A Few Considerations on "Closed Form" in Contemporary Italian Poetry
2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Literature and Culture
ResumoThe two sonnets that follow this essay are, respectively, postilla (postscript) to sequence ipersonetto (hypersonnet) by Andrea Zanzotto, included in collection Il Galateo in Bosco (The Woodland book of manners, 1978), and metodologico (Methodological sonnet) by Marcello Frixione, included in 2001 collection ologrammi (Holograms). I submit that these poems represent significant chronological markers that one might use to define literary phenomenon known in Italy as the return to closed form. While Zanzotto's ipersonetto can be credited historiographically as terminus post quem, since return to using fixed schemes in Italy dates more or less to end of 70s, Frixione's sonetto is, on other hand, an arbitrary chronological signpost; since 2001, various Italian poets have continued to employ fixed schemes of lyric tradition. Out of closed-form poems written in past decade, however, Frixione's sonnet is one that most prominently presents reflexive and metatextual elements, to extent that, like Zanzotto's, it can be read as a poem about poetics. Naturally, not all poets in Italy who write with fixed schemes do so with same degree of awareness. Then again, writing in closed form tends to disperse itself into multiple streams: between a return to sublime and a citational calculus, between an arcadian game and a metatextual reflection. In order to get an idea of complexity and stratification of this phenomenon, keep in mind that diverse, influential poets such as Giovanni Raboni, Patrizia Valduga, and Edoardo Sanguineti have written in closed form, as well as younger writers of avant-garde, such as Marco Berisso, Gabriele Frasca, Lorenzo Durante, Riccardo Held, and Giacomo Trinci, and even a mild adherent to tradition such as Roberto Piumini. To frame phenomenon in general terms, to summarize it, one needs to choose a playing field: here I will concern myself with just a sampling of authors who (perhaps paradoxically harking back to greatness of period of experimentation that marked Italian poetry in 70s) employ fixed schemes first and foremost for purpose of literary heuristics and then, in broadly political sense of term, opposition. This opposition occurs entirely within domain of literary practice, perhaps following from premise that every text is implicitly political: literature as resistance, then--to power, of course, but also to power of language, to language of power. Thus, with their claims for autonomy of literary works, new metricists have differentiated themselves wholly from neo-avant-garde positions that preach dissolution tout court of literature into politics. A sestina by Frasca, a sonnet by Berisso, or a madrigal by Durante cannot be read as a mere restoration of meter. Starting with ipersonetto, at least, any attentive poet who chooses to write using traditional meter does so, first and foremost, to make reference to conventional nature of any and all literary choice, exhibiting scheme either as a contrainte or as a surplus of signification. The adoption of closed form is, a priori, a dialectic between artifice of form and presumed authenticity of lived experience, between schematic artificiality and semantic content. Mannerism is connoted, then, as labor intus, as a dyke holding against pathetic, enchanted flow of world toward ineffable, way poetry was conceived by Italian poets of 70s and 80s, who had made an onanisticorphic practice of free verse. In Berisso's poetry, for example, reinvention of metrical forms, with its subtle philological variations, is a conceptual operation of highest order, a veritable inventio that aims to allegorize its models, sometimes in arguably didactic ways, such as in octaves of Esortativi con dichiarazione acrostica (Exhortatives with acrostic statement; in Annali [Annals; Oedipus, 2002]), wherein flow of exhortations directed to beloved is framed by acrostic TI AMO CON LA FORZA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE (I love you with force of revolution). …
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