All Over the Place

Cassity references various places in his poetry. He advertised his penchant for wide-ranging geographies in an autobiographical blurb that he wrote for the 2007 poetry collection Devils and Islands and saved on his computer:

As usual, he is all over the place geographically. One feels he would slash his wrists before he would write a poem about any city on the traditional Grand Tour. Manaus, Campeche, Trieste, Budapest (as destroyed by Godzilla), these are his places.

This "all over the place" quality is borne out in the poems saved on the hard drive of his Compaq Presario. In fact, he titled two of his file directories "Beyond the Grand Tour":

Indeed, the Brazilian city Manaus, the Mexican state Campeche, the Italian city Trieste, and the Hungarian city of Budapest are all mentioned in the files saved on his computer. Each of the following poems mention at least one of those locations: Manaus, Campeche, Trieste, Budapest.

A Tale of Three Cities

Johannesburg, Baku, Manaus: boom towns all,
All with a boom town’s mercenary siren call
From gold, petroleum, or rubber in the wild.

[Untitled]

The festival, so called, “Of All the World,”
Spoleto-in-Manaus, mounts this year
That well known Cariocan opera
Coq d’Or.

Fishers of Men

Around the Gulf of Mexico--Campeche, Vera Cruz,
South Padre--it is Hemingway hotels that one should choose.

Amazonas.com

Outside Manaus, not to disappoint the tours,
A number of the locals have obligingly
Gone native

Elegy in the Vicinity of Duino

Outside Trieste, Castle Miramar
Is what the wilder shores of Europe are,

[...]

Thanks to D'Annunzio, not Yugoslav,
Trieste vacillates along its shore,

Eiffel without the Tower

Advanced enough to awe the Viennese
A railway terminal in Budapest

Pax Vienna

The most improbable empire, however,
Stretches from Odessa in the East
To Hamburg in the West. It takes in Graz,
Fiume, Zagreb, Budapest, Berlin,
And thirty other cities.

Free Trade in Mitteleuropa

As ceremonial as Roman rostral columns,
Trieste’s two high flagpoles front the empty sea

[...]

So Triest
Continues as Trieste, having just escaped
Becoming Trst. Outliving Yugoslavia,
Its lost “side door to Europe” waits the open door.

Devils and Islands

[Table of Contents]

The Last Tauber-Lied

Budapest