Alex Caldiero, a Sicilian-born polymath artist who shaped words, sculpture and music, and brought the Beat Generation back to life for Utah students and art lovers, has died.
Caldiero died Monday evening at Timpanogos Regional Hospital in Orem, according to his longtime friend, bookseller Ken Sanders. Caldiero was 76.
With his bushy hair and beard, Caldiero was an electric performer of his poetry, adding music and his own noises to his words. He coined a word to describe himself: “sonosopher,” someone who combined sound, poetry and philosophy.
“Sonosophy,” Caldiero once wrote in an essay, “goes unnoticed in its quotidian manifestations, yet is ever present as an uncanny sense of things when we are most alone or most aware, such as in extreme moments of joy and terror. Thus, Sonosophy makes intelligible the absurdities that normally are deaf to our need for meaning.”
Sanders, in an email Tuesday, said “the sonosopher was one of a kind. With his passing is the extinction of an entire species, but unlike the great auk or giant dodo, this one is up close and personal.”
Caldiero published 16 books of poetry over his career, according to his website. He also performed poetry on video and audio, while his visual art was featured in galleries and museum shows from 1975 to 2003. He was the subject of a 2020 documentary, “The Sonosopher,” and appeared in other movies — most notably in Utah filmmaker Trent Harris’ “Plan 10 From Outer Space” (1995).
Harris said radio reporter Scott Carrier introduced him to Caldiero in the early 1990s, and Harris proposed shooting a video of Caldiero reciting one of his poems.
When Harris met Caldiero in Salt Lake City’s Avenues and turned on the camera, he said, the poet “started sticking feathers and a clock in his mouth, making all kinds of weird noises. I just knew at that second that we would be friends forever.”
In “Plan 10 From Outer Space,” a science-fiction sendup with beehive-headed aliens and other Latter-day Saint themes, Harris cast Caldiero as the main character’s father, “a mad Mormon poet,” Harris said.
“He was profound and surprising and funny, and he knew everything,” Harris said. “If I ever had a question about about Frank Zappa or Dante or pyramids or bees or whatever, I would just go to Alex, and he’d tell me stuff I’ve never even considered.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Alex Caldiero performs in 2010.
‘Masterful’
David Knowlton, an anthropology professor at Utah Valley University, wrote in a tribute that when he first encountered Caldiero, people dismissed his performances as entertainment, “as if he were a very serious clown.”
“I found his performance serious and intellectually engaging,” Knowlton wrote, “but even if he had been just clowning, it was masterful.”
One of Caldiero’s favorite performance poems wasn’t his. Once every five years, Caldiero would recite “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 memorial to the Beat Generation, the “angelheaded hipsters” whose minds were “destroyed by madness.”
Caldiero first performed “Howl” live in 1995, for the poem’s 40th anniversary, in a former mechanic’s garage that was repurposed as an art gallery in downtown Salt Lake City. Some years, he would perform the poem with musical accompaniment, often with friends — including Sanders — reenacting the audience reactions to Ginsberg’s first live performance.
“It was almost like he was a shaman that was performing some kind of ritual,” Harris said, adding that Caldiero’s final performance — last fall at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, to mark the poem’s 70th anniversary — may have been his best.
Ginsberg, Caldiero told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2010, “is not gone. The societal problems the poem deals with are not gone. Nothing about it is gone. In fact, it’s as if 55 years have not even passed. The degree that anyone sees this as nostalgia is the degree to which they undermine the effect of the poem for themselves.”
From Sicily to New York to Utah
Alissandru Francesco Caldiero was born in 1949 in Licodia Eubea, an ancient town near Catania, Sicily. He immigrated to the United States when he was 9 years old, settling in Manhattan and later Brooklyn. After studying at Queens College in Flushing, New York, he traveled through Sicily, Sardinia, Turkey and Greece, collecting tales, proverbs and musical instruments.
He was co-founder of Arba Sicula, a society dedicated to preserving the Sicilian language and traditions. According to his daughter, poet and professor Sara Caldiero, he wrote a book on Sicilian grammar, and “was devoted to preserving his mother tongue.”
At a party in New York in the 1970s, his daughter said, Caldiero met his future wife, Setenay, a dancer originally from Azerbaijan. They later converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because “he had a bona fide spiritual experience,” Sara Caldiero said.
The Caldiero family moved to Orem in 1980, because, their daughter said, Setenay “wanted to live in a clean, safe place and raise a family.”
Caldiero was the writer-in-residence at UVU from 2002 until his death. “He loved teaching,” Sara Caldiero said, “and touched many lives through his teaching and scholarly work.”
Alex and Setenay had five children. They include Sara and professional rock climber Isaac Caldiero, who in 2015 became the first competitor on “American Ninja Warrior” to win $1 million.
Caldiero fervently believed poetry should be a regular part of life. “Any poetry that doesn’t engage the human being, that doesn’t make you feel alive and outside yourself, is not fulfilling the role of poetry,” Caldiero told The Tribune in 2005. “Poetry has got its own agenda, and it’s a human agenda. … It’s part of who we are. It’s not something for the school or the cafe. It’s an everyday sort of thing.”
Harris shared an image from a notebook Caldiero wrote in a few days before he died. It included what may have been his last poem, which references the 14th-century poet Dante and the Italian word for “reader” — “lettore.” The poem reads:
Dante call’d to me by name
Lettore said he woke me
By such a designation
Meaning hear me you who are
Still attentive to my words
Come to that auratic realm
Vibrantly alive with the Dead
Learn to become unfound
Caldiero is survived by Setenay, his wife of 53 years; their five children; seven grandchildren; and his brother. A public celebration of life will be held on Sept. 26, his daughter said. Details have not yet been announced.