The Sixties saw a general “renewal” of Italian poetic language, visible in the work of most of our writers, who belonged to widely differing tendencies, and which may be read as a kind of reflection of the great social changes of the period. The language of poetry turned, in fact, towards the acceptance of common language, in a sharp reversal of the Hermetic tradition, still dominant at least until the mid-1950s, which had instead imposed the adoption of a language far removed from so-called “reality” and often hard to understand.

After the economic boom and the spread of television, at a time when Italian was about to become, de facto, the national language, and faced with the competition of other arts such as music and cinema, which dominated the field of cultural consumption, one might think it was almost a duty for poets to adopt a language “closer” to everyday usage, with the aim of re-establishing a bond with readers; the matter, however, also has to do with a certain exhaustion of the poetic tradition, that is, with reasons concerning developments internal to the literary system.

By “tradition” we must understand, specifically, that of lyric poetry, which for a long time in our country absorbed into itself the entire range of poetic genres and which entails a view of poetry – following Hegel’s teaching – as the “pure” expression of a subjectivity, a matter from which there then follow linguistic and stylistic choices that make an author’s language extremely homogeneous and far from the variety that characterises everyday language.

The force of the “prejudice” that flattens poetry onto the lyric is indeed still very much with us today, if one thinks of the naïve idea that often accompanies the unwary reader, according to which, essentially, poetry serves just to speak of our small/great wounded “self”.

Over the course of the twentieth century, and up to the present day, the problem of the relationship with the lyric tradition and, with it, of the monologic nature of the poetic word, has repeatedly been the object of reflection on the part of authors, often devoted to a writing practice centred on the remodelling of lyric forms or, especially in the case of the avant-gardes, on their conscious negation.

Some of the best-known anthologies devoted to the poetry of the later twentieth century are centred on this question, such as Dopo la lirica, edited by Enrico Testa and published by Einaudi in 2005, whose title is extremely eloquent as to the centrality of the crisis of the lyric in defining the poetics of these authors. The watershed of the Sixties, chosen by the editor, is marked precisely by the relationship established between the breaching of lyricism and the opening of poetic language to everyday language, visible in works such as Sereni’s Gli strumenti umani (1965), Caproni’s Il congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso (1965), the early collections of Giudici and Raboni, Zanzotto’s La beltà (1968), and up to Montale’s Satura (1971), including Luzi’s Nel magma (1963), Luzi being the leading exponent of Hermeticism, and passing through the early-1960s works of the Neo-avant-garde poets, Sanguineti, Pagliarani and Porta (cf. Testa, 2005, pp. VI-VII). These authors, among the greatest of our canon, albeit according to different modes, turned to a middle language, expanding the vocabulary to terms previously unusual for poetry but, above all, drawing on certain forms of orality, dialogic and colloquial; at the same time, in many cases, there also occurred the introduction into the text of “voices” other than that of the poetic self, which often play the role of genuine “characters”, in relation to a redefinition of the traditional forms of the lyric that brings with it a strong hybridisation of genres and thus, in essence, a remixing of poetry, novel and drama (cf. Testa, 2005, pp. X-XII). It is nevertheless necessary, in this sense, to push back the dividing line established by Testa, following instead the interpretive direction indicated in the anthology prepared by Stefano Giovanardi and Maurizio Cucchi for the Meridiani Mondadori series in 1996, in which Giovanardi, in his introduction, points to the mid-1950s as the pivotal moment, with the publication of Pagliarani’s Cronache e altre poesie (1954) and Sanguineti’s Laborintus (1956), but also, shortly afterwards, of Pasolini’s Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957) and Zanzotto’s Vocativo (1957), and underlines how the Neo-avant-garde, more than others, took it upon itself to challenge programmatically the dominance of the lyric in poetry.

The elaboration of a new language that becomes manifest in the Sixties begins, moreover, in the workshop of certain authors, precisely from the mid-1950s (cf. Lorenzini, 1999, pp. 121-150); it also seems hard to deny that this process undergoes a strong acceleration precisely following the appearance of the works of some authors of the future avant-garde and, in particular, the publication of the anthology I Novissimi in 1961, which marks an indisputable point of no return and represents an almost obligatory term of comparison for the other poets, who would rethink their own poetics in the light of the solutions proposed by the Novissimi, almost as if to offer an alternative response to the Neo-avant-garde [1].

Conceived by Luciano Anceschi and edited by Alfredo Giuliani, the anthology gathers texts by Giuliani himself, by Pagliarani, Sanguineti, Porta and Balestrini, and represents the first collective manifestation of the Neo-avant-garde, which two years later would receive its official launch with the formation of Gruppo 63, and of which the five Novissimi would constitute the hard core (cf. Barilli 2007).

It is “a manifesto-anthology” (Sanguineti, 1969, p. IV) whose aim is the assertion of a new tendency in the literary field, in which the problem is explicitly posed of overcoming “the equation poetry = lyric” (Giuliani 2003 p. 199) and the notion of the “poet-self” (Giuliani, 2003, p. 193), whose poetry is centred on itself [2], according to a programme of radical “reduction of the self” (cf. Giuliani, 2003, p. VIII), that is, of the voice of the self within the text.

The lines contained in the anthology are so unprecedented within the landscape of the time that the authors furnish the compositions with a substantial apparatus of notes and with a number of poetic statements by the authors, in order to explicate the more difficult meanings and to ease the comprehension of a poetry that has little or nothing in common, at first glance, with the forms of tradition, deliberately shattering the reader’s horizon of expectation. After all, the aim declared already in Giuliani’s introduction is to jolt the reader (cf. Giuliani, 2003, p. 3), producing a poetry that creates an almost choc effect at the moment of reading, and moving away entirely from “easy” communicative strategies (cf. Muzzioli 1982).

The very layout of the text, with its long lines that seek to push beyond the edge of the page, and the blank spaces that assert themselves within them – think, for example, of Balestrini’s Frammenti del sasso appeso, or of the lines of Sanguineti’s Laborintus and Erotopaegna included in the anthology – communicate, on a first visual level, in the space of the page, the sense of something that is no longer there, namely the canonical form of poetry. Such a form appears indeed chaotic; and yet, Giuliani warns in the introduction, chaos in truth establishes the method from which the very structure of the composition derives, a structure that, in keeping with the mental processes governing everyday experience in the contemporary world – processes that Jameson would later identify as the founding features of postmodernity (cf. Barilli and Guglielmi, 2013, p. 452) – becomes schizomorphic, discontinuous, fragmented.

Giuliani indeed writes that, today, “the techniques of mass culture entail a mental decomposition that must be taken into account when one seeks to produce a recomposition of the meanings of experience” (Giuliani, 2003, p. 19); the fragmentariness and discontinuity of experience, imposed by the flow of images and information that crowd perceptual experience in the contemporary world, thus become the constructive principle of the text, entailing a genuine destruction of traditional forms ^[3].

It is of particular interest, in this sense, to bring out the metrical and rhythmic aspect of the Novissimi poems, which constitutes the starting point of the more comprehensive breaching of the norms of the poetic text.

Giuliani defines the line devised by the five authors as an “atonal line” (Giuliani, 2003, p. VIII), something different from free verse which, abandoning altogether the prosody based on the syllabic accentuation of tradition, instead foregrounds syntactic units, measuring itself against the poet’s breath and the reader’s ear, taking up the lesson drawn from the poetics of Pound and Eliot, but also from a certain American beat literature (cf. Giuliani, 2003, pp. 214-222). The result is particularly evident, even to the less attentive ear, in Pagliarani’s “ballads”, in which the rhythmic quality of speech is heightened but at the same time dismantled, or in the tight rhythmicity of Porta’s texts, while Sanguineti’s lines “play” at making the old metres vanish into an extremely fluid rhythm. In no case, however, despite the naturalness that a line “tuned to the breath” would seem to bring with it, can one speak of a full mimesis of speech, but rather of the attempt to recover the oral dimension of the word in the sense of the corporeality of the voice, and always according to strategies for defamiliarising speech.

The metrical operation of the Novissimi presents, in this sense, a relationship of homology with the abolition of the figure carried out by Art Informel in painting and with the breaching of the tonal system in post-Webernian music, with which the comparison is made explicit in Giuliani’s definition of the Novissimi line and in the comparison between Sanguineti’s poetry and pictorial Art Informel, which Sanguineti himself discusses in one of the texts accompanying the poems of the anthology [4].

The reference to the “fellow-travelling” arts – which had in fact reached certain solutions ahead of poetry – underlines the shared path of experimentation, thus also signalling a common point of departure, which lies in the generalised crisis of artistic languages and codes that followed the trauma of the Second World War and the immediate European “rebirth” under the sign of consumerism and the spread of mass communications.

The experimentation of the Novissimi arises with the intent of producing a poetry that can be said to be genuinely contemporary with the new neo-capitalist society, and it is founded on ideological reasons matured through the confrontation with present-day reality which, Giuliani specifies, is first of all the linguistic reality in which we are immersed. The problem of literary language is then resolved, for the Novissimi, in “treating common language with the same intensity as if it were the poetic language of tradition, and in bringing the latter to measure itself against contemporary life” (Giuliani, 2003, p. 22).

The new poetry will therefore appropriate the language contemporary to it, grasping at the same time the complexity arising from the contamination of codes that characterises the age, not, however, in order to concern itself with representing reality as faithfully as possible, but in order to carry out an unmasking of language itself and of the claim to truth borne by the mystified representation of the real produced by the media. The aim, then, is not to create another mirror of the world, but to open a breach through which to pass beyond the mirror (cf. Giuliani, 2003, p. 16).

It will not, in fact, be possible to trust language, its capacity to grasp things; any language betrays a particular vision of the world, an ideology, and in the contemporary world that ideology, conveyed in ever more invasive forms by the media of mass communication, corresponds to the ideology of the market. “Since all language today tends to become a commodity, one can no longer take as given either a word or a grammatical form or a single syntagm”; it will therefore be necessary “to reject the oppression of imposed meanings” (Giuliani, 2003, p. 18) by the dominant cultural logic that derives directly from the market.

At a time when poetry seems obliged to “update” and “adapt” itself and to take in the language of everyday reality, the Novissimi thus set out to adopt linguistic “topicality” while at the same time contesting it, understanding poetry as a form of critique of language and, in so doing, making poetic language take, so to speak, two whole leaps forward at once.

The question certainly does not concern the avant-garde alone; the poetic turn from which we set out occurs, in fact, as already noted in the anthologies of Testa and Giovanardi, in close relation precisely with the crisis that affects language in its capacity to adhere to the referent, a crisis that emerges out of that rift – first noted by Saussure, then stressed by linguistics and structuralism and, finally, by Lacanian psychoanalysis – between signified and signifier, into which ideological manipulation easily insinuates itself, and which it was the Novissimi and the Neo-avant-garde who, through the pages of the journal “il verri”, edited by Anceschi, were among the first to introduce in Italy.

If, on the basis of these premises, the crisis of language in its relation to the world may be said to be generally felt, the Novissimi nonetheless take up a position of radical contestation with regard to language, pushing the effects of that crisis to their extreme consequences and thus to the highest degree of awareness – one that is not only poetic but properly ideological – and planning a genuine opposition to current language [5], against which, ultimately, the very vitality of poetry and its social significance are measured, that is, its capacity to intervene in reality [6].

Giuliani indeed writes that “the new poetry measures itself against the degradation of meanings and against the physiognomic instability of the verbal world in which we are immersed, but also against itself, against its own capacity for invention” (Giuliani, 2003, p. 7), since poetry is justified only “by the degree of energy it manages to impose on socialised signs” (Giuliani, 2003, p. 5). Hence the need to draw meanings out of the logic of “exchange” that governs the linguistic system, by blowing apart the norms that govern ordinary communication, as well as those of a stale literary tradition, in order to win or design new meanings and, as Pagliarani explains, to keep language in working order (cf. Barilli and Guglielmi, 2013, pp. 691-692).

If, from the point of view of writing practice, certain linguistic solutions, among them the extension of the vocabulary and the introduction of expressions of orality and of various “voices” into the text, seem to bring the writing practice of the Novissimi close to that of many poets situated outside, if not indeed in opposition to, the Neo-avant-garde [7], the way in which these elements are reworked and inserted into the context of the schizomorphic structure of the composition reveals a clear difference as regards the approach taken both to the linguistic system and to the literary one.

The vocabulary of the Novissimi, for example, opens itself to common terms but also to specialist, sectoral and slang ones, etc. and to all that language which Pasolini would call “technological”, that is, the language emerging from mass communication. The poets of “Officina”, the journal edited by Pasolini himself, which represented the opposing “front” of poetic experimentalism with respect to “il verri” and the Neo-avant-garde, were in fact the first to promote the broadening of the semantic range in correspondence with the broadening of the “subjects” treated in poetry to social ones bearing on the contemporary world, thus abandoning the field of transcendence sought within the Hermetic sphere and, with it, the transcendence of the word itself. The language of the Novissimi, however, goes well beyond the experimentalism promoted by “Officina”, pressing the pedals of plurilingualism and pluristylism towards unprecedented solutions and asserting the primacy of the structural construction of the composition over its content, that is, over the message it seeks to convey.

Pagliarani, who nonetheless remains tied, in some way, to the experience of “Officina”, with which he had collaborated before arriving at the Novissimi, explains, moreover, how any modification of the poetic vocabulary cannot but entail profound modifications to syntactic structures and, with them, to the genre itself in its constitutive structures; in this sense the author envisages a reinvention of the genres (cf. Giuliani, 2003, p. 199), which entails that intermingling with the novel and the theatre already mentioned as a widespread tendency in the Sixties, but also a strong intermingling with the techniques of other arts, in particular with cinema, which then occurs, in various ways, in the work of the other Novissimi as well.

In La ragazza Carla – of which the anthology includes some parts -, a long narrative poem whose protagonist is the young Carla Dondi, caught up in a path of personal maturation deflected and almost halted by the alienating metropolitan reality, Pagliarani transforms the voice of the poetic self into that of an external narrator, setting it alongside the voices of the story’s other characters, who “enter” the text as though stepping onto a theatrical stage. And yet, as Pagliarani will make clear (2013, p. 9), the character is in reality language itself: rather than “lines” of dialogue, what follow one another are genuine linguistic varieties, – bureaucratic language, lyric language, everyday language, specialist language, etc. – in a montage of elements that seeks not to be an imitation of speech but to denounce the exhaustion and depersonalisation wrought by language, by means of the dissonance that arises among the different varieties of the language, juxtaposed according to a discontinuous logic that breaks up the flow of the sentences, of the discourse and of the plot, following the rule of montage. Porta too, in the texts included in the Novissimi, introduces the narrative element, turning the poet himself into a character [8], dismantling the flow of the discourse through the montage of everyday events and news items, but montage is indeed the cardinal procedure of the schizomorphic structure of the Novissimi. In the texts of Balestrini and Giuliani – although in the latter the most significant results in this respect would come after the publication of the Novissimi [9] – montage works, for example, like a collage of fragments of the world’s discourse, genuine samplings from everyday language, like excerpts, which are reassembled into alogical sequences, with an evident affinity to the visual arts of the historical avant-gardes and to Dadaism above all [10]. Bearing witness to a double gaze, turned at once to the present linguistic situation and to the situation of poetry, is Sanguineti’s Laborintus, of which the anthology includes some sections, which, in a kind of linguistic and stylistic “grinder”, blends fragments and quotations of lofty literary language, terms specific to various linguistic spheres, different languages and even dead languages, formulas of orality and expressions of speech, as well as terms from the sphere of the affects, of myth, of the unconscious, in an indistinct amalgam of relics of the whole of Western civilisation and the whole of Western literature that stands there to denounce the exhaustion of an entire culture (cf. Giuliani, 2003, p. 202).

Such juxtapositions serve the programmatic defamiliarisation of language, achieved where words in common use, as well as those of “high” culture, are recontextualised within a structure that demolishes their customary meaning and their normal syntactic sequence – Giuliani indeed speaks, in this regard, of asyntacticism (cf. Giuliani, 2003, p. VIII), denouncing the depersonalising effect of contemporary language, according to a notion of defamiliarisation that starts from Brecht and that, by way of Benjamin, is determined and defined precisely through the montage of elements in contrast with one another.

Drawn from the living stuff of the social situation, the language of reality is thus taken into the poetic text through a “cut-and-paste” operation, by no means banal or random, in which the author’s self does not simply step aside to make room “also” for other voices in the poem, but tends to annul itself entirely so as to yield the space directly to the linguistic system as a whole: it is not the poet’s voice that adopts the words “of others”, it is the voice “of others” – of the world – that is brought directly into the text.

In the poetry of the Novissimi the word is therefore understood not as the expression of the subject but as a social fact, carrying with it into the text all the refractions that the word undergoes within the context of communication and within cultural and historical stratifications, as Bakhtin had already explained, establishing, as is well known, on this point the first difference between poetry and the novel.

Even though such an intention may belong to other poetics as well, the voice of the writing subject, in the works that shore up the history of our literature of the Sixties – think, briefly, of those by Sereni and Caproni, but also by Zanzotto, who more than others has shown to what assaults the self is subjected on the part of language and of the “world” – is always clearly visible, and the operation of reformulating language that may occur in them is nonetheless carried out in such a way as to preserve, albeit through various disavowals or dismantlings, perhaps parodic, and even while admitting other voices and a language different from its own, the lyric tradition and the position of the subject itself, not so much, or not only, in the text, but properly in the world (cf. Cucchi and Giovanardi, 1996, p. XXXIV).

The poetry of the Novissimi, by contrast, declares the impracticability of the lyric by reason of the dispersal of subjectivity that has taken place in the present age – since the process, far from exhausting itself, has instead extended over a virtually enlarged world – and undertakes instead to show the alienation of the subject within language, which speaks to us and directs us “from outside”: the very fact, that is, that the subject is heterodetermined by language, which is by now the language of communication, of spectacle, of the cultural imaginary, etc. and has been left as if at the mercy of the “schizophrenia” of the world outside. Nothing else, in fact, is revealed by the primacy accorded to the poetic structure over the writing subject, the so-called reduction of the self, indicated by Giuliani as one of the three cardinal principles of the poetics of the Novissimi, together with schizomorphism and the atonal line.

By eliminating the nostalgic residues of a monadic subject that no longer exists, the reduction of subjectivity does not, however, constitute a surrender in the face of the alienation of the subject in contemporary reality, but is advocated as the last possibility left to the poet for expressing himself subjectively (cf. Giuliani, 2003, p. 22) and for intervening on language itself.

Notes

[1] It is suggested, for example, by Dante Isella with regard to Sereni’s language (cf. Isella 1986 p. XXVI).

[2] The question is addressed by Pagliarani in La sintassi e i generi and by Porta in Poesia e poetica, both in Giuliani 2003, pp. 193-195 and pp. 199-200.

[3] On the destruction of forms, see what is argued by the editors in the introduction to the anthology Parola plurale (2005).

[4] Cf. E. Sanguineti, Poesia informale, in Giuliani 2003 pp. 201-203.

[5] This is clearly explained by Balestrini in Linguaggio e opposizione, in Giuliani 2003, pp. 196-198, but the concept is also addressed by Giuliani in the introductions to the anthology.

[6] On this point see the contribution of Umberto Eco, Del modo di formare come intervento sulla realtà, in Opera aperta (Eco, 2013).

[7] For a detailed analysis, see P. Giovannetti 2005.

[8] See in particular the texts Di fronte alla luna and Meridiani e paralleli.

[9] Cf. Giuliani 1965.

[10] In this sense one should also note the rich output of visual poems by Balestrini, Giuliani and Porta, produced by means of collage.

Bibliography

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Giovanna Lo Monaco is a research fellow at the University of Florence, with a project on literary and artistic expression in the European underground; she earned her doctorate at the ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome. She works mainly on avant-garde literature and on the interrelations between the arts. Among her most recent works is Dalla scrittura al gesto. Il Gruppo 63 e il teatro (Prospero 2019).