Born in Arezzo, Italy, his family immigrated to Canada in 1952. Di Cicco was brought up in several North American cities, including mong Baltimore, Maryland (USA), Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto, Ontario. In the early 1970s, he attended the University of Toronto, earning a B.A. and B.Ed. in 1973/76). While working part-time as a bartender at the university, he began to publish poems in little magazines. He wrote 13 books of poetry and in 1978 edited a volume of verse by Italian-Canadian poets, Roman Candles which became a seminal volume for the birth of Italian-Canadian literature.
His poems, consisting of deep images in stanzas of free verse - with lines consisting of irregular numbers of syllables and (hypothetical) feet - often referred to di Cicco's immigrant and Italian-family experiences. In books like Flying Deeper Into the Century (1982) and The Tough Romance (1979) he communicated a modern, sensitive awareness of the confusing welter of 20th-century life. Di Cicco's unmetrical but imagistic lines flowed on, often with cumulative power, to release their tension at the end of their stanzas. His edited a collection of Italian Canadian poetry entitled Roman Candles (1978) that inaugurated "the phenomenon of Italian Canadia writing."[2]
Di Cicco gradually felt called to a Catholic religious life. Reducing his output of verse, he spent a period in the Augustinianmonastery of Marylake, in King City, north of Toronto. He obtained a M.Div. in 1990 and was ordained a priest in 1993, subsequently serving in a number or parishes in Toronto. In the 2000s he resumed writing and publishing poems, producing Living in Paradise: New and Selected Poems (2001) and several others.
In 2004, he was chosen Poet Laureate of Toronto; he published a poem weekly in The Toronto Star Sunday newspaper. In 2004-5 he taught at the University of Toronto. "There is a marked difference between Di Cicco's early personal poems, which deal with ethnic identity, social conflict and family relationships, and his later poems about philosophical questions, spiritual ideas and broader global problems."[2] Writer and critic Joseph Pivato edited, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco: Essays on His Works (2011), an important analysis of his poetry. His last book (2018) is entitled Wishipedia.[3]
Selected bibliography
We are the Light Turning - 1976
Dancing in the House of Cards - 1977
The Sad Facts - 1977
The Circular Dark - 1977
A Burning Patience - 1978
Roman Candles - 1978 (editor)
The Tough Romance - 1979
Flying Deeper Into the Century"' - 1982
Dark to Light - 1983
Women We Never See Again - 1984
Post-sixties Nocturne - 1985
Virgin Sciences - 1986
The Tough Romances - 1990
Living in Paradise - 2001
The Honeymoon Wilderness - 2002
The Dark Time of Angels - 2003
Dead Men of the Fifties - 2004
The Visible Worlds - 2006
Municipal Minds: Manifestos for the Creative Cities - 2007
Early Voices: Flying Deeper into the Century & Virgin Science - 2009