|
Introducing the
Poetry of Alessandro Carrera There are several
ways to introduce a book of poems. One may choose to highlight the title:
“The Perfect Bride”! what and who in the world might she be? is it a
collection of poems the author dedicated to his present or future wife? or a
romantic projection? Or one may choose to begin by observing that titles
alone sketch a road map through an imaginary landscape. Think, for instance,
of some poem titles in the book, where right at the opening of Part One, we
read “Good Morning, I am your Pilot,” which scans the topography of our world
in bold strokes: “Tell me where we are. I have been flying / For three days.
Is it Arizona below us? Or is it Kansas? / Is it Oklahoma, is it Nebraska? Is
it Tierra del Fuego? / From here I see only the sun / Collecting his golden
coins from the lakes.” (14). Further in the book, we read “The Red Caboose,”
and near the very end, “Ulysses arrives in California,” which immediately
triggers the suspicion that the author espouses some notion of Modernist
irony. But we need not plunge immediately into thematic or rhetorical
criticism. It is sound hermeneutic practice to let the topos come forth by
itself, by first listening to its many external messages, or clues, or
metapoetic statements. We can also speak of The Perfect Bride by noticing immediately that it
is . . . bilingual, that is to say, Italian originals
with English versions on the facing page. These things are always intriguing,
we usually spend much time with a text that says the Same thing (presumably)
in a Different language. Perhaps we can begin
here. It is tempting to belabor critically the spontaneous metaphor of
specularity, mirror-imaging, duality. In any case, however, my initial
observations on this wonderful book of poems must be general, as it would
take a full-length essay to do it only partly justice. For the fact is that
Alessandro Carrera is an exciting new poet in our midst, that rare individual
who succeeds in combining the different elements in his own very diversified
background into a special alchemical poetic formula. Carrera’s other
production reflects the fact that his is a discourse between different
aspects of a common preoccu-pation, for instance, between being a musician
and a musicologist, a philosopher and a literary critic, a novelist and a
poet, an intellectual who operates between two cultural frames of reference,
Italy and the United States, or two institutions, academia and the diplomatic
corp, or even, Heidegger and Leopardi, the Signified and the Signifier, in
short, a candidate for a diaphoristic
reading, one who is here and there at one and the same time (or, if you
prefer, on this and that side of the same mirror). As a result his text seems
to be constantly seeking some sort of equilibrium, fully aware however that
it is neither certain nor long-lived when momentarily attained. Difficult and risky
though it may be to attempt to pin point with any accuracy what is the Main
Message in the Text, we can venture into the text at hand from so many angles
(the meaning of the title; the metaphors of travel; the fact that it is a
bilingual edition; the metaphor of specularity). In order not to lose our
bearings, and in order not to sway back and forth between the contrasting
dualisms, we must posit a third frame of reference, which must of necessity
be an “other,” a virtual Archimedian point outside the field in question. As
I have argued elsewhere, this is represented by the critic’s active figural
interaction with the poetic phenomena at hand. In fact whatever I want to say
about The Perfect Bride requires an
intervention on my part. I must inter-relate, inter-connect in the first
person, directing my perception and sense through the network of signals of
the text. This could take on the form of a comment on the presence of
adjectives in Carrera’s poetry, which entails characterization; or an
observation on how at times the translation is just not right (but as I may
see the same words as the author and yet hear things differently, I’ll drop
this one, specifying however that all translations here cited are my own); or
stack up and parse the phraseological rhythms, which would permit me to point
out that Carrera’s long verse is indicative of the growing possibilities
accorded to the “prosaic” dimension of contemporary poetry. There are in fact
several poets in Italy today who work with a long verse, usually way above
twelve syllables: I can think of Gio’ Ferri, Domenico Cara, Elio Grasso,
Guido Savio, Paolo Valesio, who prefer rather to re-produce, without being
coy about it, certain rhythms of spoken speech, and in this they are closer
to contemporary theatrical practice than to the Grand Lyrical Tradition. But
there will be some surprises, as for instance a subtle epic tone perceivable
here and there. I may finally opt to speak of this book by deconstructing its
title and reconfiguring it within a broadly understood notion of Italian/
American literature. For The Perfect Bride is, in an essential
way, about America, and therefore even though it is written in Italian, it
might just as well be read as an American book. It was, after all, written
while the author lived and worked on American soil, and its referents hors de texte exist within the several
provinces that make up America. It is about the experiences of a foreigner—an
Italian—in this country, and it can be seen as a poetic autobiography, a log
book, giornale di bordo, which
brilliantly records the surprises, the perplexities, the contradictions, the
absurdities of our society as they are observed/sensed/lived by someone who,
though fully capable of living on this and that side of the border, once in a
while asks (of himself?) whether some events, images, tidbits of reality,
from store fronts to Las Vegas angels to railroad tracks, couldn’t simply
stay put, be still, stop their irregular nerve wrecking unpredictable
unrolling through the landscapes of the mind. It is a book of poems about
living in America written through the natural filter represented by a
different national language. It is not
about the differences between being Italian and being American, it is hardly
a comparison/contrast of the two cultural and historical realities which
nonetheless are fused in the background. Carrera has often observed (most
recently in the poetics statement contained in the forthcoming Poesaggio, poeti italiani d’America,
Pagus Edizioni, Treviso, 1992) how in the strangeness of his new living
quarters in Texas he meets up with situations and typologies very much like
what one might experience in the neighborhoods of, say, Abbiategrasso near
Milan. Rather, The Perfect Bride is
more adequately understood if seen as one man’s venture outside his original
habitat and into a . . . new world. Beyond his immediate
body, however, the traveller become journeyman has only language with which
to explore and relate to this new dwelling. Now if metaphors are
also subject to metonymic linking, then let’s see what happens: country,
land, dwelling, house, family, wife . . . bride. Is the
bride the perfect land (the appropriate soil)? is the perfect bride the right
country (but why not, also: the ideal fatherland)? Let’s turn to the text,
and read from “First Appearance of the Bride:” “Others are haunted
/ By the gorgeous daemon of excess. / Normality / Gives me no relief. So why
/ Does she, the tamer, grab me / On endless nights / Shrieking write, write
about me / And how the color of your semblance I change / . . . /
But pages, open seagulls, pages. / Nothing else can give you, without love, /
As after love such peace.” (30). Let us now go back
and try another passage furrowed by the emblematic title: “I Hear the Sounds
but I Do not Understand the Worlds:” “When someone yells
at me / From his car window / That my raincoat is stuck in the door / That I
have a flat tire / That my hood is open / That I lost my license plate / That
I crushed someone / That I drive like a criminal / That I got it all wrong /
If I don’t love Jesus / As he does / I hear the sounds but I do not
understand the words . . .” (16) This is also from Section
One, titled “Domestic Flights,” and speaks to a situation which I’m sure most
of us have experienced in some guise at some time or other. It has a very
geometric structure, relying on accumulation, on anaphora, as if the author
wanted to reassure the reader (or himself) that ultimately the snapshots he
whisks by us do point to some sort
of sense, albeit one which reiterates the strangeness, the wonderment, the
melancholy of a frustrating situation. The stanzas begin with a precise
reference: “At the bus station,” then follow, in the order, “At the airport,”
then the partly cited “When someone yells at me,” and on with “When my
telephone rings,” “When I go to the drive-thru,” and “When I call a dog,”
each and every time delivering, besides the naturalistic description of the
outside event that spurred the observation in the first place, also the
author’s feelings, which can be described as somewhere between amused and
perplexed, intrigued and yet desolate. Through it all, however, there emerges
a sense that the very gift of human language is worth putting up with all
these incoherent, frustrating situations of non-communication, of
language-barriers, of phonetic mis-representation; as Giorgio Agamben once
wrote, there is is something peculiarly “human” about the voice, about
speech, which even if coming from a language we do not understand or have
never heard before, cannot be confused with utterances by either animal or
machine (though some might contest that). And the concluding stanza seems to
bear this out: “And when I hear
the sounds and do not understand the words, / I understand the sounds and so
always I say ‘yes, / Of course, I understood perfectly’, / I always say yes
to the sound of the sounds.” (18) This brings us to a
further consideration: when one understands the sounds, does one necessarily
understand the language, indeed language tout
court? It appears that the poet is stranded somewhere between signifier
and signified, so that on the one hand he may indeed relate to the sounds,
the acustic image (of American English, in this case), and respond
accordingly, but on the other the signified, or the meaning, keeps on eluding
him, which represents adequately the situation of a foreigner in any given
country. That language is made up of strings of signifiers is easy enough to
understand, to master even, yet the corresponding signifieds are culturally
determined and circumstantial and experience specific, a condition which
makes the poet pay even more attention to their diverse and problematic appearing.
It is also well known that it usually takes someone new to our language and
culture to make us aware (albeit yet again) of the staple of signifieds we
take for granted, but which to him or her disclose new worlds, at times
creatively suggest the several strategies for better social organization and
broader cultural values. In few but worthy instances, what is brought to
light by a “foreigner” is more,
qualitatively more, than what we all already know, and there is substance to
the thesis that a foreigner sees more of ourselves than we do; the relation
to both signifier and signifieds is alert and primed, oriented differently,
penetrating things and events at unexplored depths or hidden angles. As
regards this aspect, Carrera’s little book is a revealing tour of America,
reflecting a society not always reassuring and coherent as the national
ideologues would like us to believe. Concerning the
subjective side of the experience, that cluster of sounds we typically
consider the ultimate fulcrum of our linguistic-social-legal existence, that
is, our very own name, is shaken to its ontological roots, evidencing how
names, like nouns, are also arbitrary constructs: “And when someone
calls me / And says Alessandro or Alexandro or Sandro / And I stand up and I
go towards him or her / Is it because I hear the sounds / Or is it because I
understand the words?” (18) The question of the
linguistic doubt is not unrelated to the issue of ethics, as both are
theoretically grounded upon a norm. If the poet’s very name is up for
discussion, so is his relationship to the society he finds himself in. And
much in the way in which he has to rethink his identity, through the
phonetics of his name, so must he reconstruct his values, through explicit
references to one of the perennial threats and tragic events: war. His not
being a poet entangled in the self-referential game of the signifiers allows
Carrera to turn to real social signifieds, to face squarely this
all-encompassing significant issue. We have, in the early part of the book,
“Song Before the War,” (26) which speaks to the light-headed rituals of the
diplomatic/military, with an intercalating ominous statement about how that
was, but is no longer, possible. In the Second Part, titled “The Big World
and Its Wonderful Music,” there’s a beautiful uncanny reflection on being and
being-there titled “Gulf and Silence; Nine Snapshots of the Same Place,”
(38-48). And then, in the Third and last Section, we read “A Song after the
War,” which is a tragic and ironic, and overtly sad, resentful even,
assessment of how we justify our mass violence and still pretend to be
ethically viable as a society. This poem will surely find its niche in any
future collection of poetry on the Gulf War: “. . . Thanks
for the 51 TV jokes about the lousy enemy / And for whoever counted them /
Thanks for the post-war blues, if someone gets them
/ . . . / Thanks for this-nation’s-got-no-more-balls /
While this-nation-still-got’em / Thanks for the memories / For our song / . . .”
(114) Turning toward the
conclusion of this brief introduction, we can now ask, what happened to the
bride? where and who is she? On page 94 she reemerges in the poem that gives
the book its title, symptomatically subtitled “A Pilgrimage in Seven
Choruses,” where we begin to get the suspicion that she is, much like
Stevens’ necessary angel, a necessary partner, one which permits the author
(or the speaker in the poem), to rebuild himself, but only by assuming the
responsability for such an essential, grounding, founding gesture. More than
that, the speaker will confront ambiguity and chance head on, admitting that
the soft, self-mocking irony of the composition is not at all proof of having
it all under control, as there will always be doubt, slippage, a haunting
residue. Beginning with a rhetorical-scientific question, “What do we know
about her,” we read: “Divided like a
hive / Yet one and fluid like honey / When she turns her glance the horizon
is defined / When she gathers it the horizon rushes to her
/ . . . / We make her up: / The result is not greater
than the parts. / We change her: / She’s not interested in diversity
/ . . . / Silly like a god she picks us at random /
Demanding unheard of virtues. / . . .” (96) Then, coherently with
the title which suggests a plurality, an encounter of selves and situations,
someone else begins to move onto the scene to speak: “The most courageous one
brings us together,” where we perceive how the poetry can only procede by
wearing the masks of narrated existence, as it unfolds drama-like: “One,
keeping silent, whispers,” until we get: “The curious traveller breaks in,”
and for the next stanza, “The most persistent one exhorts us.” Then, once
again representative of this chorus of the several avenues, “The youngest one
stands up and says.” By this time the reader is in the midst of a small “long
poem,” with characters, situations, hypotheses, action, resolutions, doubts,
dreams, mysteries, and finally, “She stops taking notes and answers,” with an
Homeric-Dantean background tone: “You who hoard the
winds / Hunting the hare with the wolf / Diving against the current: / If you
could but once behold me / As the woman that I am / Before me you would
certainly rise up / Blind with sovereign purposes / Speechlessly debating the
tunes yet to come.” (104) The next line is a
classic entreat: “Do show off your
humiliation / Do spell out what you’d do for me / If only you were free,
brave, and wild.” (104) Clearly this bride is
a goddess, she is the land, the dwelling, she is the country-as-mother: “You
would carry me in your arms / As if each day were / Independence Day.”
Impossible not to link up, in the next line, with history: “Yet you land here
sleepy and in disarray / Your imagination alive / Despite all
/ . . . / So much seed you have dispersed / In the
pathways to my womb and the rooms of my accent. / Of mortal love I love you /
Because deathbound, and very ill, is love.” (106) Do we still have any
doubts as to what the poem is talking about? America is the newly found
mother-earth, an idea which pre-exists the actual voyage of the pilgrims: “You will learn how
I preceded you, / And how we were already conjoined / When I was still /
Unknown to you / On the most gaping shores / Where no grip or memory are to
be found. / Yes, you will be mothers, words and limbs / Of a progeny you
cannot control; / Yet while looking for your features in their faces / You
will see me again, because you are / My grateful desire turned flesh, / My
happy flesh walking on the sea.” (106) We can only wish
that, alongside with his insightful critical-philosophical production,
Carrera continues to poetize about experiencing America.* CUNY/Queens
College |
*The Perfect
Bride • La sposa perfetta. Houston: Thorn Books, 1992. 126pp. P.O. Box 821432 Houston, TX
77282-1432 ($12.00 + $2.00 p&h).