Enosburg Falls, VT: Kumquat Press, 1971. 52 pp.)

• Spectrum of Poetic Fire archived website Cardarelli was the founder of Spectrum of Fire
• Anselm Hollo on Joe Cardarelli
• This Can Free