A full life, shaped by water and words

The Salem Film Fest concludes tonight with a documentary about Gloucester poet Vincent Ferrini, who died in December. (HENRY FERRINI/2007)

Growing up during the Depression, Vincent Ferrini disdained high school in favor of his self-assigned studies in the public library. He called it his "university."

"Students are explorers," he suggested. "They have to do it on their own."

That insight is pinned to the office bulletin board of UMass-Boston English professor Dorothy Nelson, a close friend of Gloucester's long-term poet laureate, who died Christmas Eve at age 94.

"There was always something to learn from talking with him," says Nelson, who will be one of several readers paying tribute to Ferrini tonight at Cinema Salem, on the closing night of the Salem Film Fest. The event follows a screening of "Poem in Action," an award-winning documentary of Ferrini's life made by his nephew, filmmaker Henry Ferrini.

Though he was synonymous with Gloucester, Vincent Ferrini was born and raised in Lynn; his first book of poetry, 1941's "No Smoke," addressed the hardscrabble lives of the city's shoe-factory workers - his father's peers. But when he moved to Gloucester, he became one with the city.

"He was a big man in a small town," says Willie Alexander, the longtime Boston-area rock 'n' roll fixture who will also pay tribute tonight. "He was this great, twinkling presence. To me he looked like Henry Miller and sounded like W.C. Fields."

A kind of competitive brother to that other Gloucester poet, Charles Olson (who addressed his first so-called "Maximus" poems to Ferrini), the poet laureate believed he was born to write about his adopted fishing city.

"I'm a Cancer, moon in Pisces," he said in an interview in 2005. "All water. It was inevitable."

He published more than 40 books, including the 1988 autobiography "Hermit of the Clouds" (which opened with the audacious statement, "I was thrust out of my mother's womb with a pencil in my left hand") and the 2004 collection "The Whole Song." As the film title "Poem in Action" suggests, Ferrini liked to think of his entire existence as a "living poem."

"I live, and the poems come shooting out," he said.

For decades the poet, twice divorced, made his home in a one-room building near the waterfront, conducting his framing business at a huge table in the front. The tiny house was stuffed with books and art.

"It was almost a museum - what he chose to display and why," recalled Nelson. Plans are underway to make the home into a writer's retreat.

Even in his final months, Ferrini moved into a nursing home in Rockport, he retained his fierce independence. He refused to use a cane, said Nelson. Just before checking in to the home, he wrote a brief poem condemning the war in Iraq. "He knew the power of language," said Nelson. "Never a wasted word."