Moderna | 2017 | N. 1-2

This essay is meant to be a contribution to the history of « Officina », the legendary twentieth-century poetry review published in Bologna between 1955 and 1959. Dangling between amateurism and worldliness, the three founders, Roversi, Pasolini and Leonetti, later joined by Scalia, Fortini and Romanò, succeeded in shaping « Officina » as a real critical ‘workshop’ (that’s what « Officina » means), and indeed the left-wing cultural myth of the Italian fifties. Hosting authors such as Gadda, Ungaretti, Calvino, the review was meant to become the very focus of the then fashionable debates on experimentalism and realism such as the discussion on Auerbach’s Mimesis, or on the canon of Italian modern poetry.

In the discussion on Italian poetry and poetics between the fifties and the seventies the so far obvious lyrical nature of poetry is being brought into doubt under the suggestion of the new ‘epic’ trend brought about in Anglo-American Modernism by Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos. Curi’s essay, through Anceschi’s influential study on Anglo-American poetics and also through Rizzardi’s important study and translation of Pound’s Pisan Cantos, takes into consideration the Italian side of this new anti-lyrical ‘epic’ trend, with its effects on the various types of reduction of the lyrical Ego shown by the poetry of the ‘Novissimi’, the ‘Gruppo 63’, Sanguineti’s Laborintus, and the poetry of Pagliarani, Balestrini, Giuliani, and Porta.

The Gruppo 63 – writes Lorenzini – was a very short experience, without a manifesto, without any collective declaration of intents, and an experience considered with self- irony even by its protagonists, «la generazione di Nettuno», «a nobody generation», in Umberto Eco’s memorable formulation (Nettuno is the Greeek Sea-God Neptune, here a Joke with Italian «Nessuno», i.e, «Nobody»). Yet, underlines Lorenzini, that short experience, with no manifestation of togetherness, became ‘canonic’, and entered school texts as an important moment in the history of Italian culture. It was the discovery of a common trend in ‘critical thought’ resulting in the Group’s common anti-tragic, anti-pathetic, anti-sublime, fragment-montage text-construction modality with a kind of perspective also to be found in the history of the Italian vanguard musical composition, in Nono, Maderna, Berio.

In the early years of the third millennium, the old nineteen-fifties clash of poetics gave way to new perspectives, new experiences, new names, new meeting and discussing places in the new media, especially internet blogs. In the nineteen-sixties-seventies the Italian Neoavanguardia had started and fought a no-quarter war against the dominant lyrical tradition and its typical highly emotional language, the so called «poetese» (the lyrical self-centered language of sentimental poetry). In the early years of the third millennium, the « research poetry » school, including poets born after the Neoavanguardia years, much influenced by the French and American poets they translate (Tarkos, Quintane, Silem Mohammad), found new colder ways of expression of the poetic ego turning the old Neoavanguardia’s subversive sabotage approach into a new estranged, centrifugal, fragmentary, unassertive intonation.

In 1970 two Italian anthologies of new poetry were published: Il pubblico della poesia and La parola inamorata, both of them powerfully testifying to, and defining the multifold production of a new generation of Italian poets. The present essay intends to analyze the introductions and declarations of intents of the two anthologies, as well as their criteria of inclusion of the various contributors. This is meant to pose a capital question about poetry-writing after the experience of the Group 63, and the crisis of the vanguard, and the other symmetrical capital interrogation on verse writing after the publication of Montale’s Satura bringing to an end a long and exhausted tradition.

Since the mid-70s the representations of the poetry scene in contemporary Italy has been characterized by fragmentation and a sense of chaos even more emphasized in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the new millennium. There are two typical reactions to all this: euphoria and dysphoria. On the one side the idea that poetry in the old sense is always to be reborn from its own ashes, on the other the anti-sublime tendency in a kind of Freudian Trauerarbeit (the work of mourning) for poetry’s death, after which no longer can a poet rely on inspiration: he must write in cold blood, using all the tools offered by tradition – intertextual quotations, montage, multi-lingual issues –, and be skilled in the cold-blood, conscious use of metric and rhetoric tools. These two reactions, the myth of the ever new origins and the sense of the end of poetry, can find a common ground in the emphasis on a clear, natural, immediately communicative language.

The Nineteen-fifties are the decisive moment and vanishing point in any reconstruction of the history of Italian poetry in the last seventy years. This essay on the canonization process of Italian poetry in the latest modernity is a cultural voyage beginning with the polemos fought betrween the « Officina » group, and the poets of the new vanguard, the ‘Novissimi’, with a particular reference to the first important critical reference point, the 2001 Pontignano symposium on Poetry Genealogies in the Second half of the Twentieth Century. Marco Corsi moves in a complex landscape of literary models dangling between the ego-centered Lyrical tradition and a new ‘epic’, showing the canonization process in action, through cultural dynamics, symposiums, publishing houses, and the growing importance of the publishing market, literary histories, anthologies, reviews and reviewers, and the literary pages of newspapers.

The aim of this paper is a comparative investigation on the evolution of two of the most important and influential European literary movements of the second half of the twentieth century, namely the German Gruppe 47 and the Italian Gruppo 63. The analysis of the historical and cultural context in which these two movements arose and flourished – a divided nation that had to deal with the spiritual and material ruins of its cumbersome heritage and, in the second case, the rich and industrious Italy of the sixties – proves to be particularly useful in pointing out affinities and divergences between the two groups.

This essay is focused on what Madelyn Detloff calls «the persistence of Modernism». A comparative analysis of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves – an annotated copy of which is kept in Fondo Rosselli in Viterbo – and Rosselli’s poetry shows illuminating consonances between Rosselli’s poetics, themes, stylistic strategies and Woolf’s modernism. Rosselli and Woolf share modernist characteristics such as impersonality, the strict relationship between music and poetry, the same concept of time, the dialogue with Tradition. Besides, Rosselli’s imagery often seems to come from Woolf’s. Rosselli, like Woolf, believed that the role of literature is the representation of experience and the preservation of collective memory as a lasting political and ethical cry for social justice, sympathy and peace.

This essay is devoted to one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century, Vittorio Sereni, and focuses in particular on his third and fourth collections, Gli strumenti umani (1965) and Stella Variabile (1981), which were highly innovative and played a crucial role in the renewal of the poetic language in the second half of the century. Both Dante Isella and Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo produced fundamental studies on Sereni’s poetry. The investigation of Sereni’s autographs also proves illuminating as it sheds light on Sereni’s laboratory as a continuous work in progress.

Paolo Volponi’s verse production, strictly intertwined with the history of his narrative writing, bears witness to a poetics of ‘fury’ against any old idea of poetry as ‘harmony’. Connected as he was with « Officina » and a close friend of Pasolini’s as he was, Volponi’s early poetic production clearly shows the nineteen-fifties crisis of Lyricism in the choice of political themes and in the new perspective of realism in a nineteen-sixties typical indictment of industrial utopia expressed by extremely transgressive solutions as intense and hard-hitting as those to be found in the Neoavanguardia.

According to a common-place opinion on Volponi’s works, his novels explore society’s ills and contradictions, while his verse production is the expression of his personal point of view on the world. Volponi himself wrote once that the prime motivation in his verse writing was fear, while social concern and political struggle were easier subjects for prose writing. Yet the fact is that Volponi’s novels go deep into the awareness of Entfremdung, Marx’s old concept of alienation and still the key to a deeper understanding of new Capitalism, while his poems show readers the way to achieve a new control and dominion on language and truth.

This essay intends to read Montale’s Satura in a correct historical perspective, against a somehow wide-spread critical tendency to disregard its autonomous value in the history of Montale’s poetry. Satura is often read, and critically interpreted as a part of Montale’s ‘diary’ phase, and consequently almost invariably analysed in an inter-textual key in connection with Montale’s previous works, or considered as a mere reaction to the 1960s new-experimentalism. Satura, instead, is both a specific and an autonomous coherently articulated work, resulting in a problematic re-reading of history, and the consequent tragic diagnosis of the situation of the Italian intellectual class, in the early nineteen-seventies.

Among the incunabula of the Gruppo 63 there is the indeed memorable 1961 translation of Joyce’s Poems by an impressive team of translators, Giuliani, Aldo Rossi, Wilcock, and Sanguineti who was also to sign in the years to come a long series of important translations (Petronius’s Satyricon, 1970, Goethe’s Faust, Homage to Goethe, 2003), Homage to Shakespeare, 2004, Exercise Book, 2006, not to mention his Corneille, Molière, and Brecht). Taken together, Sanguineti’s translations, or his ‘imitations’ as he preferred to call them, might be defined as poetics in progress as well as a theory of culture with particular reference to his adaptations, or stage réécritures: Molière, Brecht, Corneille, Dante, Pirandello. The most famous among them, his adaptation of Ariosto’s Furioso, written for Luca Ronconi, was staged for the first time at the Orvieto Festival in the unconsecrated Church of St. Niccolò in 1969, and then re-adapted as an Italian Television serial also directed by Ronconi. It was a mass success to which Sanguineti, however, did not collaborate, and which he did not like.

The exploration of Giuliani’s archive and library at the Pavia Manuscripts Center shows how deeply Giuliani’s verse writing and poetics were influenced by his work as a translator. The present essay is meant to draw a map of the interconnections between Giuliani’s poetry and his translations of British and American poets such as Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Empson, James Joyce, Edwin Arlington Robinson, all of them deeply affecting Giuliani’s production in the period of the Italian discovery of British and American modernist poets (Pound, Eliot, Duncan, Creeley, Ashbery) through the translations of Fernanda Pivano or Alfredo Rizzardi, and published in cultural magazines such as «Nuova Corrente».

This essay analyzes various aspects of Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry and poetics in order to define Zanzotto’s special position in the history of twentieth-century Italian poetry. The evolution of Zanzotto’s poetry is examined from the crucial point of view offered by Zanzotto’s autographs and drafts held at the Centro Manoscritti of the University of Pavia, and through the lens of the critical work of Zanzotto’s finest scholar, Stefano Agosti.

Balestrini’s 1979-80 Blackout, as this essay is meant to show, is a multiple, multi-perspective and multi-directional, combinatorial text like the one unravelling in the whole of Balestrini’s poetical production; not a mere divertissement but a digging out process of a complex, changeable, fluid and buried network of power.

On the margins of the Gruppo 63, Corrado Costa’s poetic production acquired great importance after the end of that experience, when Costa became the Italian reference model of experimental poetry, bringing into question, even overcoming the two almost dogmatic principles of any vanguard experience in Italy: montage techniques (from collage to cut-up), and the anti-referential principle, the idea that words and objects, language and the world are unconnected. Vanguard poetry must always conceive itself as linguistic sabotage in a key of extreme criticism. In Costa’s renewal the language of poetry, in a fully speculative sense, must become a meta-language investigating its own nature on the trail of Willard Quine’s analytical philosophy.

The following annotated bibliography of the important anthologies of Italian poetry published since 1953 describes and discusses all the important anthologies establishing the Canon of Italian contemporary poetry.The bibliography, minutely accounting for the complexity of the various proposals and perspectives, is meant to be a short, yet complete guide and introduction to the most accredited trends of recent Italian poetry.

The Bibliographic Repertoire lists and discusses all the main critical essays on Gruppo 63 published between 1994-2014. All the studies taken into considerations focus on the poetics and common activity of the so called Neoavanguardia (the Italian sixties new vanguard movement). Particular importance is given to monographs, even though the Repertoire also includes a number of the more significant essays published in collective books. Monographic numbers of journals, conference proceedings and recently republished materials and documents produced by the Group are also taken into consideration.