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Foreword by
Gian Paolo Guerini
See the blank, from word to word.
Can these poets see the space expand, withdraw the meaning and
the reading, the will and wish, to nowhere.
Can these poets give you back the whole blank hole, the silent
invisible words of an unredeemable dream.
And those are words carved on air that once on water befell.
[Translation from Italian to English by Federico Federici]
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n Iverson Ann Iverson
A Poem By
Antonio Diavoli
from < extra password>
unspanned
folding her careful fingers
in the common ritual of life
and if you speak in response of glance
–and it’s your turn–see the unspanned
arch of teeth, the ache of it
that is given us that we may agree
(
More poem by Antonio Diavoli)
A Poem by
Agata Spinelli
from <Years>
There’s no time and no timing
just belonging to oneself
and no word to express
I have no word to catch
all this invisible
fluency and smiling
always so cool and glad.
Do you know anything about skin?
(
Agata Spinelli)
A Poem by Massimo Sannelli
from <InversiOn>
[translation from Italian to English by Chiara Daino]
***
Childhood
we talk about–we do
we are not understood
A shoot is no thing
if session is losing.
Sight ’n’ tight
a smack,
alone they are,
and much more,
they relish
alone
Pink to look like
green, we get and
we give, we won’t
dare any more
the sharp mark
over sense wall
***
Thin white is, it is in
a wonder wadding seat
and rest: that’s the best
cheek to seek,
to be new
to be due
Lusty limb to be to
***
run really runs,
flow one’s own
flows, fine, now:
the wedding ring
–wanna see!–
IS MARRING
to hamper hands
–gonna be me?–
thirty ’n’ three
nearly.
run runs ’n’ leap, leap leaps ’n’ runs, run
TO LEAN
TO LIVE
( Massimo Sannelli )
A Poem by Paola Loreto
The Veritable Woman
There’s no way that I can
tell you who you are but
you’re everywhere under
the touch of my fingers.
Your face slants the way
the things you sculpt do
and your eyes move imperceptibly
in their orbs like the bulbs
of the busts one circumnavigates
in an odyssey. Why don’t you
open your mouth and let words
reach the canvas of your hands.
Why don’t you give the bug
back his pain, that he shared
with you. There’s one way
to a woman’s high and angular
hip. It goes by memory
and comes home via a certain
cast of very thin hair
breathing impossible moves.
( More
poems by Paola Loreto )
A
Poem
by Paolo Fichera
from <The apothecary>
[translation from Italian to English by Brenda Porster]
***
From there was born and
due to die the duty
of the son to the son of the father,
bones readied for the slaughter
his for the duty of a variation
and deviation in the seed between buttocks–
frozen at pleasure’s estuary–
the bull’s head in the study, over there
reflecting the fragment between notes
and painting, the opaque maze on the wall
like a private carousel the garden
of the virgins crouching and to my eyes
discovered
***
because the name makes room for dance,
light chipping the substance
of being two in a shape of statues,
in walking weak with justice ,
copper on beam, a defeated rain
between grates, in itself, the bones of crying
***
gathered in grains of corolla and joy
the shore of paper repeated, the bones,
to the seed you carry cupped in hands,
you reunite in yourself health, the tight,
the lightening sweetness of absolute,
derives from my open hands
making ashes and spice from paper
the fertile embrace of the dead
in my veins, the seed of reality
clenched by tongues absorbed in sounds
***
the only spice that rests
is the site of the traces,
transparency and tool
of clarity that becomes embrace,
sin burning in hands,
without distance,
your light’s odour making us
saliva spit making the blend
out of schism
***
and returns the structure, the spice,
to the shape of a vase
the privilege of constancy
to the curve of ceramics
the mapping on marble
to the blood’s harmony
to gestures that alone prepare
the ribbing of reflection,
of silk, dark signs on hands
***
the hands implode the screen
–film of elements–
patient geometry of song
spoken in the apothecary’s mouth
announcing death by
blindness–of gesture–steeped
in what is left of spice, refined
beyond song,
purity made arid and sweet
the blend not creating but calling
***
it is aridity that covers breath
the tongue’s unlifting the fatigue
of the shape that fails
in yielding to life and breath
the ritual of what is lacking
minority that precedes each act
and covers it, vases put back
into places, blood spiced
by smells
***
the space between tables
is the site of the world
“were it to yield to life, the shadow
of flesh to flesh
the empty imperfection of each distance
***
thirst is the peace of dream
and here in ritual it is given, it moulds
man’s veins, eye dying
in eye, invoking
essences, beyond the threshold,
prayers learned in the hearts of children
***
the tongue of blackbirds with clarity
resting at the border is the clash,
celebrating on wings of ruin
the charm of flight, the traces of man
***
a breath of fragments recomposes
the garden and your simple bones,
knowing this to be certain and given to joy
custom etched in death and crucifix,
“what more?”
***
smoke. essences burned as a remedy
that dissipates, being cold and
tense body; the pain of iron is other,
the blood harvested, the gait
and “in the smoke we cannot find
the first harvest, the woman’s wisdom,
the foetus who, eroded, heals man.
Burnt is the god, harvested and moulded
in the shape of a vase, there in the name
am I at rest: time, exile, sin”
***
bound to fragility are sorrows
bowed like a threshold of lovers’
hands “it was this clothing my heart
with your skin that was the golden
balm.
Knowledge of time only the light
that bows your back, inebriation
beyond an orphan’s laughter
now is the wreath of flowers
on your face
the world’s sacrilege?”
***
spice is nothingness repeated
abandonment and the obscene mass
before the colour of lashes
the eye grown dull and the courage:
“be brave still, the raven
has already rasped ashes, nourished earth”
***
the bark–not sap–of the branch
is the room of smoke,
the silhouette wrapped–precious and real–
to the root of my sorrow, the first sorrow:
“chastity vented in the body, mine;
do you remember?”
it is night that illuminates
the fire: not the other; night that
covers and nourishes with dark
the brightness and the flame.
the bark
burning in the fire
is the room of fire.
in the smoke returning
to the fire; betrayal
and guilt have the same hands:
the blood that receives them,
is suffered.
and the fire is manifest
in the bright womb
in the gesture of birth
hysterical ashes and emptiness.
“the well radiates
the satiety of the lair
do you remember?”
death illuminates the fire
( Paolo
Fichera )
A Poem by Tiziano Ogliari
Time and space cannot exist side by side
[translation from Italian to English by Julia Taverné]
Time and space cannot exist side by side, but only one inside
the other.
You are right when you say time does not exist but deploys things:
time cannot be displayed, be outside, it cannot have a separate
dimension, even a “temporal dimension” (the space of the soul); it
would be a contradiction in terms. Death, for example, which is
deployed by time and is a non-measure of time, is disappearance, a
removal of space to an eternal elsewhere, an eternal visible; all
the signs left by time are signs of erosion, of things coming
apart, a loss of defined spatial distinction. Writing is a an
omnivorous fish–a carp–on the river bed, ready to proliferate
where time and space part company, opening the real into an
estuary, not an unhealthy polymeric, resolution of space?
Unhealthy because tradition has it that–to admonish us–it is also
a supreme waste of time.
If space is resolved, time is wasted: when I return to myself,
after quitting this paper and pen, I’ll re-appropriate space
within myself; I will be a copy of myself and will return to a
point from which I did not set out. I will have left nothing
behind but will find a self; in the meantime I will have written
this note, asking words to do–despite the logos–something they
cannot do.
You do not return to yourself: ever since mankind has had a
language, he has no longer returned to himself–either by
phylogenesis or ontogenesis.
A return to somewhere you’ve never been, completing something
never given: this is what copying really means.
A copy is a return, a circular act, like the idea of the world in
a twilight culture; like the word mundi which seems to rise,
beginning with a vowel escaping the reserved embrace of the lips,
in a circular motion, a cycle, returning to two due prominent
consonants, closing the word, making it self-sufficient. But mundi
is first and foremost an opening out.
Before a world takes place–in as much as everything that tales
place is a world–it is as if nothingness opened itself up to
something, only to return into itself and disappear. There is
nothing before this opening up: a nothingness disappearing in
order to leave something behind it has no before. In this sense
time is a convention: it establishes and settles a before and
after, to identify states which co-exist within the world, in the
absence of time we call the present.
Mundi, however, is a closing off. It defines a world be excluding
what is not in that world, it rends a world closed and
self-ordained. A world may tend towards the infinite by including
more and more, but the more it counts things in, the more
indefinite becomes what it leaves out. So a world is an opening
out and a closing off.
( Tiziano Ogliari )
A
Poem by
Gian Paolo Guerini
from <led I there: leaden, patior, laughter>
[translation from Italian to English by Federico Federici]
black
stench and in love among I love you go
if vacuous to call it asthmatic
the cure draws here
and stays the steady bitter
wise fate, it passes
thoughts in a maze
of short returned bandages
fully where I went to
in a slow derma that nothing stares
the backs stretches and
the black one thronders,
laurel wreath and needle of
dumb steps, fairy outlet of
the lake with thee,
dares and lures still overturned
a wedding bed, an aiming stone or wake
choked, whelmed and rayed
taken in a mined shingly land,
drained trawl steeped
in new born stinks
to return faces in the morn
and the shame on stars
and many grudges in bones
and harmed in hopes
in that time-net
and the quick joy put neither grubs nor grafts
nor came the rose with its fierce head
nor lights unweaving strings of lies
( Gian Paolo Guerini )
A Poem by
Enrico Pietrangeli
The Madman
[translation from Italian to English by Heinz Nardi]
He is a deep and clear lake
of impeccable innocence,
noble and blue his pupil runs
without any reason
looks straight and drifts
into the remote labyrinth of the soul
and naked worms that we are
we turn our backs ignoring him.
( Enrico Pietrangeli ) |
