Posts Tagged ‘vulgari’
FORMA-CUBO/CUBE-FORM
In which I chat with Cris Mattison about the cube as poetic constraint and Pentecostal space of all possible rhythms—presented in tandem with relevant translations of Amelia Rosselli and my own experiments in the cube form, courtesy of Zoland Poetry.
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA RERISES,
Phoenixlike, and I am thrilled to be launching the Xs in this venerable fracas of a tome with a new entry on “xenoglossia” and the dream of a common language. To order, click to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics….
LOCOMOTRIX, POETRY, OCCUPATION
A review of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli by Marco Giovenale appeared in last Thursday’s Il manifesto, one of the precious dailies that covers experimental aesthetics. Read the review as a .pdf on Charles Bernstein’s blog. (And consider making a donation to the newspaper, endangered by the financial crisis!) In the print [...]
SOFT VORTICISM
Worth the sweltering heat of stone discharged from the arbors of the living, amplifying the rise and fall of expectations to locate any trace of memory of the fratelli Rosselli in this their first burial site: a stone’s throw from Toklas and Stein, a porquoi become genital and mouth of Jacob Epstein’s direct carving softened, [...]
ETERNAL/EPHEMERAL
In the lurid purple apparition of the Ponte Rotto and cherished summer passeggiata schmaltz, resisting the surreptitious yet certain sense of possibilities clamping down with the passage of the weeks and the neighbors, even if the morning, recall pixelessly, among the myriad possible pixeless lessons of the year of explosive potential in love with the [...]
LIVED, SPOKEN WORD, SICILIANU
And as we were schooled by the friend of a friend in the tradition of theater/recitation/storytelling called cunto siciliano, possible heir to Greek bardic traditions, the bank too is distinguished by its vernacular fold, improvised.
PIAZZA AS WUZ
Occupying the ruins now framing a deejay set ranging from Volare to hiphop all’italiano and the hospitality of Earthquake Jack: scene of palpably postwar pregentrification Palermo.
TOWN PRIDE
“Non ci passa una lira,” says the lady we meet surveying her high plaza with diamond facade from the waist up, and who justifies our afternoon chocolates by identifying us as her “children” to a daughter several minutes later. Not a cent passes through here yet everywhere—pizzerias, baseball caps, banks—is the immense unidentified Hellenistic goddess [...]
CROSS-SPECIES COMMUNICATION, ITALIAN STYLE
Michele uses his excellent skills as translator, poet, and Italian (c.f. Bruno Munari’s dictionary of Italian gestures) to communicate with a cat atop the castle complex who is fond of quizzical self-exposure.
LANDSCAPE WITH CAMOUFLAGE
How would old Rockefeller lurch to learn that the Palisades view he purchased for his Cloisters transported from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-en-Bigorre, and Froville to frame serves also as stageset to the “quiet-zoned” spectacle of bellic muscle for the next century?
STANZA AS JAIL OR A BALL
“Stanza as Prison, Homicile, Cube, Sphere: Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, and the Spaces of Post-Fascist Ytalyan Poetry” is the name of the talk I delivered tonight at the American Academy in Rome. Such rare pleasure to present, incommensurately perhaps given the material of dislocation, to a room full of neighbors, however hailing from the strange. [...]
BOOKS AS BALLS
Why shouldn’t poems roll across the floor? From Emilio Villa’s The Rolling Balls: Hydrological Antistructures, With 6 Silkscreens (Rome: Edar, 1969), in collaboration with Silvio Craia and Giorgio Cegna….
BUNDLING
Tales of old disguisings and the wicker mock-up basis of Bernini’s baroque Counter-Reformation core, so antithetical to deletion and arrogant stolidity of the carved.
THE FALL OF ROME, FREE VERSE
In advance of the world premiere of Derek Walcott’s Moon-Child (Ti-Jean in Concert) at the American Academy in Rome last night, I interviewed the author/director, last week, for Sunday’s Il manifesto. A work recast from the earlier Ti-Jean and His Brothers, taking the ballad meter of the conteur, riddled with jokes & calypsolike songs on [...]
WHY WE ARE NOT PAINTERS
“Why wasn’t he?” asks Mr. Walcott when I’m supposed to be interviewing him. “Too chatty, too bloody discursive, in the presence of oranges.” I can’t think of any lines to cite, nervous. Street details. “He was beautiful.” Two remotenesses colliding, the optimism of free 50s poets and painters in which one could fall to a [...]
PUNCTUM
As planes and trams move one through shifting tablesettings of alliances, in advance of a celebrated guest of the state cancelling flights, the street glimpsed in transit reliable as ever in rendering the difference in any e pluribus unum eloquent.
THE CARNIVALESQUE
Where does it lie, nella vita attuale, nowadays: in the performers, or their onlookers & ubiquitous multiform recorders?
IL PERTURBANTE
Peering as ever, captivated, up through the thin filigreed iron barrier between monochrome and color, underground and over, death and life, making the current uncanny, unhomely—dreams haunted by missing digits and their turgid, sluggish, anxious replacements—and Felipe’s well-founded compassionate laugh at the unsolicitous inheritors of “Old Masters,” which over lunch conversation about crumbling walls of [...]
“AUBADE”
Peter Rockwell on hand tools, marble holes, direct carving of the dolors of Mary crowned by monster base and ascension, illegal sculpture on abandoned chapels, illegal tri-headed rose sandstone window, & just plain liking monsters, massive stone monsters carved to be climbed: finally understanding the material dialectic of stone and thought in Pound’s Cantos with [...]
TOWARD AN UNWRITTEN SONG OF ANTI-FASCISM (MILAN-NY-ROME)
As recounted by Tullia Calabi Zevi (1923-2011), a song in Milanese dialect her freemason father said had been discovered on the walls of Corso Buenos Aires at dawn— before the family’s 1938 escape from Italy to NY, where they founded the Mazzini Society— Caro il me Benitute me cunscià pulitute me cala la pagate me [...]
POET-LAUREL-CAPITAL
Ugo Foscolo: poet and hopeful patriot becoming laurel becoming memorial becoming architecture, Ionian, becoming mundane or magic electric in dusk: patron non-saint of an archive of the vernacular. PER LA SENTENZA CAPITALE PROPOSTA NEL GRAN CONSIGLIO CISALPINO CONTRO LA LINGUA LATINA Te nudrice alle Muse, ospite e Dea Le barbariche genti che ti han doma [...]
MOTET: MOVERE/MOT
Following desire for more critical words in the president’s passional mourning address; following the Scharoun Ensemble’s performance of lyrical wendings by John Dowland, Huck Hodge, and Dadaist Stefan Wolpe (1929 Musik für Hamlet, likely a soundtrack to Hamlet’s masque within the play), all taking up poetry, continually curiouser about the braiding of individualities within collective [...]
BABEL/MILKLESSNESS
From the early fourteenth century of Dante-in-exile, in translation by Stephen Botterill, glimpse of a most ancient attempt to circumvent the confusion of Babel and pain of banishment from one’s mother tongue: Dodge the mother altogether: “Since human affairs are now carried on in so many different languages, so that many people are no better [...]