Tombs are full of fools

Who gave their life upon command of

Romance gone wrong

The same old glue

And never coming true, never coming true!

(Stephen Patrick Morrissey)

[…] la sua solitudine è popolata di spettri, e gli

spettri la popolano di solitudine.

(Amelia Rosselli)

1. Lyric and the ghosts of the lyric in the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century

In La lenta cancellazione del futuro, the introductory essay to Ghost of my life, the collection of essays on depression and lost futures that Mark Fisher published in 2013 and that has recently been translated into Italian[1], the English critic recognised in the concept of hauntology coined by Derrida in Spettri di Marx[2] the cast of mind that has characterised (and that, in many respects, continues to determine) the processes by which an imaginary is produced and constructed in the popular culture of the late twentieth century and during the first decade of the 2000s. The term – whose meaning, in Derrida, is built on the wordplay between the verb “to haunt” (to infest, to obsess) and ontology understood as the study of being, of its manifestations and persistences – turns on the concept of the trace and has meaning only insofar as it is projected into a temporal dimension: “Everything that exists is possible on the basis of a series of absences that precede and surround it, thereby allowing it to acquire the coherence and intelligibility it possesses” (Fisher 2019/2013, p. 32). The formula keeps its Jamesonian derivation intact, tied to the logic of the making of meaning in absentia typical of the postmodern phase of Western culture[3], and in this sense it proves especially well suited to analysing works and codes of the present, such as those found in the novels of David Peace, in trip-hop, or in the music of Joy Division. Underlying the concept of hauntology is a strain of nostalgia for the forms, modes and codes of the past, whose applicability turns out to be incompatible, from an ethical standpoint, with the mechanisms that govern daily life and existence in the contemporary world. The presence of stances and stylistic features inherited from tradition ended up generating, in the second half of the twentieth century, a constellation of revenants and, precisely, of ghosts, which surface from the registers and works of modernity to haunt the structures of meaning and the output of writers, directors, musicians and poets from the postwar years down to our own day.

Shifting the vantage point from popular culture to the field of Italian poetry produced over the same span of years, it seems to me possible to identify a series of constants and stylistic procedures underlying the making of a text whose outcomes can be analysed in the light of that same concept of hauntology, from a long-range perspective that takes in the relationship a single poetic generation maintains with the fathers of the preceding generation and with their way of revisiting the tradition they had inherited. The question gains in substance when referred to the so-called lyric genre, with which Italian poetry, weighed down by the burden of a classicist tradition (Contini’s ‘monologic’ line), has often ended up identifying itself. The impulse to take up, and to react against, a lyric stance in poetic discourse produced, over the course of the twentieth century, a jolting, fitful movement, marked by attempts to break free and to found a new lyric code and, at the same time, by operations that put the classical to new use, as much from the standpoint of the stance of the self as from the more strictly stylistic and metrical-formal one. As critics have long since established, the moment of rupture on the basis of which it is preferable to speak of the “persistence of the lyric”[4] – and not, therefore, of its mere existence – coincides with the trauma of the passage, during the 1960s, “between a peasant, archaic civilization and the industrial growth of the neo-capitalist boom” (Testa 2005, p. V[5]). The poets who make their debut, or carry out much of their work, over the course of the decade react to the change by adopting a set of textual strategies that will sharply mark the evolution of lyric discourse in Italy. The subsequent turning points, symbolically represented by 1971 (the year that saw the publication of books such as Viaggio d’inverno by Bertolucci, Trasumanar e organizzar by Pasolini, Invettive e licenze by Bellezza and Satura by Montale) and by the fateful date of the decade’s ‘closure’, made to coincide with the events of the Castelporziano Festival of 1979[6], would allow the process of putting the lyric to new use to remodulate itself according to aesthetic reasons and social needs partly different from those that had animated the poetry of the 1960s.

2. Petrarch, the “real ideal”: the case of Amelia Rosselli

Among the poets belonging to the generation of the 1960s who respond to the earthquake of the forms of the past by devising a series of strategies aimed at acclimatising the lyric self to the new environment created by the social change under way, the poetry of Amelia Rosselli seems to me to offer a particularly telling example, not only for the quality of the results she achieved – long since widely acknowledged by critics, certified by the canonisation that culminated in the publication of the Mondadori “Meridiano”[7] and by the ever-growing number of studies devoted to her work – but above all because the ways in which the classical is put to new use in Rosselli’s work seem particularly apt to exemplify the process of the hauntologisation of the past described above.

In Rosselli, the dialogue with the forms of tradition is structured along the parallel lines of absence and presence, tellingly giving life to a ghost and to a tension straining towards a form still to be reached, in which one can recognise an influence of the codification of closed metre across the centuries of the tradition. It is indeed possible to detect the persistence of an element foreign to the timeline of the present both on a thematic level, by virtue of the dense throng of the dead who people Rosselli’s verse, and on a more strictly stylistic and metrical plane, in which the echoing of a closed form often takes on the sense of an ideal bulwark to set against the disintegration of the present, against loss and mourning.

The essay appended to the collection, Spazi Metrici, written in 1962 at Pasolini’s urging[8], framed the problem of re-founding a closed metrical environment capable of giving objective form to a content of truth in terms of a journey back towards the very foundations of the word, starting from the primal nucleus, from the “minimal organising element in writing” (Spazi Metrici in Rosselli 2012, p. 184): “A concern with poetic form has for me always been bound up with a more strictly musical one, and I have in fact never separated the two disciplines, regarding the syllable not only as an orthographic link but also as sound, and the sentence not only as a grammatical construct but also as a system” (Spazi Metrici in Rosselli 2012, p. 183). From this perspective the question of metre in Rosselli’s research is inseparable from an ethical component, as the poet herself states in an interview with Giacinto Spagnoletti, apropos of the writing of the long poem La Libellula: “[…] for about ten years I had been racking my brains attempting various possible metrical formulations, never rigorous enough from my point of view to be regarded as ‘systems’ that were not only metrical but also, or almost, philosophical-scientific and historically ‘necessary’, inevitable” (Rosselli 2010, p. 85[9]). The closed form thus becomes the guarantor of an aspiration to truth that is not foreign to the other well-known influences coming from studies in post-Webernian musical theory, from the promptings derived from the I-Ching and from Jungian psychology: experiences in which one can glimpse the common lowest denominator of loss and of the breaking of the circle, together with the consequent need to recompose and re-found the lost unity. Within this horizon, the classical and the dialogue with the Italian literary tradition become the aspiration to a totality never completely attained and yet coherently pursued, since “to attempt once more the ideal of the fourteenth-century sonnet is itself a real ideal” (Spazi Metrici in Rosselli 2012, p. 189).

Such a “real ideal” readily ends up coinciding with the intertextual spectre of Petrarch, drawing Rosselli’s poetry close to that particular strand of the twentieth-century lyric tradition – Paul Celan above all – in which the echoing of the poet who founded the lyric self in the modern sense represents, in Adornian terms, the symbol of a lost condition of humanity. One can make out the figure of an ideal Petrarch, comparable to the other presences in absentia that stud Rosselli’s lyric verse (her father Carlo and her Mother Marion, Pasolini, Rocco Scotellaro), with whom the poet often stages a confrontation bent on finding, in the addressee-‘you’ summoned up each time, “nella sua faccia”, “il sigillo / della noncuranza e del vuoto armarsi / alla morte senza pensare alla vita!” (Documento in Rosselli 2012, p. 362). This type of figure recurs throughout the author’s output, and its presence licenses us, in hermeneutic analysis, to conceive of Petrarch’s influence on Rosselli’s poetry in terms of ideality. Rosselli’s reception of Petrarch’s alieniloquium is, in this sense, comparable to that practised by other poets of our twentieth century, of whom Tandello writes in terms of a “via negativa […] crucially mediated by Leopardi […] through a rare "modern nostalgia"” (Tandello 2007, 301-303^[10]) and which, besides Rosselli, includes at least the very different achievements of Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto. The second part of the question nonetheless remains open: to what extent did the frequenting of the Canzoniere and of the other texts of the Italian lyric tradition influence the theorising of Spazi Metrici and, in general, Rosselli’s prosody and metre? The hendecasyllable of the Canzoniere, with its codified scansion into predominantly regular stresses, seems, together with the positive recovery of the canzoniere and sonnet form, to generate some echo within the closed, regulated space of Rosselli’s metrical seriality.

3. Documento, the failed canzoniere

Leaving aside an uninterrupted frequenting of Petrarch from the years of her poetic formation in Italy onwards, it is Documento, published by Garzanti in 1976, that is the Rosselli work most deeply indebted to a framework of Petrarchan derivation. The book is structured as a kind of canzoniere both on the thematic-ideal level, as Rosselli herself declared more than once (“the inspiration behind this collection is Petrarch. It was meant to be a love canzoniere in sonnets and it became something else. A love canzoniere it is, all the same”, Rosselli 2010, p. 175), and as regards the macrotextual construction, which explicitly recalls the canzoniere form from the very first poem, which seems to have a proemial function of metaliterary synthesis, drawn up after the fact of an amorous and existential experience.

The title itself, moreover, suggests the book’s biographical and at the same time inventory-like dimension, even though Rosselli on more than one occasion expressed her impatience with a kind of poetry that dwells on the private sphere and rests on the self-you duality (Rosselli also voiced reservations about the “you” typical of communication in Montale). Even so, in Documento one can observe a significant increase in the number of poems structured according to a binary dialectic based on the speaker-listener relationship. Although the goal Rosselli sets out to reach always seems to be that of a poetry ideally destined for a choral dimension, the problem of the formal addressee in a lyric mode of communication makes itself felt with particular frequency in the structure of the individual texts of the collection, and is often bound up with the metrical-syntactic question, as well as with the figure of Petrarch understood as the ideal archetypal synthesis of the problem:

in Documento, the third book, I set myself the problem [of] how to get out of the self-you relationship: it is not that this is always possible, but it is a very difficult problem that also comes to us from poetry in general, especially from Hermeticism. Indeed, the syntactic problem of the line […] the book is dedicated, in a certain sense, to Petrarch, even if for the most part they are not love poems, at least for the first third of the book, which is very formal, very formalist. But the themes are many”.

(Rosselli 2010, p. 203)

In the poetics the author developed during the 1970s (subsequently confirmed by the return to Elizabethan models in Sleep), the formal and the ideal aspects tend to coincide, letting one glimpse the presence of a kind of Ur-Petrarch, a model for a lyric stance more inclined to the confessional moment, and of an Ur-sonnet conceived as the ideal space for the private dimension of the self, with inevitable repercussions for the actual metrical scansion. And it is telling how Rosselli speaks of the composition of the texts of Documento, insisting on the presence of a “formal appeal to the sonnet without, however, systematically obeying the rules for composing the hendecasyllable”, and on the very project underlying the writing of the book, which “starts out as a book of fake sonnets that somehow recall the Petrarchan tradition, but then, towards the middle of the book, everything begins to fall apart and I use various kinds of lines. The plan is one thing; the execution changes with the passing of time, and it took me seven years to finish that book” (Rosselli 2010, p. 165). And indeed the collection contains several poems that can be regarded as “sonnets” that overrun in some of their measures or are stripped of a sirma, as, for example, Vorrei donarti il mio sangue tutto:

Vorrei donarti il mio sangue tutto

ma esso corre in piccoli inestricabili

rivoletti, e non graffia la tua porta

d’entrata con abbastanza tenerezza

per tenerci a galla.

O forse sei qua ad accompagnarmi?

Ne ho perso le vie anch’io di questa tua

triste casa. Non vedo altro che luci

e tramonti che a me sembrano diabolici.

Hai rime intense per me, non posso

provvedere al caso che tramite questo

tuo essere re delle mie giornate.

(Documento, in Rosselli 2012, p. 315)

The poem explicitly recalls the Petrarchan measure, including from a graphic point of view (an aspect that is famously not secondary in Rosselli’s poetry), and presents no particular anomalies beyond a senario added to the first sirma and the absence of the final stanza; the lines are broadly hendecasyllabic, both in measure and as regards the placing of the ictus. From a thematic standpoint, the poem may be defined as “a non-humorous parody of the sonnet” (Rosselli 2010, p. 51), carried out through a reworking of the language of metrical forms that makes it possible “to remake the sonnet by means of a metre that is wholly non-neoclassical yet advancedly formalist […] an attempt to bring the language to a mean of its own” (Rosselli 2010, pp. 51 and 54), and in which there are no “ruminations, except in the grammar, which comes across as a little squared off, deliberately, like the sonnet form” (Rosselli 2010, p. 54). The will to sustain a dialogue with the poem’s addressee is explicit (see the direct question in line 6) and is structured according to a perspective of resolutions and on the basis of what looks like an urge to draw the self closer to its interlocutor, expressed in the first line of each quatrain and retracted in the following lines because of the sensing of a feeling of danger. Once again the voice that speaks in the text finds itself suspended between two dimensions, at the centre of divergent and mutually contradictory tensions. The self, suspended between fear and the need to draw closer, seeks contact with its own interlocutor of indefinite outline, close to those of a hauntologised presence: the encounter may hold the past in store and therefore prove dangerous for the poetic subject.

And it is through this alternation of different flows of energy that Rosselli’s verse is structured, in the constant search for a need for order that, from Variazioni Belliche to Documento, will find realisation through formal and thematic solutions that are at times very different from one another, attempting once again the ideal balance of the tradition in ways unique to Italian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century.

Notes

[1] Fisher, M. (2019/2013). Spettri della mia vita. Scritti su depressione, hauntologia e futuri perduti. Translated by Vincenzo Perna, Rome: Minimum fax (Fisher, M. Ghosts of my life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Lanham: John Hunt).

[2] Derrida, M. (1994/1993). Spettri di Marx, translated by Gaetano Chiurazzi. Milan: Raffaello Cortina (Derrida, J. Spectres de Marx, Paris: Galilée).

[3] Jameson, F. (1991/2007). Postmodernismo, ovvero la logica culturale del tardo capitalismo, with a preface by the author, afterword by Daniele Giglioli. Rome: Fazi. (Jameson, F. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, translated by Massimo Manganelli).

[4] Giovannuzzi, S. (2012). La persistenza della lirica. La poesia italiana nel secondo Novecento da Pavese a Pasolini. Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina.

[5] Testa, E. (Ed.). (2005). Dopo la lirica. Posti italiani 1960-2000. Turin: Einaudi.

[6] See on this point Mazzoni, G. (2017). Sulla storia sociale della poesia contemporanea in Italia, “Ticontre. Teoria Testo Traduzione”, [S.l.], no. 8, pp. 1-26, November 2017. Retrieved October 25, 2019 http://www.ticontre.org/ojs/index.php/t3/article/view/236.

[7] Rosselli, A. (2012). L’opera poetica. Stefano Giovannuzzi (Ed.), with the collaboration on the critical apparatus of Francesco Carbognin, Chiara Carpita, Silvia De March, Gabriella Palli Baroni, Emmanuela Tandello. Introductory essay by Emmanuela Tandello. Milan: Mondadori.

[8] On Spazi Metrici see at least Colangelo, S. (2002). Metrica come composizione. Bologna: Gedit; Carbognin, F., (2008). Le armoniose dissonanze. "Spazio metrico" e intertestualità nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli. Bologna: Gedit; Giovannuzzi, S. (2016). Amelia Rosselli: biografia e poesia. Novara: Interlinea (in particular pp. 47-77).

[9] Rosselli, A. (2010). È vostra la vita che ho perso. Conversazioni e interviste 1964-1995. Monica Venturini and Silvia De March (Eds.). Preface by Laurea Barile. Florence: Le Lettere

[10] Tandello, E. (2007). Between Tradition and Transgression: Amelia Rosselli’s Petrarch in Petrarch in Britain. Interpreters, Imitators, and Translator over 700 years. McLaughlin, M., Panizza L., Hainsworth, P. (Eds.) London: Proceedings of the British Academy 146.

Francesco Brancati is a doctoral candidate in Italian Studies at the University of Pisa. He works on sixteenth-century literature (Ariosto, Berni, Boiardo) and on the poetry and prose of the second half of the twentieth century (Rosselli, Benedetti, Bolaño, Orelli). His essays, texts and poems have appeared in academic journals such as “L’Ulisse”, “Contemporanea”, “Carte romanze”, “Italianistica” (of which he is an editor) and on litblogs such as “Le parole e le cose”, “Il primo amore”, “Officina poesia Nuovi Argomenti”, “La balena bianca”, “formavera” and others. He is co-author of the poetry book Hula apocalisse (Prufrock SPA, 2018).