MILLI GRAFFI/EMBARGO VOICE

Graffi on the yanked-away object of poetry: reading a poem for Corrado Costa, "incomparabile," and "chi sa se è grugnando" from embargo voice (Bibliophile, 2006) at the Circolo delle Quinte, for the Romapoesia PoEtiche Festival, Rome, Italy, October 2010.

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Milli Graffi, Milanese, was born in 1940. She studied Anglo-American literature, with a focus on semiotics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. She has produced works of sound poetry (Salnitro, Farfalla ronzar, Tralci) as well as four poetry collections—Mille graffi e venti poesie (1979), Fragili film (1987), L’amore meccanico (1994), embargo voice (2006)—and a novella titled Centimetri due (Edizioni d’If, 2004). She has translated Lewis Carroll (the two Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark) and Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol). She has also taught at the University of Verona and the Accademia Carrara of Bergamo. Her research ranges from studies of nonsense and the comic function in the early avant-gardes to militant criticism aimed at understanding the situation of contemporary poetics (writing on comrades from Balestrini to Raworth, Guest to Scialoja). She is editor-in-chief of the journal Il Verri.