Carson Cistulli



Carson Cistulli (born December 23, 1979) is an American poet, essayist and English professor. His works of poetry include Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated, Assorted Fictions, and A Century of Enthusiasm.

Early Years
Carson Cistulli was born December 23, 1979 in Concord, New Hampshire to Philip Cistulli Jr. and Holly Young. Carson passed his early childhood in a middle class Italian-American home until his parents' divorce in 1994. Rather than choosing to live with one or the other of his parents Cistulli left for boarding school at Milton Academy in Massachusetts.

Education
After graduating from Milton in 1998 he attended Columbia University where he studied under poet Kenneth Koch of the New York School of poetry. After his studies under Koch, he moved to Seattle to write. He would later receive a bachelors degree in Classical Civilizations from the University of Montana in Missoula and a master's degree in Creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Panic Attacks
In an essay about sports and aesthetics, "A Lengthy Meditation on Baseball and the Science of Happiness," Cistulli explained that part of his turn towards writing was a therapeutic response to anxiety attacks. Cistulli wrote that these attacks became so intense that he at times struggled to breathe: "During the fall of 2001, while living in Missoula, MT, I began experiencing some symptoms of generalized anxiety: occasional tightness or pain in the chest and limbs, invasive thoughts about death and illness [...] those symptoms persisted off and on into the next spring, at which time I developed a considerably less pleasant one (i.e. symptom): for long periods of time, and with no warning, I was unable to breathe involuntarily".

A biographical reading of his poetry highlights echos of these experiences, death, disease -- "At some point you'll die of a) cancer b) heart disease[...]" -- the apparently offhand remark of breathlessness in Chapter 84 of A Century of Enthusiasm, Part III. After a lengthy meditation on enthusiasm (and a call towards listening, invocations of both the ontological argument and the ten commandments ) Cistulli writes:

Poetry
Cistulli’s work A Century of Enthusiasm begins “People of the world, allow me to introduce myself: my name is Carson Harrington Cistulli, ambassador to crunk in the Western Hemisphere”. Carson plays with context and language often mixing the vernacular with the scholastic. References to pop-culture (like the above mention of crunk) and intertextuality with scholastic figures as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson,         Sean Casey  or Emily Dickinson  occur frequently in his work. Cistulli also plays with the notions of authorship,  poetic inspiration,  and recontextualization.

Lisa Baker writes that "In a day and age when we are quick to consume the rigid definitions of relationships fed to us by those who wield power, Cistulli tutors us in language’s malleability; a new comparison, an unexpected verb in a familiar phrase can force an entirely new perspective—and perhaps one more curious and more generous."

Authorship
In his essay Let us Proclaim the Mystery of Faith Cistulli references the "ineffab[ility]" of authorship. To the question who is the author Cistulli writes that "there is no answer. Or, rather, there is no one answer". Following Borges' "whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition" Cistulli re-writes Walt Whitman's famous "I am large—I contain multitudes" as "it is large and contains multitudes." The effects of the re-interpretation of the author as multiple, fragmentary and opaque can be seen in James B. Jones review of Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated. Jones writes that reading Cistulli is “as though Rimbaud, the Boston Sports Guy, a drunken Slovene, and the director of advertising for a struggling talk-radio station all sat down for a game of exquisite corpse”.

While this review was written in 2007, it could easily have been written about Cistulli's 2010 piece A Poem with Dick Allen’s Name in It:

In this excerpt the I -- Cistulli who will elsewhere introduce himself as "Carson Cistulli. You may know from me such films as 'How Stella Got Her Groove Taken Away in the First Place' and 'Haters Gonna Hate: The Life and Times of Jimmy Stewart'." -- is lost and in its place, insofar as Cistulli will write of an author, authorship, as taking place, is the "unassailable" it writing between and beyond a stable "I" who can say 'I wrote this' (for as Cistulli writes, citing Borges, "I do not know which of us is writing this page." )

Essays and journalism
Cistulli's essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, SBNation, FanGraphs, ESPN, The Hardball Times, The New Enthusiast, RotoWire, The Huffington Post, and The Portland Sportsman. He won the FSWA 2011 basketball sports writer of the year award for his writing at Rotowire.

Sabermetrics
Cistulli has written that his interest in sabermetrics is to explore "that place where quantitative analysis and aesthetics meet" in practicing what he calls the art of sabermetrical research. Within sabermetrics he is the creator of NERD, SCOUT and historical GBz%. Cistulli has influenced many contemporary sports thinkers including Rob Neyer who, asked about the value of Cistulli's work within the sabermetric community, responded "there's value in just about everything that Cistulli does. He's got an original mind and we'll ignore him at our peril."

Feast Days
In “admir[ation]” of the Eastern Orthodox Church practice of feast days and saintly hymns Cistulli began writing verses for past and present baseball players in February 2011 with a hymn to Bug Holliday. He has since written hymns to Dazzy Vance, Honus Wagner, Sparky Anderson and Vladimir Guerrero among others. These celebrations include a traditional biography, a lyrical “prayer,” and, beginning with the feast of Liván Hernández, propose a spiritual “ritual” or “exercise” related to the player’s life.

Electronic Aphorisms
In January 2009 Cistulli decided to add "Moral Edification" to his writing at the The New Enthusiast: "in the tradition of Heraclitus, La Rochefoucauld, and Morgan Freeman in most of his later films, we have decided to experiment with that most honored form, the aphorism". In addition to these daily aphorisms he started writing aphorisms for SB Nation in March 2011.

Radio Hosting
Cistulli was previously the host of "Goal: The Soccer Show" (103.3 FM Northampton, MA) and "The Shuttlecoque Sporting Hour" (1450 AM Portland, OR.) He is currently the host of FanGraphs Audio. With FanGraphs Audio he has interviewed, among others, Matt Antonelli, Rob Nelson (inventor of Big League Chew), Dayn Perry, Jesse Thorn, and Rob Neyer.

Publications

 * Englished by Diverse Hands (2003)
 * Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books (2004)
 * Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated (2006)
 * Assorted Fictions (2006)
 * Origin, sixth series, Spring (2006)
 * A Century of Enthusiasm (2007)

Edited
• The Prostituesdays Anthology (editor, 2008)