REVIEWS For Kim Addonizio and Sharon Negri,
Tony Ardizzone, Dorothy Barresi, Rita Ciresi,
Onat Claypole, James Wyatt Cook, Stelio Cro, Alfredo de Palchi, Emanuel di Pasquale, Rachel Guido deVries, Luigi Fontanella, William Leparulo,
Little Italy, Sebastiano Martelli, Fred Misurella, Paolo Valesio, and Tom Zaniello, David Shevin, and Larry Smith
             

 

Kim Addonizio. Jimmy and Rita. Poems. Rochester, NY: BOA, 1997. Paperback. 88 pp.

Sharon Negri. Ruby and Other Lives. Poems. Washington, DC: Ar­gonne Hotel P, 1996. 24 pp.

 

These are two books by women poets close in age, both of Ital­ian-American background. Negri hails from working-class upstate New York and now lives in suburban Washington. Addonizio comes from middle-class Washington, DC, and has moved to Cali­fornia. They come from backgrounds that are disparate and simi­lar at the same time. There are no stereotypes here. These women, these poets, these sisters of the soul have much in common. But it seems to me, that which most binds them is that their works are informed by work—by labor, especially the labor of women.

What is so satisfying in these works that explore the lives of working-class women and men, but mostly women, is that they approach their journeys with such different sensibilities. Their voices, first of all, are distinct and unique. The forms that they use to look at the lives of the characters who live in these books are wildly different, and perfect for the worlds that they describe. Let’s look. Let’s listen. Let’s open our hearts and minds and guts. These books are the stuff of literature—a word that they reinvest with meaning in a society that is the most alliterate of all: ours.

Jimmy and Rita charts the lives and stories of two down-and-outers, two lovers who separately wander to California, fleeing tough circumstances that a post-industrial, post-modern world has to offer to most of us—only to find more of the same. Tough circumstances are now a mass-produced commodity, widely ad­vertised every day and night on “Oprah,” “Jerry Springer,” “Geraldo,” “Cops,” “NYPD,” “Bounty Hunters,” and a hundred other televised circuses of the absurd. A world of perversity and cops now dominates cultural dialogue in this, the most impris­oned nation in the industrialized world. More than a million peo­ple now inhabit our prisons, the fastest growing public housing program in the United States. According to the US Department of Justice, one of every twenty people born after the year 2010 will do some time.

California, our Promised Land, has become our most impris­oned state. And in California, in or out of prison, you work. When not behind bars, Jimmy, a failed boxer from New Jersey, and Rita, the daughter of a failed salesman from Arizona, inhabit a world of day labor for Jimmy and sex work for Rita. It is junk—drugs—that brings them together. Their story, told mostly through Rita’s eyes and heart, is one of seemingly endless decline; but in the face of that decline, the resilience of truly human characters exposes itself again, and again and again.

Addonizio structures her narrative through a series of poems that take on many characteristics of a screenplay. Settings are shown. Dialogue is given. Action takes place. Three primary points of view are used: the narrator’s (or film-maker’s), Jimmy’s, and Rita’s, which predominates.

Here’s Jimmy feeling himself awakening after a long, tough night: “Jimmy wakes up at dusk, / stares at the couch legs, con­fused / for a few seconds. / Lights a Camel, watches / rings rising to the ceiling. / He hates this time of day, / feels death coming on like a punch / he won’t duck in time. / Each circle of smoke / solid at first / then pulling itself apart.”

Here’s Rita making love with Jimmy: “Jimmy inside me coming and saying Rita / if my name is me, if it’s not / if I am or if I’m nothing empty / solid for that one moment.”

Jimmy and Rita go on a Sunday picnic like any other newly­weds. They are penniless. They are addicts. They get drunk. They get stoned. And then: “They unscrew wine and spread cheese / with a pocket knife. / Triangles of Laughing Cow on saltines. / Rita says No one / can live like this for long.”

Rita goes to work: “The men finish / and I go into the bath­room / and look at / myself / disappearing where they touched me. / At night I feel my heart / beating too hard / and I’m afraid. / Stop, I tell it. / But it keeps on / saying Rita, Rita, Rita / as if she’ll answer.”

But Rita’s heart doesn’t stop. And her life, brought into words by Addonizio, asks this final question: What about you reader? Is your heart beating? Do you care?

If Jimmy and Rita uses narrative techniques taken from screen­writing, Ruby and Other Lives can be said to be a novella. The book is fifteen poems about the death and life of Ruby—a small-town sex worker in deindustrialized upstate New York. Each individual poem (and the entire collection) use a language that is rich in the way that a good dessert is rich, dense—but not impenetrable. And extremely filling. Jimmy and Rita flies across thousands of miles—an entire country; but Ruby lingers along a single winding road.

Uncle Ray tells of Ruby. Her dad talks about his daughter. And Ruby speaks in her own words: “Found this picture / of me and mama / from 1953, / a Sunday in August, / she’s wearing / her best church dress, / streaks of gray / in her hair, / air thick with Tabu. / Daddy’s gone like always, / taking up / with women and beer, / leaving mama / with dinner to cook, / me in her arms, / but she’s smiling down, / letting the sun rub / the back of her neck. / She’d never have thought / that day / I’d pierce my own ears / at ten, / get a rose tattoo / a summer night in Norfolk, / or turn / to such heaviness.”

As she’s packing Ruby’s things after her daughter’s death, Ruby’s mother reflects on “my only child leaving the world before me.” She says “her grandmother crocheted this afghan, / Ruby loved the lavender mixed with white, / kept it on her bed, no matter the season . . . / . . . these lipsticks were in her leather bag, / she liked the deeper reds / from as far back as I can remember . . . / . . . I bought her this white sweater last Easter, / the pale blue brought out her eyes, / pearl buttons suited her just right . . . / . . . strange what you remember at a time like this, / dates and be­longings and people / all mixed up like patchwork. . . .”

Negri discovered Ruby somewhere in her imagination. She’s a “good Catholic girl” who becomes a sex worker in a small town who succumbs to “such heaviness.” In the discovery, Ruby is rec­reated through the words of Negri and those (imagined) people who knew her, or at least knew of her. Ruby lives. She challenges us to do the same.

These two poets cut some pretty difficult and dangerous turf here. It is ground that has been walked by some of our greatest writers: Algren and Bukowski immediately come to my mind. Gi­ants of a different time and place and gender. Giants who are honored, actually, by the works of two poets from our time who bring something new and fresh and vital to a part of the human story that most of us don’t like to look at. But we’d better start to. And turn off the damned TV.

 

Tom Johnson

Washington, DC

 

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Tony Ardizzone. Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood. Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 1995. 155 pp.

 

Tony Ardizzone’s most recent collection of short stories offers a glance into the ethnic, primarily working-class, world of Chicago, a world that the author suffuses with poetry and into which he injects his awareness of the tragedy that can invade the peaceful routine of daily living. Many of the twelve stories in the collection focus primarily on one character, whose slanted perspective func­tions as the reader’s gate into a slice of life that would otherwise go unnoticed. If the title of the collection conveys the idea of a homecoming, of a reunion between the author and the neighbor­hood of his childhood and youth, then the stories themselves capture a world in which the narrators and protagonists feel at home in, but also estranged from. Ardizzone uncovers the unfa­miliar in the familiar: the strange perversions of everyday life that shatter his characters’ trust that tomorrow will be like yesterday insidiously make their way into these stories. The stories them­selves surprise the reader with unexpected twists and closures that refuse to provide either resolution or reconciliation.

The characters skillfully balance the precarious equilibrium of living, recalling the struggles of Sherwood Anderson’s grotesques. Ardizzone portrays children, clumsy adolescents, adult men and women, and old people with grace and understanding: no one is exempt from life’s trials and tribulations, which can strike even a group of children playing baseball—a game that appears fre­quently in these stories. Baseball serves as a frame for the mayhem of daily living—and dying. For the protagonist of “Baseball Fe­ver,” the opening story of the collection, baseball is not merely a game of childhood: it is the locus of unexpected tragedy; it is the word that brings back the memory of the death of a playmate he accidentally caused during a game improvised in the streets of his neighborhood. The images of the child killed by a ball that struck him in his throat, and of the other child, who suddenly finds him­self a murderer, weigh heavily on the mind of the reader. The abrupt shift from humor to tragedy takes the reader by surprise and sets the tone for many of the later stories. Yet the humor never quite disappears, even when death looms. Ardizzone’s narrative is imbued with a dark humor that is one of the distinctive and most captivating traits of his style.

Baseball and religion are intimately connected, especially in “Baseball Fever” and “Holy Cards,” and the rules of both “games” provide the protagonists of the two stories both with interpretive frameworks through which to contemplate overwhelming events and with ways to view the sacred as profane and the profane as sacred. The rules and dogmas of Catholicism and their supersti­tious manifestations surface frequently in these stories, in ways that suggest that Ardizzone’s relationship to Catholicism is not simple. His critique refuses to reject the cultural element of Ca­tholicism obviously pervasive in his upbringing and in his prose. “The Language of the Dead” offers an unflattering portrayal of Catholic schools and an oblique but eloquent condemnation of physical punishment, a disciplinary method freely used in the schools. The game played with crucifixes by the young protago­nist of “Baseball Fever” enables the boy to engage in a conversa­tion with Jesus. Lying still, he sees Jesus’s “hollow cheeks” re­flecting a flame; Jesus’s head seems to shake in disagreement, as if he were rejecting the boy’s request for absolution.

Ardizzone’s stories seem influenced by Joyce’s subversive and irreverent uses of Catholicism and his depictions of the violation of childhood innocence in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “The Eyes of Children,” for example, recalls Joyce’s “Araby,” as it aptly describes the disillusionment of a young boy who discovers that life promises no miracles. “My Mother’s Sto­ries” begins with the troubling statement: “They were going to throw her away when she was a baby.” There is little safety for children in the world depicted by Ardizzone, and adolescence proves no less trying, as rendered in “The Daughter and the Tradesman,” in which playful courtship becomes rape; or in “Ladies’ Choice,” in which being picked by the dream girl has quite different connotations than one might expect: only at the end of the story does the reader find out the true significance of the title.

Ardizzone is at his best in his depictions of children, adoles­cents, and old people. His sensitive and often lyrical portrayal of old age is evident in “Nonna,” one of the most memorable stories of Taking It Home. The haunting presence of an old woman wan­dering through the streets of her neighborhood, the Little Italy of the West Side, where, feeling a pariah, she is chased by her memo­ries, leaves its imprint on the reader’s own memory, as do char­acters such as Vinnie, the young boy in “The Language of the Dead,” or the nameless protagonist of “The Man in the Movie.” The old woman’s fragmented memories constitute the core of the narrative which, although in the third person, filters the thinking of this character, which is as disjointed as her roaming through the dilapidated neighborhood. By entitling this story “Nonna,” Ardiz­zone, like other Italian/American writers, pays an endearing trib­ute to the old Italians—comparable to Tina De Rosa’s elegiac evo­cation of the same neighborhood—that never turns into futile nostalgia.

Ardizzone is one of a handful of writers who refuse to sub­scribe to formulaic or self-serving depictions of Italian Americans. What is striking about these stories is their portrayal of everyday life, of characters who might resemble your next door neighbors: one can almost see their silhouettes framed by a door against the darkness of their houses, catching a train, driving their parents’ cars at night, encountering the reader half-way between fiction and reality, while the author makes that encounter possible through his compassionate vision of the quotidian.

 

Edvige Giunta

Jersey City State College

 

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Dorothy Barresi. The Post-Rapture Diner. Pittsburgh: U of Pitts­burgh P, 1996.

 

The Post-Rapture Diner, Dorothy Barresi’s new book of poetry, imagines southern California as a vast, hot, flat desert wasteland that revises T. S. Eliot’s epic locale, finding redemption in lyrical strains of ice-cream trucks and sit-com romance. Barresi’s first collection of poetry, All of the Above (1991), won the 1990 Barnard New Women Poets Prize; this collection is just as striking, I think: almost always strangely moving, cock-eyed, charming and dis­arming. Barresi’s tone is wise and gullible, her cravings material and mystical, metaphorical and theatrical: in “The Older Brothers of Girls I Grew Up With,” one of the most moving poems in the collection, she gives us the outlines of a nerve-racked teenage en­counter, her “heart leaking joy as though I’d eaten meat from the moon.”

Describing her childhood and California, Barresi offers a full-fledged poetics of the liminal. This uncharted region or experien­tial middle-ground lacks a clear history or map; caught some­where between heaven and hell, past and present, it is a place where memories curl up and wait to get retold. The only clear markers in this emotional terrain are volcanoes or earthquakes. Bodies can get lost to anger in this space, children absorbed by their parents, and secrets can eat up conspirators or lovers. “My father tells a story of 1934,” she writes in “My Anger in 1934,” “one I’ll tell my shrink / some afternoon when the sun has gone stately / behind the vertical blinds.” Barresi’s voices, too, belong to displaced, weather-beaten figures trapped between these worlds, like the “Prodigal Daughter” or the storm-tossed patriarch in “Noah Descending.” There are no gods in Barresi’s landscape, “no gods in Vanity Fair,” but many stranded prophets, figures for whom vision can be painful and rarely clarifying, like the Mark of the Gospels (cited in Barresi’s epigraph), the visionary who rec­ords Jesus saying “I see men as trees, walking.” Barresi is trying, I think, to recall mythical subjects and bring them down to earth—not in order to deflate them but to uncover their mechanics, like her picture of the father-figure Daedalus, tooling around in the garage with a distracted son.

Occasionally, Barresi’s poems feel heavy with sentiment or seem overly-absorbed by her wit and striking sensibility. At times, her images stop short, too-easily fascinated by collisions between private longings and more public fantasy, like Barresi’s strained conceit of Ralph Kramden and Alice making love in their off-screen bedroom. Indeed, this is a poetics where the land-locked Kramden and sky-bound Rudolf Nureyev take up equal room. Too often, television provides both the signs and the affects here. Barresi’s obvious delight in the colloquial and everyday, the banal or the faded, can get thick without getting rich. Her imagination sometimes rides over rough edges, and blurs lines instead of ex­posing them. The vision can simply veer away, toward absent-mindedness: sometimes I wondered, exactly what is Barresi look­ing at, or is it simply now looking at her? To be sure, she raises this confusion directly; in “Some Questions We Might Ask” she muses: “After the earthquake this morning / the glass in the win­dows flexed / subtly, intermittently— / a faint murmur of steel in the day.” Perhaps Barresi’s poetry is both the steel and the win­dow. But I wish she had confronted this poetic dilemma between viewer and viewed at other times in other poems, and made more of an effort to look past her impressions.

Still, when Barresi does stare long into the hard light of her imagination, we get a desert sun that throws things into sharp, dizzying relief. What is so graceful about her poems is their but insistent refusal of grace, some transcendental solution or impulse toward a larger, blanker scheme (like the one Eliot later proposes in Four Quartets). Burying a poisoned neighborhood cat, she sug­gests, can be more complicated than “making the proverbial rabbit / appear.” Yet Barresi does not subvert those transcendental frameworks so much as leave them behind in the California dust. Especially in the later, longer poems, I found myself entranced by Barresi’s magical specter of the real, the full-bodied images pro­vided by Nureyev or Ralph Kramden—who, after all, has his own ideas about the moon.

 

Elizabeth Mazzola

The City College of New York / CUNY

 

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Rita Ciresi. Blue Italian: A Novel. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco P, 1996. 287 pp.

 

 “Books were rare sightings in my parents’ house,” explains Rita Ciresi in her autobiographical essay, “Paradise Below the Stairs” (Italian Americana, Fall/Winter, 1993). Ciresi might also be de­scribing Rosa Salvatore, the protagonist of her debut novel, Blue Italian. A second-generation daughter of working-class Italian immigrants, Rosa struggles to find happiness in a family firmly dedicated to “the grimmest possible view of what it [means] to be a human being.” Blue Italian revolves around Rosa’s marriage to Gary Fisher, a Yale law student and only child of wealthy Jewish parents from Long Island. The outer frame of the novel focuses on Gary’s untimely death at 31 of prostate cancer. Avoiding any hint of pathos in her novel, Ciresi begins the first line of the prologue with the unsparing fact of Gary’s illness: “Gary Alan Fisher had cancer. He was thirty-one years old and he was going to die.” The meat of the novel is told in flashback, centering on Rosa’s court­ship with Gary, their different cultural backgrounds, and the in­creasingly obvious parallels between Rosa’s Pizza Beach Italian neighborhood and Gary’s Long Island affluence. Perhaps what makes this novel both infuriatingly funny and painful is the fact that Rosa Salvatore’s desire to escape her often loveless and insen­sitive Italian-American family drives her straight back into loss and pain. Underneath the dialogue of clever wisecracks and witty quips is a very sad and serious book. Rosa Salvatore is one blue Italian.

Like Ciresi’s short-story collection, Mother Rocket, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Blue Italian incor­porates several hilarious vignettes, including such events as pa­rental dinners, trousseau shopping, and wedding parties. Con­nected in theme and tone, Ciresi’s short stories often echo each other, adding depth and variety to the collection. In a similar manner, Ciresi often pairs chapters and events in Blue Italian, a doubling strategy which reinforces the fact that Rosa Salvatore is captured by texts not of her own making, despite her desire to es­cape them. Both the initial parental dinners that Rosa and Gary attend and the parties after their marriage suggest that Rosa is not relinquishing her Italian-American family as much as she is seeing it repeated in Gary’s Jewish-American relatives. Despite their outward differences in class standing and religious beliefs, the Salvatores and the Fishers are very much alike—perhaps all fami­lies keep secrets and continue to feel embarrassed by relatives who refuse to be anything but themselves, such as the eccentric Aunt Sylvia and the opera-singing Zio Louie.

Rose Salvatore is mourning her life well before she learns that her husband has cancer. Uncomfortable with her body, longing for family affection, and deeply unhappy about her Italian-American home life, Rosa Salvatore’s major impetus for marrying Gary Fisher is to escape the “awful fate” of her family background. That Rosa finally chooses for her Bridal Registry the Spode plate pat­tern called Blue Italian perhaps suggests her undeniable connec­tion to her immigrant past and its attendant emphasis on destino. While Rosa’s fate might lead her to personal unhappiness, ulti­mately, Ciresi does not allow Rosa to fit into a traditional Italian-American role: that she be married, preferably to an Italian; that she have molti figli—many sons—to complete her role as an Italian mother; that she spend her married years “becoming a woman who leaned out of a second-floor window, her heavy upper arms jiggling as she hung out on the clothesline the white flags of laun­dry, like so many signs of surrender.” Rosa Salvatore does not measure up to the traditional and stultifying roles of marriage and motherhood to which her mother grimly adheres, and that is pre­cisely the point of the story. Nonetheless, Rosa is not as a result freed from the expectation that she measure up to precisely those standards that constrict those who thoughtlessly abide by them.

That Ciresi uses humor to depict the formidable limitations of both the Salvatores and the Fishers—particularly mothers on both sides—indicates her interest in exploring the perimeters of par­ody. Having been thrilled as a youngster by reading the by-now infamous novel Love Story, Ciresi reverses the male-female roles and pointedly makes it clear that having to say you’re sorry is hardly the point, but having Italian parents, ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Perhaps, too, Ciresi also imitates Italian-American literature as well, in which the fundamental focus on the family becomes, in the hands of a writer as verbally dexterous as Ciresi, carnivalesque, a gross exaggeration of itself. It is no surprise that Ciresi was equally thrilled as a youth by the romance of the family depicted in Puzo’s The Godfather. In keeping with Ciresi’s keen awareness of the effect of Italian signs in American culture, she has Gary Fisher make the connection between Topo Gigio (the Italian mouse who gave the good-bye kiss to “Eddie” at the con­clusion of the Ed Sullivan show) and his wife, Rosa Salvatore: “‘hey, Ro, . . . I hate to tell you this, but you look like Topo Gigio. And if you’re Topo Gigio . . . then Somebody sent you to me, right? right?’ Rosa crinkled up her forehead. Jesus. It was worse than she thought. She had married a man who wanted to make it with a mouse. And after he made it, he tried to act like it was a religious experience!”

As dismissive as Rosa’s comment is, Ciresi’s strategy in this scene offers both a perspective on the past event (the Ed Sullivan show)* and the present scene, a staple feature of parody. First, the Jewish-American character fondly remembers the Italian mouse, his “pure love” for Ed Sullivan, who was “short and dark and hairy and ugly,” traditional descriptives regularly foisted on Ital­ian immigrants in the early twentieth century. Second, Gary rec­ognizes in Rosa a soft and gentle creature who has neither been noticed nor needed by her family. Ultimately, Gary’s recognition of Rosa’s loveliness serves to illuminate other sections of Blue Ital­ian, in which Rosa submits to what I’ll call “prayerful moments”: moments of interior monologue in which Rosa prays to the God in whom she continues to believe and articulates her desire to tran­scend her familial culture: “she kept thinking there was something inside Gary that would help her understand the world—surpass it, even.” What she surpasses is precisely the story that Aunt Sylvia loathes and Gary Fisher enacts—the operatic plot in which a couple falls in love and dies. In fact, during a scene at the Fisher’s wedding party for Rosa and Gary, Aunt Sylvia complains about the love-and-death plots of opera. In response, Gary offers an alternative choice of plot: “‘Like they fall in love and live?’ Gary asked.” Aunt Sylvia responds, “‘That’s more like it. How about it, Rosa?’”

Whether she likes it or not, Rosa falls in love and lives in this narrative. Perhaps Gary’s death will ironically help her to surpass the provinciality of her Italian-American world. Despite Rosa’s loss of husband and baby (she has a miscarriage), she refuses the role of mater dolorosa, the suffering and always grieving mother. Her rebellion lies in her humor and her private thoughts which reveal the soft and beautiful side of an outwardly cranky protago­nist. Ciresi’s own form of rebellion against Catholicism and other elements of Italian-American culture led her to two acts—reading and subsequently, writing. Attributing the lack of reading mate­rial in her home to her decision to become a writer, Ciresi may very well have created Rosa Salvatore to suggest that harsh fami­lies might very well produce lovely heroines. Blue Italian does an excellent job of exploring family relationships, families whose bluntness shocks and disarms us.

 

Mary Jo Bona

Gonzaga University

 

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Onat Claypole, ed. and trans. Sicilian Erotica: A Bilingual Anthol­ogy of Erotic Poems by Giovanni Meli, Domenico Tempio and Giuseppe Marco Calvino. Brooklyn, NY: Legas, 1997. Pp. 189.

 

The grouping of these poets, each ostensibly writing on the same topic but in different modes, explores a range of styles as the writers raise erotic male heterosexual poetry to new artistic highs (not to mention lows), while writing in the vernacular national Sicilian language. The poetry ranges from the witty double enten­dre (mostly variations on names for the male member), to the raunchy and the downright coarse and obscene.

Giovanni Meli (b. 1740), a physician and a favorite of the cul­tural elite of Palermo, wrote refined, erudite, and graceful lyrics. His eroticism is veiled in coy conceits, and as the introduction notes, he had little use for four-letter words, which seem to be the standard vocabulary of the other two poets. Petrarch’s sonnets often praised Laura’s parts; her hair, her eyes, and other physical attributes. Meli follows suit, with poems devoted to “The Bosom,” “The Beauty Mark” (with whom he would like to trade places), etc. But he reaches the apex of lyricism in “The Garden of Love,” which, on one level, can be read simply as a pastoral. This poem is an extended metaphor, and is deeply rooted in Classical and Ren­aissance comparisons of the beloved to an enclosed garden, a locus amoenus with its requisite flowing waters, lush vegetation, and fragrant flowers. The poet’s desire to enter the garden and lose himself in the pleasure of enjoying it becomes a delicately veiled promise of sexual physical restraint: “If I manage to get in there, / —Oh the waters there are bliss!— / I won’t tease, I will not tear, / I’ll just smell and touch and kiss” (63).

Meli’s subtlety contrasts starkly with Tempio’s (b. 1750) outra­geous and scandalous poems, which are clearly influenced by the Enlightenment. The problem: a pre-pubescent Venus inspires lust in all the gods. A hilarious poem called “The Masturbation of the Gods” (the introduction refers to this poem as the “circle jerk of the Gods”), describes the Olympians’ solution when only Vulcan, whose name has been drawn out of Jove’s hat, is allowed to have his way with the goddess. “The Creation of the World,” a poem about sodomy, contains an anti-clerical jibe suggesting this act has been reserved for priests. The poem ends with a blasphemous scenario casting God as a voyeur, who, watching Adam and Eve in the act, becomes extremely frustrated: “But if Almighty Father had a dick, I guess, / the world today would not be such a mess” (75).

Calvino (b. 1789) used the genre for social satire in his “Philosopher” series. In one of these he lists the benefits of mas­turbation: he will not need to engage with another, his imagina­tion can run wild, as he “conquers” all women, and just think of all the trouble that could have been avoided if Adam and Eve had not tasted “the sweet apple,” or if the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah had not succumbed! The Trojan war could have been eliminated, there would be no unwanted pregnancies and no ve­nereal diseases. Calvino’s play on the word cugghiuni, which translates to English dickhead, asshole, or moron, is used by all three writers; in Meli’s anti-clerical poem, the Abbot Ricca is called a minchiuni, another word for testicles. Calvino’s fin de seicle mal­aise is cleverly summed up in “The Nineteenth Century”: “the man who wants to fuck is called disgraceful. / Stealing through politics is not a sin at all;” (173).

Despite the subject matter and true “low form,” these poets continue in the classical tradition. Women are given pastoral names, like Nice, Phyllis, Chloris, Lici. The emphasis is on a “seize the day” attitude of living life to the fullest, a Sicilian characteris­tic, given the uncertain and troublesome history of the island. Like seduction poetry written before, these poems suggest that sex was made for man’s pleasure, and that women have to be praised, ca­joled, wheedled, begged, or tricked to participate. First nights and deflowerings are a recurring motif.

This anthology is Volume 5 of the Legas series devoted to bi­lingual editions of Sicilian poetry. The sixteen-page introduction by Justin Vitiello, “An Overview of Eroticism in Western Poetry: From the Greeks to the Enlightenment,” cannot possibly fulfill this tall order, but having noted this, Vitiello begins with the Freudian view, the difference between erotic poetry, seduction poetry, and pornography, its Classical literary antecedents, its previous prac­titioners, Catullus, Sappho, and Ovid, Dante’s intermingling of sacred and profane, and today’s debate on where to draw the line. All this while claiming he will resist entering the list (25).

I would have welcomed less speculation in the introduction and more biographical background on each poet, analysis on the poetry as poetry, (prosody, metrics, rhyme schemes, etc). And, by the way, who is this talented translator? Onat Claypole is remark­able, and has performed a great service by rendering these earthy, lusty poems into our own vernacular.

 

RoseAnna Mueller

Columbia College Chicago

 

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James Wyatt Cook, trans. Antonia Pulci: Florentine Drama for Con­vent and Festival, Seven Sacred Plays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

 

This collection of plays is the first volume in a series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. That voice is woman’s voice, emerg­ing in this period against a 3,000-year history of misogyny. The editors of the series, Margaret King and Albert Rabil, Jr., review the literary history of the period in their introduction, paving the way for future volumes.

Antonia (b. 1452) received a literary and religious education and at eighteen married Bernardo Pulci, a member of the Floren­tine literary clan. Both spouses wrote sacred dramas for popular performances to make ends meet, perhaps the first example of a husband and wife professional literary team. She did not have children, and so became a caregiver to her relatives, and in turn a playwright, an Augustinian tertiary, and later the founder of an order of nuns. Cook’s introduction, “Antonia Pulci and Her Plays,” looks at Pulci’s work in sections that examine her voice, the emphasis on noble deeds in her plays, her womanly concern, a biography of Pulci, and her literary antecedents. Included is an analysis of the Pulci canon, the performance of sacri rappresenta­zioni, and suggestions for further reading.

In her plays, ably translated by Cook, Pulci’s saints and secular women stand out as strong protagonists at a time when women were expected to be passive and submissive. Her heroines bristle with energy, they are intelligent, and when they show weakness, it is circumstantial, and not an inherent trait linked to their gen­der. The plots of Pulci’s plays reflect her personal experiences, her own concerns, and woman’s choice in her day: marriage to their “lord” or to “The Lord.” The decison to live at home or to join a convent had been an issue in Pulci’s own life. Domestic subjects in her plays, such as the challenge of raising children and the grief parents suffer when children do not turn out as expected, demon­strates her empathy. This is seen in the play St. Francis, whose fa­ther becomes furious when Francis decides to give away all his possessions. St. Gugliema is an early modern psychological analy­sis of lust, violence, and rape, and the gender and power issues that connects them. Queen Gugliema’s husband joins the Cru­sades, leaving her to the mercy of her brother-in-law, who first strips her of power, and then tries to seduce her. When he is un­successful, he incriminates Guglielma, telling his brother it was she who tempted him. Other plays give voice to wives’ com­plaints, primarily their husband’s infidelities, and the scorn and verbal abuse they must submit to.

Convent dramas, though religious in nature and didactic in their aim, mirror the dominant culture’s view of women while giving women’s own assessment of their state. At times, the plays envision an audience of religious women, in which female pro­tagonists are faced with the decision to marry or to enter the con­vent. The Play of St.(Flavia) Domitilla, written in 1483, perhaps Pulci’s first, lays bare what marriage means for a young woman and forcefully argues against it. Possibly performed at an initia­tion, or an investiture, it extols the superiority of chastity over marriage, and provides solid arguments for the religious profes­sion of women. Marriage to Christ is eternal, and Domitilla can retain her noble virgin state. Marriage to the mortal Aurelian would mean total change and submission: “To every pleasure of his, transform your life. / Your habits, and your manners, and your style, / His every vile commandment would perform / So that his appetite may be sated” (lines 141–44). By the end of the drama, Domitilla, along with her martyr companions, chooses to burn, rather than to marry.

 

RoseAnna Mueller

Columbia College Chicago

 

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Stelio Cro. The Spirit and the Flesh. Manzoni and the Modern Novel. Tallahassee, FL: DeSoto P, 1995, ii, 264 pp.

 

Cro’s interest in Manzoni has produced several interesting studies ranging from “History and Poetry in Manzoni’s Il Cinque Maggio” (1980) to “L’idealismo neo-guelfo e il teatro nazionale in Alessandro Manzoni” (1988), from “Manzoni and the Lombard Question” (1986) to “The Idea of Progress in I promessi sposi” (1987), from “Alessandro Manzoni and the French Revolution” (1990), from “Cavour, Manzoni and Liberism” (1994) to “Manzoni and the Modern Novel” (1995).  In his latest book-length study, his purpose is to place Manzoni in the Italian and European cultural context, addressing a dimension of his work that has not previ­ously been studied in depth, that is, the symbolic or allegorical meaning of some of the best known characters of his masterpieces, most notably, the character of Gertrude, the “monaca di Monza.”

In the first chapter Cro discusses in a broader context the issues of Classicism versus Romanticism in Italy as well as abroad. In this context, the author perceives as the outstanding contribution of Manzoni the ability to “identify and give expression to that as­pect of the Italian people which would transcend narrow political boundaries and would unite small city states into one nation, forge one language out of many, give diverse people a common dream” (8), so that, in retrospect, he can define this end result as the unified Italian collective unconscious, clarifying that his inter­pretation of this Jungian concept is more sociological than biologi­cal: “In the end, Manzoni believed to have identified that collec­tive unconscious in a Christian soul, which is like a spiritual form inside a solid marble block. . . . In [his] work there is a utopian di­mension, since Manzoni’s Catholicism will clash with the political reality of the Roman question and the virtual opposition of the papacy to the Risorgimento. But . . . Manzoni’s interpretation would inspire every patriot, whatever his political views, to fight for the independence and the unity of his country (9–10).” These theoretical parameters are then applied in the following chapters. Chapter II examines Manzoni’s Christian view of history, drawing on a number of works in various genres: his poetry, Il Cinque Mag­gio, his plays, Carmagnola and Adelchi, and his prose studies, the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, the Discorso sulla storia longo­bardica in Italia, the Storia della colonna infame, and the Saggio sulla rivoluzione francese dal 1789 e sulla rivoluzione italiana del 1859. Ref­erence is also made to the Lettre à M. Chauvet and I Promessi Sposi, especially Chapter XIII. Manzoni’s Christian utopia offers a par­allel and a contrast to the unification process of 1859-1860: “While rejecting the French Revolution because of its intrinsic anti-Chris­tian ideology, Manzoni shared the same democratic ideals of many French revolutionaries, only more so, because his renewed faith in Christianity carried an irresistible social and political force, one which would shape for generations to come the new modern Italian nation” (25–26).

In Chapter III we see an example of the allegorical reading of Il Cinque Maggio; ultimately, for Cro, the “poem is therefore also an allegory of poetry which acquires immortality from life itself” (39–40).

The theater is the object of a careful discussion in Chapter IV, in which the critic offers an allegorical reading of the characters as victims of a traditional Machiavellianism inherent in Italian poli­tics. In Adelchi the author argues that Manzoni sought to produce “a poetic work which has earned the title of the first example of national theater in Italy. . . . In the character of Adelchi the author intentionally decided to renounce historical truth to inspire Ital­ians with national sentiment” (76). Manzoni’s search for a solution to his own debate between poetry and history came to fruition in Adelchi and prepared the foundations for I promessi sposi: “Manzoni could at last shake off the constraints imposed by his strictly faithful historical portrayal while still using historical situations and documents to demonstrate the corrupting influence of . . . all the evils inherent in a Machiavellian interpretation of power” (77–78).

Chapters V and VI with the discussion of the concept of histori­cal progress and Manzoni’s economic ideas, highlight, on one hand, the analogy between the character of Ferrer in I promessi sposi and that of Necker in the later Saggio, and, on the other, the affinity of Cavour’s economic doctrine with that of Manzoni: “Cavour and Manzoni belonged to opposite ideologies, but their Liberalism brought them close, because for them Liberalism meant the love of freedom” (118).

Chapter VII, “Christian Utopia versus Modern Nationhood,” reviews the European debate on Romanticism, comparing and contrasting Manzoni’s Romantic ideas with those of such well known writers and critics as Goethe, Mme. de Stael, and Sis­mondi, as well as the anti-Manzonian authors of the later Risor­gimento, like Carducci, whose hymn “A Satana” is the counterpart of Manzoni’s “Inni sacri” (150):  “Satan as the embodiment of the Italian Risorgimento is the extreme ideological reaction to Man­zoni’s Christian and Catholic Risorgimento” (153). That is the “satanic” perception of a dualism between spirit and flesh on which Cro has based the title of his study.

Chapters VIII and IX locate I promessi sposi within the context of the history of the European novel by contrasting the providential design of Manzoni’s narrative with that of other major eighteenth and nineteenth century authors. The critic analyzes in detail De­foe’s Robinson Crusoe as “a symbolic warning against the illusion of utopia” (165) and describes the impact of Spanish Golden Age theater on Manzoni. Chapter IX  contrasts and compares Manzoni and Scott, Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy, establishing I promessi sposi within the rise of the novel genre. Particular attention is given to Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata whose “radical solution” is “prepared by Manzoni” (221).

The tenth and final chapter, “Allegory and the Collective Un­conscious in Manzoni” discusses different approaches to realism in order to demonstrate that this concept is inadequate to capture the depth of Manzoni’s creation. The “obscure, forgotten pseudo-chronicle of a little town in the first half of the seventeenth cen­tury, a period particularly insignificant in Italian History” (229) could not explain the lasting influence of his masterpiece. Cro suggests an allegorical reading of Manzoni’s novel: “Could not the story of Gertrude, with its tale of oppression by a despotic father, significantly called the Prince, to remind the reader of the Machia­vellic nature of this character, be read as an allegory of the drama of a nation, oppressed and cast down, but not without hope that virtue may overcome vice?” (228). Cro concludes that Manzoni’s ability “to bring out in the open the collective unconscious of a nation, projecting it into the individual drama of his characters, was his lasting contribution to the modern novel” (231).

This book is written with an authoritative, clear, concise style. Cro’s familiarity with several literatures and languages provide a rich and varied background on which his thesis of Manzoni as a father-figure of the modern novel is convincingly argued, opening the field of critical inquiry in the current debate on the origin of  the novel.

 

William E. Leparulo

Florida State University

 

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Alfredo de Palchi. Anonymous Constellation. Translated from the Italian by Sonia Raiziss. Xenos Books, Box 52152 Riverside, CA. 92517. 909–370–2229. ISBN 1–879378–X (paper) $13; ISBN 1–879378–24–8 (hardcover) $23.

 

Alfredo de Palchi’s Anonymous Constellation is one long stream-of-consciousness presentation in the style of French symbolist po­etry—with plenty of blank white spaces between the individual sections, or short poems, which wash through the poet’s mind with stark imagery and cynical emotion. Pour ce qu’il est tout in­sense is the opening epitaph from Francois Villon—showing that the poet means to insense us with his ironic message—to slap us in the face with our own pretense at civilization. There’s a thoughtful introduction by Alessandro Vettori of the University of Virginia which explains the poet’s mission and why the style of the book is organic to its themes. The strongest section of the book comes in the middle when the poet leaps into concrete happen­ings, leaving the more abstract mode of existential nausea and de­spair. Disgust and rage are expressed at corruption, greed, big­otry, hate, folly, human vanity, and the loneliness that is the human condition. These are dePalchi’s themes as he takes us from the beginnings of our evolution through the vulturism of the ani­mal kingdom to set us adrift in the far reaches of the stars. He is a poet longing for human perfectibility, calling us to awaken into humane conscience, aware of how power corrupts all in a self-ag­grandizing universe where existence seems based upon the expe­diencies of survival and the necessities of nature.

Writing in his native Italian, de Palchi has been translated into sharp-witted English by Sonia Raiziss—but the English transla­tions are not as good as the Italian originals in tone and polish. The book is happily a bi-lingual edition and a cycle of poems not unlike his last, The Scorpion’s Dark Dance, also translated by Raiz­iss, which won praise for its “dark exuberance, bright anger, cut­ting cynicism which hammers us to the other side of apathy.” There is a Dantesque harshness and a Montalean sorrow, even as there are glimpses of redemption and self-insight that break through with a typically Italian, sardonic tone.

De Palchi is a survivor of war and imprisonment by Fascist and Communists zealots, longing to make sense out of the violence and brutality that surrounds him and which nearly destroyed his youthful life. His earlier book, The Scorpion’s Dark Dance, was a sharp contrast of surreal, existential rage with sensuous imagery. Nature’s beauty bloomed forth in sticky, succulent contrast to the abstracted wit of a sardonic mind to offer its peace. The poems seemed to flow in a more driven sequence than in the current book. In Anonymous Constellation the rage is more complete and encompasses nature, herself, the grass in the end covers all rot, corruption, murder, and massacre, but does not bring peace. Rather, in the current work, nature is a seductress tempting us to forget our horrors, a suspect beauty.

The poems intensify as one reads along. Perhaps, they are not arranged in the sequence in which they were originally written, but the highest points of the sequence come on pages 51–63. As one reads deeply into the book to capture its strength, a more con­crete imagery leaps out of abstractions to ground the existential despair in everyday realities. An excerpt like the following—so much more powerful in the original Italian, too—is such a mo­ment:

 

They shot a black man

in a fruit store,

his tingling crinkled head

lands in a crate of tomatoes. . . .

. . . the crowd grumbles. . . .

I shrug my shoulders, hurting at the thought

of the crash in his own and at the sight of his face

tinged with busted tomatoes

 —Is that blood?—

 —Eh, he’s just a nigger—

says a dwarf clown.

 

This is followed by a section that states the central theme of the intensely streaming consciousness—which despite its cynical bite seems meant to bring us to a peace on the other side of despair and toward a more humane conscience. Only an idealist can be­come so disillusioned.

 

. . . the world grins under a fist

we have opted for not weeping not helping

but looking away

when a body collapses

and walking off with the same indifference

we feel for the beast knocked out

by a car or a shotgun—

it’s useless to pretend, everyone

is out for himself

and locked in himself.

 

And then the voice explodes into a flowering of truth that sur­mounts the every day world to become epic in proportion:

 

How can we swallow history, our

daily story, get used to enormous and petty

insults—under each fallen leaf a war

of insects and everywhere the rage

for survival: the mouse the rabbit

the cruising hawk attack

and the butcher’s boy in his ferocious glee

lashing the ox and hungry for power. . . .

 

This is de Palchi’s ultimate sorrow. Yet, the poet’s despair in Anonymous Constellation is full of heavenly aspiration, even in its existential nausea. The title poem gives the book a resonant aspi­ration, a respect for the mystery of self in relation to the cosmos, so unfathomable to one finite mind. Alfredo de Palchi suggests that each of us is his own “grand inquisitor” responsible for the love we can create within our own small society of friends and family. Within the walls of our own homes we may find love that tran­scends the bitter world. This is his finer message and Anonymous Constellation is a book worthy of many readers. Responsibility for human love and suffering is what the poet calls us to. In all his existential sorrow, de Palchi wishes to reach beyond himself to a greater understanding and humanity as he feels himself reeling in a vast universe, a mystery even to himself, an Anonymous Constel­lation.

 

Daniela Gioseffi

New York City

 

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Emanuel di Pasquale. Genesis. 1989. Jostro Publications, 1997.

 

There is something so honest about Emanuel di Pasquale’s po­etry that reading it makes us feel, somehow, the world is made more sure. Like Sicily itself at a time when emotional artifice was unheard, when di Pasquake was born, nothing but the truth would do; feelings were disclosed vigorously, verbally. So it is with this work. The language, while gracefully crafted, is un­adorned, unselfconscious, as we are introduced to the people in the author’s past: the mother; dead father; Fat Louie (“Nightly he squatted by the tavern doors . . .”); Mad Mario (“A heap of lice, half mad . . . found dead in the mouth of the Mother Church . . .”); Uncle John (“seismic boozer”); Al, The carpenter; even a poem for an unlikely visitor to the family album— Ezra Pound. The point is that Emanuel di Pasquale is passionately and hopefully connected to the humanity in his past and in this world. And he raises peo­ple from the dead to honor that.

The poet is unconcerned with the abstracted, unformed, and unrecognizable. He prefers living breathing characters who can speak forever clearly in Genesis so we can know exactly what he knows, portraits of souls as he saw them, and places he knew, with mad, sad, ebullient lives passing through the corona of his creative powers.

For these reasons, I found Genesis startlingly original, and yet classic in the tradition of American poetry. There is elegy, remem­brance and song, (influenced by Carl Sandburg, ‘the people, yes,’) but something unalterably European is more the fuel of this book. It is a slight unwieldy disregard for fashion while displaying a consummate knowledge of it. There is a faith in the self, first-gen­eration émigré to our literary land, not quite convinced one must accommodate wholly.

 “Return To Sicily,” in the second section of the book, is a travelogue for the sensual. “Hundreds of swallows [sprinting] . . .,” marble columns, hot sand, sea waves “like the white teeth of horses.” It is more than one can expect, the clear eye, the record of geography made sentient and always the people behind the next artifact who come into focus. Just when we are sliding into Sicily’s antiquity with its cool light and breezes, comes a departure, an entry, stanza 16: “Mr. Style! Who studied a bit and speaks Formal Italian / with a Northern sound. Who loves to be close to me, / the professor . . .” and we are back to people again, the passionate utterance. And, back also to women . . .” stirring in their water­melon seeds. . . .” I like this. It is part of di Pasquale’s stand against pretense. It says we can have unity and symmetry on the page but watch for the harnessed emotion. If it is felt, it is entitled. It is recorded.

In the poem “Sicilian Pre-Dawn,” the poet begins: “When I was eleven, / people were always dying. / Even my father forgot to live. / I was alone. / And in this autobiographical note is where Emanuel di Pasquale finds his power. If one is alone, truly alone, he can afford to speak to the crowd. This is the individual clarion call of someone who has nothing to lose. Coming from the solitary life (his mother says of his origin that he was “found beneath a stone”) we have the birth and the legacy of the solitary voice.

I think I like best the sentiments in “My Two Fathers.” I quote from the poem its final stanzas:

 

At home, his eyes looked down on me

and he would never speak.

And once, in my small anger,

I hurled a carrot at him

and made a cobweb of his face.

 

But the small picture on the tombstone

always spoke to me

and asked for flowers, flowers—

and I . . . I stole

chrysanthemums and roses.

 

Grace Cavalieri

Hedgesville WV

 

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Rachel Guido deVries. How to Sing to a Dago. Toronto: Guernica, 1996.

 

The mass migrations of Italians to America occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and ever since then, poets and writers of Italian descent have been steadily leaving us public documents of our collective experience in this country. Through this often pas­sionate documentation we have become more visible to ourselves, identifying ourselves to one another and to the non-Italians around us. We are a culture steeped in family and tradition, un­dergoing huge change and loss in this Anglo-dominated country, yet re-generating ourselves as we go. It is due to the strength of la via vecchia, the ways of the old, the centrality of the Italian-Ameri­can family, and, I believe, the persistence of our potent literary voices over the decades, that our Italian-American culture has re­mained as intact, regenerative, and alive as it still is.

It is with this attitude that one should approach How to Sing to a Dago, a new book of poetry by Rachel Guido deVries. Her capti­vating title reads like an instruction manual. On first glance, after noting “dago,” the ethnic slur, one is led to expect instructions on the task at hand: How do you sing to a dago? The poet’s assump­tion is that of course everyone will want to. The boldness of that assumption is delightful and emphasizes her sense of entitlement and her right to her own vibrance. The non-Italian reader, of course, might be starting in the basement: what is a dago anyway? But the poet does not seem overly concerned with this dilemma. She may even be counting on the irony of it. Upon reading the poem, you will soon appreciate her self-confidence, her humor, and her directness. They recur throughout the piece from which the title of the book is taken. She begins with a rather musical lim­erick:

 

Wop wop wop, wop wop a guinea guinea,

Wop wop wop, wop wop a guinea guinea

all day, all day, as the dagos on

 

This limerick also recurs throughout, and with its energy, seems to propel the poem forward. In spite of her obvious humor, deVries also goes on to convey the anger and pain of her experi­ence as an ethnic woman too often silenced and made invisible by her Anglo peers. Her sometimes raucous and impassioned re­sponsiveness to life is too often curtailed by “the white girls who tell me Italians are loud,” and who find her exuberance tactless, overwhelming, and downright threatening.

In “Italian Grocer,” the poet once again describes the pain and frustration that come with being misunderstood as an Italian, and judged as less than by outsiders who belittle an unrestrained con­nection to life, to food, to love, and to sensuality in general. In this case, she is describing her father, an Italian grocer, who owned his own store. His “polished apples,” “sweet Jersey peaches all fuzzy and gold,” and “figs which he held up like gems,” were so clearly his pride and joy. Yet when the store mysteriously burned down to the ground, the neighborhood rumor was that he “torched his own store for insurance.” In fact, he had none, and he “wept all over the street” when his store was destroyed. By the end of the poem, we are left with the poet’s own emptiness and confusion, her child’s eye view of this inexplicable loss: “His white coat, smelling of cheese and fish, was gone.”

This poem and the title poem are both about joy and passion and how living in a hostile dominant culture we are pressured to stifle our expressiveness. In fact, so much of this book is about passion and its expression: passion exploding, love and passion tragically thwarted, a passionate connection to one’s Italian an­cestors, spiritual passion, a passionate connection to the natural world, sexual passion with women. DeVries’s poetry is filled with images of the natural in a sensual/sexual context. A major strength in her work is her elegant and musical use of natural im­agery, imbuing it with sensuality, as in the poem in Part II of the book, “Hands Like Birds, Flying”:

 

Five a.m.

I wake/with you

in my hands

wet/ready

to take you

in my hands

like birds

flying

Two hands

I hold up

and flutter

slow until

all I desire

becomes a love song

filling the air

with blue

 

Her use of birds in symbolic ways comes up again in the third part of the book. This part focuses on imagined and felt visitors, spirits of the living and dead, blood relations whose presence and energy speak to the poet across time. In “Crying Bird,” the poet longs for her mother, such a pivotal figure in our Italian-American sensibility. Her words mourn the loss of the mother that inevitably comes with adulthood. She says, “Mamma . . . it’s still what I long for . . .”

 

alone in my forties. Not a child, but

to be yours again, the old ways we danced,

your palm tender on my cheek, the small

phrases you’d whisper, our secrets. Too

many years without you have made me come

loose from your treasure. Out here

on the sea I recall it and weep. I

think I’ve gone hard, Mamma, tough bird

in salt air. I think I’ve grown old

 

Skillfully, the poet’s voice returns to the dilemma, again and again, of how we go about regenerating ourselves and imbuing ourselves with the sense of vibrancy that gets stolen from us and that we must recreate in order to live. So much of this, it seems, has to do with learning to love—well and deeply—and expressing ourselves continuously. From her title poem, she says:

 

When I lay my mouth to your ear,

my tongue in its shell, I’m singing a love

song and singing it well.

 

Passionate self-expression is it, in a nutshell. That’s how a dago sings, and that’s how you sing back to her.

 

Giovanna Capone

Oakland, California

 

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Luigi Fontanella. Ceres: poesie 1986–1992. I Transatlantici, 1 Caramanica Editore, 1996.

 

A costo di tirarmi addosso risate e risolini (e spero sia proprio così perché sarò io che farò la risata definitiva), e valanghe d’improperi dai numerosi venditori di fumo, specifico subito che nella vasta America degli Stati Uniti ci abitano tre o quattro (per farne una folla) poeti italiani, non italo-americani, seri e capaci di tener a bada quelli che abitano e operano, certuni come fossero mediatori di bestiame, sulla piazza italiana. Due, I “Transatlantici” Luigi Fontanella e Alfredo de Palchi, di generazione diversa, hanno sicuramente un valore letterario. Per la verità non è un grande problema per questi due sovrastare, senza allungare il collo, coloro, qui e là numerosi, che si arrabattano a vivacchiare nel giallore dell’invidia, che a vicenda s’informano sulle loro pic­cole cose le quali servono soltanto per loro stessi senza poter spaziare fuori del loro circolo d’invidiosi. Poveri meschini. Ma per adesso lasciamo in disparte il particolare caso de Palchi. Qui desidero mettere in evidenza il valore, come io lo percepisco, della recente raccolta poetica di Luigi Fontanella.

Ceres contiene cinque sezioni, diverse dall’una all’altra per il materiale usato e per lo stile espressivo: Dediche, Ceres, Parole per Emma, Ars poetica, Ballate e canzoni.

In Dediche, la prima sezione di sette poesie, la costruzione di belle arcate per I dedicati non mi nasconde lo sforzo di spiegare e c’è più prosa poetica che poesia. Infatti, la dedica a “Pier Paolo Pasolini (in memoriam),” con I primi tre versi Nell’attesa ho fatto più presto io / a scribacchaire una poesia / che lei ad arrivare, chiarisce la mia interpretazione giusta, verso quella dell’autore, e giustifica la facile prolissità di Pasolini. Fontanella non intende dire questo, però lo suggerisce a me malizioso mai stato un ammiratore della poesia cosidetta pasoliniana. Non parliamo di quella ad Alfredo Giuliani, dedica che vuole essere di ammirazione quasi imitative. Ma nemmeno del lavoro di Giuliani sono mai stato un apprezza­tore. Può darsi che sia colpa mia nei due casi appena menzionati. Preferisco le due dediche a Francesco Paolo Memmo, e quelle a Ro­molo Runcini e a Achille Serrao, personaggi a me ignoti.

In Ceres riesce a dominare la scrittura del suo spirito generoso entro I limiti dei versi musicali, liquidi, ma compatti. Posso avvi­cinare lo stile del più giovane Valerio Magrelli a quello di Fontan­ella. Ci saranno altri che non seguo a non conosco, però Magrelli mi viene in mente senza timore di sbagliare. Il nervo­sismo lin­guistico del maestro è in unisono con la precisione dello scorrere mellifluo dei versi e della chiarezza espressiva. Esempio:

 

Sussurrato vibrare d’un albero in piena

primavera dalla finestra aperta

d’una biancasala di conferenze.

intanto che un molle relatore srotola

parola dopo parola

entrano escono si perdono nella testa

mentre l’aria cincischia circola

da un interno che vola

a un esterno che resta.

 

In questi nove versi c’è nervosismo—precisione—musicalità—chiarrezza. Anche vedo fisicamente il “molle relatore” che si ascolta specchiandosi nelle proprie parole.

Già dissi altrove con certa ammirazione che la sua immedesi­mazione nei giochi infantili della sua bambina Emma gli fa scri­vere poesie di pura freschezza—infatti, questa freschezza sembra dettata, scaturita con semplice dizione, dal linguaggio che Emma gli suggerisce. Non è facile trascrivere, senza sentimentalismo, l’attività e il linguaggio di una bambina, tramite l’impulso pa­terno. Ma Fontanella, che qui si autocrea bambino precoce, seguita a giocare con la Parole per Emma, ora in XXVI parti da formare un continuo poemetto. Le poesie, allora non numerate, racchiude­vano la breve raccolta uscita per la Edisud-Salerno, 1991. Dalla plaquette originale sono state omesse alcune poesie e aggiunte delle altre. L’ambiente fantasioso rimane intatto, anzi meno vaga­bondo della prima stesure, ed io noto la freschezza e la precisione.

Come tanti prima di lui, anche Fontanella si accinge a spiegare, anzi si permette di indovinare o di precisare cosa è l’Ars poetica. Dove sta quest’arte, da dove comincia—dal contenuto, dalla per­spicacia nei versi, oppure dall’insieme. Direi sopratutto dal con­tenuto benchè la maggioranza urli dall’insieme. Ci sono coloro che scrivono versi scorrevoli, musicali, ma quando uno si ferma ad analizzarli, non trova più niente; rimane un rimbombo, e quello che l’autore credeva di aver messo in luce di poesia è diventato invece descrizione, narrazione. Non ne siete convinti? Sforzatevi a rileggere Pasolini e Giuliani. La poesia non è descrizione o narra­zione. La poesia è la trasformazione della immagine e del pensiero dietro quell’immagine a un consistente livello di intensità da non considerare più quell’immagine e quel pensiero alla semplicità iniziale. Purtroppo, anche Fontanella cade nel trabochetto, facile a caderci, di annotare tante cose e tutte opposte, secondo la sua es­perienza, secondo la sua visione. Chissà, può darsi che l’ars poe­tica sia tutto questo ed altro. Le sei poesie accettabili di questa sezione mostrano la fantasia del poeta che cerca di convincerci cosa è l’ars: C’è il vedere / e tutto ciò che d’invisibile / si può immagi­nare. . . .

Che dire delle Ballate e conzoni, ultima sezione. Innanzi tutto, al­cune di più ariosa lunghezza mi obbligano a risentire quelle melanconiche di un altro salernitano. Mi sbaglio? È il poeta più amato in giovinezza? Non mi interessa di saperlo perché comun­que accetto le poesie brevi che non hanno versi di nenia, di ballata o di canzonetta. La scansione delle parole è come si leggesse il lin­guaggio secco delle lapidi.

Anche non ci fosse città e data, si capirebbe dal nome Amilcare, che i versi seguenti di un testo senza titolo, e che trascrivo solo perché mi colpiscono in un largo sorriso, sono nati a Roma per una ragazza che non si fece più rivedere

 

Su una di queste panchine

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sulle sue vaghe risposte alle mie

impacciate profferte

il giorno dopo avrei chiesto lumi

ad Amilcare autista della ditta

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 

e subito dopo, nel prossimo testo, quell’indicibile: “e il tuo mezzo sorriso acquatico.”

Non mi pare che questa sezione sia di ballate e canzoni nella maniera in cui conosciamo le ballate e le canzoni. È un titolo. Naturalmente, il poeta Luigi Fontanella ha il diritto e il dovere anche di trasgredire la quasi certezza sulle cinque sezioni del po­eta Alfredo de Palchi.

 

Alfredo de Palchi

New York

 

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William Leparulo. Radici disperse. Hamilton, Ontario: Symposium P, 1996. pp. 160.

 

William Leparulo’s autobiographical novel is in keeping with a recent group of Italian writers whose works reflect their reaction to the uncertainty and constant flux of the present times. They have developed a keen interest in the past, both as part of a quest for roots and out of a desire to investigate human emotions and problems, as exemplified in recent historical novels and biogra­phies.

Leparulo’s writing developed in the 1970s with his first book L’Italia nell’opera di Albert Camus. This was followed shortly there­after by a second book: Maria Montessori scrittrice, which marks a significant transitional stage of the author’s critical work. In it we can see a line of development from text analysis to creative writ­ing. From this book, in fact, Leparulo draws terms and concept on which he bases the development of his own novel. Without actu­ally restating his critical theory, the novel simply and spontane­ously defines it. Leparulo, a firm believer in Pirandello’s concept of art, thinks that after the author’s initial choices, the work takes on a life of its own. Radici disperse, in fact, in more ways than one can be considered independent. The immediacy of the spoken language, the acute expressive observations together with strong, clearly defined characters, make events and emotions flow via clear cut images. The characters are transformed into real persons who stand before us, rather than abstract literary figures. The reader experiences this when the young Giulia excitedly returns from witnessing the bombing over the town of Avellino. Her in­nocent, gleeful mood is suddenly interrupted by a strong slap: a solemn “ceffone” that expresses the anger of the terrified adults, contrasting sharply with the naiveté and light-heartedness of the young girl.

Many other self-supporting events are scattered throughout the novel: the nonno’s insistence upon freeing the rabbits, the young narrator’s confused sense of justice mixed with guilt and fear, the boy’s passive obedience when nonno asks him not to eat meat, an finally his surreptitious middle of the night feasting on the deli­cious “coniglio alla cacciatora.”

At times the independence of plots and characters is expressed through small, apparently self-sufficient sketches, almost sepa­rated from the context, full of local color and faithfully portraying the country folks. For example the first encounter with the “partigiani” in a scene in which Ettore shows the affection univer­sally felt for young children. Other vignettes are the adventures of Alfredo and every parent’s opposition to him.

At other times Leparulo reclaims his right as a writer and pre­sents a town or a character trying to uncover the inner causes of their actions, the way they see themselves and others, the effects society has on them and on their actions. Descriptions and dia­logues in these cases show a very interesting portrayal of the “paesani” of Avellino. They all seem to be “content” even though their condition is one of bare survival. They act for their own self­ish interests, or out of ignorance, mixing religion and superstition, calling to God only in cases of extreme necessity. They have little or no political knowledge nor do they attempt to obtain any, un­less they are very directly affected.

Leparulo does an admirable and efficacious job of depicting the naked truth. Events, persons, and society become vibrantly alive. For this reason alone this novel becomes much more than a mere autobiography. Going back to his grandfather’s generation, the narrator retrospectively dissects the events narrated, relating the hard facts known to him and to his family and using historical events not to corroborate his tale, but to make or to complete his­tory. For this purpose, events of the end of the last war in Italy are used as a framework around which the author builds a convincing and evocative study of the situation in Italy preceding the Ameri­can occupation.

The facts narrated have a great significance for the Italian his­tory of that period. The author himself was an active participant and interested observer of these facts.

Born in a lower, middle-class environment, the writer recounts Italy of that period as seen from the eye of the common man, from the novel’s first spontaneous reaction to the American invader, to the hatred for Germans and the horrors of war.

Aptly tracing the values of his age and class, Leparulo’s book transcends the genre of the war novel and becomes a vision of Italian society during the time when the acquiescent attitudes to the Fascist regime were being replaced by widespread poignant ideals of democracy.

Leparulo is a spontaneous and powerful writer, whose simple yet learned prose is both witty and enjoyable. The whole work, full of precise historical references, should be considered a signifi­cant contribution to the literary production of post-war Italian lit­erature.

 

Franco Zangrilli

Baruch/CUNY

 

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Little Italy. Will Parrinello, producer & director. Mill Valley Film Group, 1995. 60 minutes.

 

The New York Daily News described Little Italy as a film “very tenderly told [that] bursts with heart, humor, warmth, tradition and respect”; and the San Francisco Examiner found it “riveting . . . wonderful and uplifting.” Written, produced and directed by Will Parrinello with John Antonelli, of the Mill Valley Film Group, Lit­tle Italy won the prestigious Gold Hugo award for Documentary: History/Biography at last year’s Chicago International Film Festi­val. Other awards earned include a Golden Gate Award at the 1996 San Francisco International Film Festival and an Award of Creative Merit at the American International Film Festival.

Like the “kaleidoscopic country [and] not a melting pot” that is the United States, as August Coppola tells us, Will Parrinello’s narrative is a type of kaleidoscope; through a mixture of extended interviews, historical footage and photographs, home movies and pictures, and Italian (Adriano Celentano and opera) and Italian/ American (Jerry Vale) music, Parrinello explores the various phe­nomena of culture, language, ethnic identity, gender, accultura­tion, and assimilation, or lack thereof. On the one hand, his inter­viewees tell their story directly into the camera; on other occasions they are the voice-over for the various pictures and scenes Parri­nello draws and constructs from his visual artifacts of newsreels, photos, home movies, and his own camera work. The people we meet therefore become both his subject and co-author as they os­cillate between telling their own story as well as the story of oth­ers, especially those who can not speak for themselves—the im­migrants who are no longer with us.

Little Italy is divided into eight sections: 1. “Wrenching in the soul”; 2. “Non parla italiano?”; 3. “Table as temple”; 4. “Power not authority”; 5. “Passion has us”; 6. “What they understood is Ital­ian American”; 7. “I could have been in that village”; 8. “I didn’t know who I was.” Thus, emigration, assimilation, food, women, identity, stereotypes, ethnic (re)discovery, and sense of self con­stitute the thematic foundation of Little Italy. As they figure as the outline of Italian America’s poly-generational history, they also serve as a type of road-map that the later Italian American must consult in his/her quest for ethnic self-discovery. To be sure, as we follow our narrators throughout their composite voyage from the docks of New York to the Marina of San Francisco, we come to understand that “being Italian American is [indeed] a riddle,” as Robert Viscusi tells us; for the conscious ethnic can not avoid the constant state of cultural negotiation in which s/he must engage with the dominant cultural paradigm after s/he comes to know who s/he is—s/he has (re)discovered and (re)appropriated his/ her Italian Americanness. This, in fact, is what we witness in Little Italy; and in so doing, we also discover that all the Little Italys, those neighborhoods in most cities that became a refuge from that early hostile culture, have also become for the later generations a place to renew bonds with old friends and relatives and, ulti­mately, revitalize Italian and Italian/American customs and traditions.

Little Italy is both an intimate and profound journey into that often misrepresented world of Italian America. A universe often misunderstood by the media’s stereotypical representations of Italian Americans, Parrinello succeeds in bringing to the fore the real issues of Italian America vis-à-vis its past, present, and future. Parrinello draws on the experiences of artists and artisans (Ralph Fasanella, Chris Pomodoro), professors (Donna Gabaccia, Paolo Palumbo, Robert Viscusi, and August Coppola), writers (Diane di Prima, Larry DiStasi, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gay Talese), ac­tors/writers (Chaz Palmentieri, Marco Greco), and other not-so-famous people primarily from the San Francisco and New York areas. Indeed, it is this ecumenical aspect of Parrinello’s video that places it above most other documentaries done thus far. For he weaves his story from the words of Italian Americans from all walks of life from both the east and west coast.

Documentaries like Little Italy may often run the risk of in­dulging in both a defensive and overwhelming nostalgia, extolling the virtues of that which really underscored the very stereotypes the members of the ethnic group eschewed while complaining about the unidentifiable and ubiquitous they who supposedly held the group down. Parrinello, to his credit, instead, has skillfully avoided this trap; while his interviewees mention the struggles they or their parents and grandparents have endured, they do speak more to the various triumphs these very same people ac­complished despite the various roadblocks they encountered. Thus, a positive tone subtends the entire video; and Parrinello’s viewer, especially the Italian American, comes away with a sense of gleeful triumph and pride for his/her group’s success. Through this video more than others, to close with Larry DiStasi’s words, the “Italian American public [may find] its own story, it’s real story.”

 

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Purdue University

 

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Sebastiano Martelli. Letteratura contaminata. Salerno: Laveglia, 1994.

 

Sebastiano Martelli is well known as an assiduous and produc­tive scholar of literature about migration and the Southern regions of Italy. Other works of his include some fine analyses of Tozzi, Silone, Pasolini, Rimanelli as well as dialect poetry, studies which reveal an affinity to integrate the world of literature with the wide world of culture or to place literature in relation with other disci­plines. This recent volume by the suggestive title of Letteratura con­taminata [Contaminated Literature] gathers studies and docu­ments that cover a period of post-unification Italy or more exactly the years spanning the two centuries (1880–1910), but later works are treated as well. While a variety of texts are discussed here, of literary, historical, sociological, anthropological nature and char­acter, the main thrust of Martelli’s discourse is an analysis and reassessment of the social and historical causes that led to brigan­dage and emigration, two sides of the same coin, two phenomena that profoundly affected the fiber of (especially Southern) Italian society, nevertheless mainly ignored by the literary canons of that era.

So Martelli sets forth to unearth or reevaluate a number of texts discussing brigandage in the first part of the book and emigration in the second, all in all representing a vast and vibrant spectrum of life (and death) among collectives of bandits or exported migrant workers. A final section by the title “The Shifting Frontier” depicts the world of the Italian American with new myths and values in contrast with those of the traditional first generation. Indeed, we have here a number of texts for which the boundary line between literature and other disciplines—history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and philology—can hardly be delineated because such line intersects cross sections of diverse disciplines, and interests as well a variety of literary genres. Hence the title of Contaminated Literature by which the author reaffirms the roots, the depth, the universality, and the parameters of literariness while confirming the necessity to explore responsibly the text also through anthro­pological approaches or by means of social, historical, or linguistic factors. The result is generally a document partly rooted in literary tradition, partly anchored in the shifting realities of actual cultural encounters. Thus we perceive that from such an exchange or transfusion of experiences, the literary and literature can carry on and even gain vigor and momentum, as Martelli consistently demonstrates through analyses and concrete examples that take on universal historical meaning (such as the uprising in Isernia and subsequent doubt on whether to support Garibaldi and the Piedmontese or the Borboni dynasty (1860–67) in the parallel reading of the historical text Del brigantaggio meridionale and the novel Signora Ava by Francesco Jovine).

The interdisciplinary approach is surely appropriate to these texts and documents about brigandage, some penned by the vic­tims themselves— Italians, Germans, Swiss, English—which con­stitute the first part of the book. They reflect both a meeting point and a confrontation between different cultural worlds as they give an eye-witness account of life and organization of the wandering bandit, a remarkable iconography of the out-law and rebellious hero of romantic tradition— more in the mold of a cruel Schiller than in the guise of a suave Byron. What it often means is that the myth and epos of the bandit stand as a vindication and rehabilita­tion of the rebellious peasant who rejects exploitation and hu­miliation; that myth and epos stand also as an apologia for the gentleman bandit far more forceful than the Robinhood type: a case in point of that vindication is found in the novel Signora Ava, where the farm-servant Pietro Veleno is ironically forced to turn into a bandit against his will, as he becomes aware of his master’s betrayal. In fact, as he delves through the causes of brigandage, Jovine focuses his attention on the role and power of the bourgeoi­sie from the eighteenth century to the time of unification of Italy in 1860/70 (and even down to the fascist period) to emphasize the double failure, in the South, of the industrial revolution first (which never came to fruition) and then of the new government of a united Italy for lack of social and economic reforms. While the bourgeoisie throughout the entire Western world prospers in commerce and industry, in Southern Italy it remains mostly agrarian as it replaces aristocracy in obtaining possession of large expanses of land originally of public domain as well as land that was reverted to the private sector after the dissolution of the an­cient feudal system. Here the latent conflicts, first between bour­geoisie and aristocracy, eventually explode between ‘gentlemen’ and peasants. The theme or problem of “land” (a rare item in It­aly) possession becomes an essential and emblematic component in the novel Signora Ava as it is linked to the very concept of his­tory in Jovine’s ideology; land is represented here as a social and economic force, and consequently it becomes a battlefield between land owners and land farmers, it becomes history in the sense of a painful awakening and consciousness of the peasant condition of servility, exclusion, abuses, usury. Nicola Misasi and Francesco Perri shared the same convictions in their own literary works and drew a direct link between the dire social and economic condi­tions of the peasant on the one hand and brigandage (Misasi)/ emigration (Perri) on the other.

Literature about migration in this period is rather scarce if seen in relation to the historical events and phenomena that affected large segments of the Italian population, especially in the South. Such experiences went pretty much unnoticed by the canonical literature, a fact which did not escape the attention of critics like Antonio Gramsci and Ugo Ojetti. We find, however, among the major writers who started significant albeit limited incursions into this literature names such as Edmondo De Amicis, Giovanni Pa­scoli, Luigi Pirandello, Massimo Bontempelli, Luigi Capuana, Maria Messina, Francesco Perri, and so many minors with whom literary critics would have to deal in order to accomplish a well rounded map of migration literature. This literature presents a distinct thematic typology—departure without return, voyage impossible, mourning, bloodshed and tears, disease and despera­tion, racketeering and profligation, lawlessness, or at best ship­wreck and return—in a variety of literary genres that ranges from the historical to the populist and serial novel, pamphlet, diary, autobiography, journalism, poetry, and prose, even cinema, where the fibers of aesthetics and politics often are fused or confused as an integral pursuit.

We certainly have here a lucid and vibrant analysis of the liter­ary phenomenology on brigandage and emigration, a book of ex­traordinary interest to a wide spectrum of readers, particularly welcome as a guide to an area of studies important enough on this side of the Western hemisphere. The rich repertoire of texts and bibliographies offers ample possibilities for further pondering on the topic—given the depth of critical information in a context of current interests and norms aimed at new relationships between literature and other areas. Indeed, the author concludes his apolo­gia on the processes of ‘literary contamination’ by reaffirming: “A literature which boasts to know how to reproduce or invent life in its many and multi-faceted emotions and experiences and which professes to add a flavor and depth which the common human dimension ignores cannot preclude or deny itself the dialectical exchange of experiences and emotions which constitute the basis of so many other disciplines” (307). They are convictions born out of a certain historical conscience. Literary criticism for most of our century provides concrete examples of such vital transfusions: it may suffice to recall the brilliant literary analyses of philological tradition by Curtius, Auerbach, Spitzer, Damaso Alonso. And the same argument can be made for historical or philosophical schol­arship as embodied in Burckhardt, Huizinga, or Croce who have shown great breath, depth and theoretical gifts, or indeed by the application of anthropological strategies in the interpretation of the literary text, widely emphasized in this book as indispensable for “extending the canons beyond the narrow precincts of litera­ture,” with the resultant enlargement of the literary map, elabo­rated through an extraordinary mastery of facts and scholarship.

 

Michael Vena

Southern Connecticut State University

 

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Fred Misurella. Short Time. VIA Folios 8. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1997.

 

Short Time by Fred Misurella is the eighth volume in a series of books to come from VIA Folios (Bordighera). Since this reviewer is also a VIA Folios author, it is important that the following point be made. As a long time member of the National Book Crit­ics Circle fostering ethics in reviewing, I must report—candidly—that I would be thrilled with Mr. Misurella’s book even if I were not an author connected to VIA and VIA Folios. Thank good­ness—given the situation—that I was happily pleased with the quality of Misurella’s writing. If I had not been, I would have po­litely demurred to say anything about it in print, as my own reputation as a critic is at stake. Gladly, I quote Milan Kundera to back me up my own opinion in this endeavor. “What a pleasure to read this little novel by Fred Misurella!—In it I recognize so much that I admire: sensitivity, a heart open to ordinary people who are vulnerable and weak. Weak before chance occurrences that give their own meaning and direction to events we (vainly) think we master.” It could not be said better. That is exactly Misurella’s tal­ent: to take the lives of ordinary people and portray them with sensitivity and quiet awe.

In Short Time, Fred Misurella portrays an Italian-American sol­dier returning home after a bloody encounter as a troop leader in Viet Nam—one in which he is forced to become a murderer. The descriptions of the soldier on duty in the jungles of Viet Nam ring true to the reader. The existential predicament of the protagonist is subtly evident every step of the way. The deadly violence that ensues keeps us absorbed—even if we are not lovers of war sto­ries. Misurella’s vision is not facile, but intricately woven of philo­sophic and poetic detail. At the same time that he is worldly in a sophisticated way, he manages a delicate balance of humility as the author of this often-told sort of tale, yet there is original twists at every turn. His descriptive powers keep us focused on every lucid page of the involved story. There is clarity and steady pacing so that we want to read every word carefully and feel ever present in the evolution of the ultimately, sardonic tale.

Short Time is part of an unpublished book of stories entitled Body Lessons. One hopes that Mr. Misurella’s entire collection will find an appropriate publisher, because his prose is so accessible and artful at the same time, much more so than much of the minimalist sensationalism, or Baroque experimentalism, touted as art in our time. Misurella is not an artsy writer who will turn away the every day reader; he is the sort of stylist who will make new readers and new fans for entertaining and enlightening litera­ture—in which we recognize ourselves, our sisters and brothers. There is not much that is experimental in technique in Misurella, yet there is an originality of tone. His characters are invested with everyday humanity, and three-dimensional quality, in their search for meaning. The leading character finds the ironies of life as old world family values conflict with contemporary America’s fast paced, and puzzling, culture. The Italian-American reader will light up with moments of identification.

Short Time is a most readable and worthy little book and I highly recommend it to those who wish to explore some of the best qualities our writers have to offer our culture. The reading is painless, but the story ironic and full of sardonic and ordinary, as well as universal truths. Fred Misurella, like Ben Morreale, is among the best of Italian-American male writers of fiction, the sort that our American culture should pay attention to as the tellers of the real stories of Italian-American life, rather than the Mafia sen­sationalists who have made fame and fortune from selling out their people to Hollywood. As is Ben Morreale, Fred Misurella is reminiscent of the young Mario Puzo who starved writing his best early works—like The Fortunate Pilgrim—prior to his notorious success in the only genre Hollywood has wanted from our men—that cheap, romanticized stereotype that continues to haunt us daily in the powerful and wholesale, visual media.

 

Daniela Gioseffi

New York City

 

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Paolo Valesio. Nightchant: Selected Poems. Translated by Graziella Sidoli and Vanna Tessier. International Poetry Edition. Edmonton, Canada: Snowapple P.

 

Me è difficile discutere liberamente della produzione poetica di Paolo Valesio, professore di letteratura italiana all’Universita di Yale—gentilissimo signore, schivo, che senza saperlo mi mette un po’ in soggezione. Sarà forse perché io, abbastanza arrogante, im­modesto, e snob quando voglio, lo reputo colto, intelligente, un intellettuale che offre onore all’Italia, miserabilmente ingrata, in questa nazione USA dove tuttora gli italiani in generale, e gli italo-americani in particolare, sono considerati ignorant, mafiosi, e piz­zaioli. Sarà forse anche per la mia timidezza, o per la mia mezza cultura, nonostante tutto.

Ho incontrato Valesio pochi anni fa. Subito ci siamo scoperti di essere d’accordo su un argomento di cui la differenza gli italiani in Italia, per ottusità con implicita offesa, non riescono a capire: l’italiano che abita all’estero, in questo caso negli Stati Uniti d’America, non è un italo-americano—è semplicemente un italiano che per lavoro, o per non importa cosa d’altro, abita all’estero. Allora perché un qualsiasi giornalista italiano, o una pezza da piedi corrispondente della TV, non è considerato italo-americano? Perché l’americano, che abita e lavora in Italia, non è definito come americano-italiano? Perché l’italiano in Italia, benché indossi Armani e jeans e cammini con scarpe da calli, è rimasto contadino o provinciale. Perché uno si accerti e si con­vinca di quest’ultima asserzione, osservi come veste l’italiano in Italia (tutti alla stessa maniera, in una pecorile uniforme), e la politica del cretino Umberto Bossi.

Qualcuno già può chiedersi cosa c’entra quanto copra nel caso Valesio. Ecco, il problema è che se uno scrittore parte dall’Italia, senza prima lasciar scorrere del sangue per farsi notare e in con­seguenza valutare, con appena il cognome sperso qua e là, ha gravissimi ostacoli e silenzi (forse anche ostilità e invidie) da su­perare e sopportare. Paolo ha vissuto e, si spera, superato quegli ostacoli e sopportato con dignità i silenzi ostinati continuando ad essere narratore-saggista-teorico-critico-poeta.

La sua passione per la poesia proviene dalla sua stessa pro­duzione, e sussiste con altruismo per importare quella italiana negli USA via la Yale Italian Poetry—rivista fondata di recente. L’altruismo sensibile di Paolo (e qui si certifica anche quello di altri redattori impegnati già da numerosi anni) viene malissimo ripagato, rispettato e valuatao dal meschino-mediocre-egocen­trico-megalomane ambiente delle riviste e case editrici italiane. Siccome la generosità può essere scambiata per debolezza, sug­gerisco a Paolo e agli altri redattori, di agire alla maniera dei re­dattori italiani in Italia—però dichiarando un “va in mona” a tutti quei pezzenti ingranditi fotograficamente e annunciando che il materiale, ricevuto senza l’invito della redazione, non sarà letto e restituito. A quei signori e a quelle signore di cartapesta che si strozzano discutendo a lungo sulla virgola che hanno “scritto” a vicenda sul proprio lavoro, l’annuncio andrebbe di traverso.

Si noti a caso una qualsiasi rivista di letterature italiana. Come esempio, scelgo questa Zeta—Rivista internazionale di poesia (1986) che me sta davanti bella grossa sullo scaffale. Una fascetta annun­cia: Il “nuovo” in poesia—Antologia a cura di Carlo Marcello Conti e Lamberto Pignotti. Guardo l’indice e leggo una fila lunga di nomi a me ignoti, immagino allora giovani, e pochi della quarta genera­zione. Ma perché, interrogo, il Conti, direttore della rivista pubbli­cata dall’editore Campanotto che dirige, e il Pignotti sono inclusi? Cordiali Conti e Pignotti, sopratutto perché ci conosciamo, aper­tamente vi accuso di favoritismo. Considerate il precedente para­grafo. Intano la mania di includervi ve la posso molto debolmente perdonare, ma non riesco a perdonarvi le esclusioni—quelle che avrebbero dato decenza all’antologia—per favorire un’armata d’intrusi. Dovevate includere gli “altri,” in un secondo grosso vo­lume, esclusi perché non “nuovi”? Sempre a caso, apriamo in­sieme la Zeta; a pagine 128 (non menziono l’autore per non fargli pubblicità, sia pure come stangata) leggiamo: “Intanto la vita cresce (come il pane, la frutta che si matura ed ogni altro elemento) etcetera. Spiegate come siete arrivati a considerare tale lavoro “nuovo.” A parte quella di un paio di inclusi, con certezza assoluta la poesia è esclusa; nell’insieme questo numero speciale monografico è un pane che decresce nella propria muffa. Probabilmente commetto una ingiustizia verso Valesio considerando che perlomeno doveva essere interpellato, se non invitato, insieme agli “altri” indubbia­mente di molto più valevoli di costoro che propagate con il voca­bolo zeta+zero. Questo esempio, facile perché mi stava proprio davanti sullo scaffale, l’ho dovutamente appurato per confermare la scempiaggine di numerose redazioni a battente chiuso in Italia.

Del prolifico Paolo Valesio (non so dove e come trovi il tempo per eserlo), per mia fortuna la scelta delle poesie di Nightchant si limita alla mia personale dimensione. Le composizioni sono tratte dalle sei raccolte: Analogia del mondo, 1992; Le isole del lago, 1990; la campagna dell’Ottantasette, 1990; Dialogo del falco e dell’avvoltoio, 1987; La rosa verde, 1987; Prose in poesia, 1979. La dedizione di Graziella Sidoli, sua traduttrice ufficiale, e quella di Vanna Tessier in questo case, è ammirevole se si pensa alle difficoltà incontrate nel trasmettere poesia in inglese dal testo italiano narrativo-de­scrittivo a doppio intendere (almeno per me recensore atipico); perché lo stile di Paolo, che assale il soggetto, potrebbe debellare la sensibilità poetica nella possibile incertezza del testo inglese; però qui nella prima poesia Nightchant, che intitola la raccolta, non vi è incertezza: “. . . / Dawin in a few hours / will bring the claw with anguish” e stranamente si intravvede l’allodola ingabbiata che comincia a penare la propria prigionia al crepuscolo—invece è l’uomo che alla fine si alza all’alba e vagabonda. C’è similitudine? Sì e no; però è anche così che la poesia funziona, interpretata a modo personale. “. . . / But the man who embraced her / encircled by her thin armrests” sembra l’abbraccio amoroso di una coppia, fisi­camente non bella—e la tenerezza persiste benché si tratti, invece, di un poltrona scassata: “But since that men bent over, / becoming smaller / than the circle of her arms— / from that moment / the armchair seems more than motionless.” Fin qui, On Guerrazzi Street, secondo una interpretazione non ortodossa, emana una fiamma sensuale; poi continua a descrivere per altri 24 versi il rassegnato destino della poltrona: “She is too dark closed resigned; / and she seems des­tined / to remain a motionless piece of furniture.” Non dovrebbe ter­minare così. La poesia si compie al momento in cui “the armchair seems more than motionless.” I 24 versi che dovrebbero in questo caso essere eliminati, potrebbero compiere un secondo testo sullo stesso soggetto.

I passaggi esemplari, brevi, perché quasi tutti I testi sinfonici sono lunghi e dignitosi, testimoniano sull’appassionata poesia, talvolta complessa e misteriosa. Da Unbearable Beatury II: “If the snow covered by the night / is sinister, / the snow packed in the sun / is cruel / like the skin of a young woman” a gli ultimi tre versi di Augur che chiude la raccolta della poesia in versi: “But at each dawn we find mastery: / the bodies distend themselves into the air; / forgotten, we forget ourselves.”

La raccolta si apre con un’alba d’angoscia e si chiude con un’alba in cui dimenticati ci dimentichiamo—come? Sembra palese ma non è così, così semplice. Si lasci che la lettura, anche quella di Poetic Prosing, specialmente la prima pagine che a me ricorda Dino Campana, chiarisca il come. Infine, sicuro della mia arroganza, dico in inglese che “there are inequities in the world, and I am here to fix them right” per ben intrattenere onestà e giu­stizia letteraria.

 

Alfredo de Palchi

New York

 

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Tom Zaniello. Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds and Riffraff: An Organized Guide to Films about Labor. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP (ILR Press Imprint), 1996. 295 pp. paperback.

David Shevin and Larry Smith, eds. Getting By: Stories of Work­ing Lives. Huron, OH: Bottom Dog P, 1996. 263 pp. paperback.

 

A recent conference on working-class studies at Youngstown State University gathered over 200 scholars, writers and artists around the theme “Working-Class Studies and the Future of Work.” This was the second conference at Youngstown State, which has created a Center for Working-Class Studies, devoted to examining working-class culture, and evidence that the desire and the need for studying working class issues is growing at a rapid rate.

Two new publications reflect this growing interest in working-class culture and present ways we might begin to organize ap­proaches to the study of this too-long neglected region of American life: one is a guide to working-class films and the other is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and memoirs produced by writ­ers of the working-class.

Tom Zaniello’s compilation of films, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds and Riffraff, is a must-have publication for anyone curi­ous or serious about studying working-class culture. This in­credibly useful, accessible, and interesting compendium of over 150 films is the result of years of painstaking research and analysis by Zaniello, a professor of English at Northern Kentucky Univer­sity and a visiting professor at the George Meany Center for Labor Studies.

After a brief “Introduction” in which he explains the process by which he created the listing, discusses trends and themes he found both in his own original research and his reading of the few previ­ous studies, and orients the reader to the guide, Zaniello launches into an alphabetical listing of the titles. Each listing includes a guiding phrase or sentence that summarizes the film’s focus from Zaniello’s perspective. These captions can be poetic, parodic, de­scriptive, or just plain corny, but no matter, they add a bit of gar­nish to the staple reference fare he serves up. Under the captions is the year the film was made, the MPAA rating (when available), the cast, an energetic description, a critical commentary, and pro­duction details. Zaniello goes the extra mile for scholars by pro­viding suggested films of related interest, annotated references for further reading, and an availability index complete with addresses where the film can be bought, borrowed, or rented. His inclusion of a thematic index—a big help to those wanting to create college courses around related issues—and an address list of sources, round out a work that should become the new standard for refer­ence publications.

Zaniello’s book transcends its reference value through its clear writing and entertaining voice. As he tells us in the introduction, this result of twenty years of work is still a work-in-progress, and you can help him expand and refine the work by writing to him directly.

Over forty poets and story writers from the US working class contributed to Getting By: Stories of Working Lives, an anthology edited by David Shevin and Larry Smith, with introductory essays by each of the editors and a preface by poet Sue Doro. These in­troductory writings join those by Janet Zandy in Calling Home and Liberating Memory, and the essays by Tom Wayman, to form the core of the developing theories surrounding working-class writ­ing. Smith’s essay creates theory out of autobiography as he re­counts his experiences signing his book at a mall. As he writes, “the working class is the one class seeking to deny itself—to dis­appear.” But Smith, Shevin, Doro, and the writers included in this important anthology, won’t let that happen.

An anthology is difficult to characterize in a review, and the number as well as the variety of writers Shevin and Smith have found resist any generalizations, and rightly so. But each of the entries reminds us that work can be honorable, boring, necessary, life-saving, and life taking. Working-class experiences lend them­selves to a rough texture, both in the living and the recounting of work; at first glance, some of these entries seem more surface than depth oriented, but this probably comes from the conditioning we have received in literature courses, which typically ignore work­ing-class writing.

Entries range from the mainstream-smooth poetry of Philip Levine to the rough and ready style of Randy J. Abel. Italian/ American writers are represented by the able work of P. J. Corso and the challenging poetry of Joe Napora. But the one thing we learn by reading all of the entries is that work has a way of mak­ing an individual’s experiences matter to the entire community. The beauty of creating an anthology around work is that it is a theme that can help us all to transcend differences created by categories such as race, gender, lifestyle, and ethnicity.

The anthology is organized into five sections: “Carpenter Aunts: Family and Neighborhood”; “Working Class Education—That Working State of Mind”; “The Sweeper: Ingenuity and Per­sistence”; “Where You Go When You Don’t Work: Struggles and Getting By”; and “Cleaning Stalls in Winter: Work Ethic and Dig­nity.” While this might be too neat of a way to bring a sense of order to the selections, it might help someone trying to use it in a course.

It is difficult to single out individuals in an anthology, espe­cially when there are no weak links in the literary chain. Suffice it to say that what does characterize the writing gathered in this anthology is its lack of pretension and its lack of experimentation, which probably comes from the need and struggle to show us how work affects all of us. Getting By does that well enough to make it required reading, not just for those who attend confer­ences on working-class studies, but for anyone interested in ex­panding their notions of good American literature.

 

Fred Gardaphe

Columbia College, Chicago

 

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*Although Ed Sullivan gave Topo Gigio national exposure, it was Maria Perego who invented the patented system of gears, levers, and flexible “skin” that al­lowed the mouse to move smoothly. See “A Mouse-hold Name,” Attenzione (April, 1983).