{"id":1051,"date":"2016-04-14T16:03:41","date_gmt":"2016-04-14T16:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/?p=1051"},"modified":"2016-04-14T16:21:02","modified_gmt":"2016-04-14T16:21:02","slug":"on-the-poetry-of-alfredo-de-palchi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/on-the-poetry-of-alfredo-de-palchi\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Poetry of Alfredo de Palchi"},"content":{"rendered":"

De Palchi, Alfredo, Paradigm: New and Selected Poems 1947-2009, <\/em>ed. John Taylor, New York: Chelsea Editions. 2013.<\/p>\n

ISBN 978-0-9884787-1-8<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Review by Stephen Massimilla<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paradigm: New and Selected Poems<\/em> is the most comprehensive single collection to date of the original, provocative, and uncompromising poetic oeuvre<\/em> of Alfredo de Palchi. As one of the trustees of the Sonia Raiziss-Giop foundation,\u00a0De Palchi has done a great deal to support and promote poetry in translation in the United States. He founded the Raiziss\/de Palchi Translation Award at the Academy of American Poets; and he provided funding for the Bordighera Poetry Prize, for bilingual book publication, at CUNY. De Palchi was also the long-time Editor-in-Chief of Chelsea<\/em> magazine; and, with Sonia Raiziss, he has been an accomplished pioneer translator of such Italian poets as Eugenio Montale. Paradigm<\/em> comprises selections from all of the author\u2019s major volumes, as well as new poems, in the original Italian complete with en face<\/em> translations by six accomplished poet-translators. The book also includes an extensive bibliography of critical works on the poet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This volume showcases the poet\u2019s various styles, ranging from the dark and curt to the somewhat more prosy or plain-spoken. The work is generally\u2014for all its frequently frank, hard-edged anti-lyricism\u2014also mysterious, rhythmical, and emotionally rich. Although De Palchi is not a narrative poet, his poems often fit together in long sequences that recount stories.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whole cycles are at times delineated in a few turns of phrase. (I will quote from the English translations, though it is important to look at the Italian, which is generally more lyrical than the translations, to get a better sense of the original music.) In a world \u201cboiling with seed\u201d (71), birth itself is represented from the start as an affliction that engenders the trials of life\u2014possibilities, sufferings, the struggle for self-preservation: \u201cThe first cause \/ engrafts the nebulous aorta \/ and quickens consciousness \/ with the abject drop that splits \/ the egg \/ starting the womb \/ fit for affliction\u201d (5). And the related \u201cblack \/ sunflower seed\u201d evoked on the next page simultaneously signifies the urgency involved in writing, in reading back into the embryonic past \u201cbehind \/ the unconscious,\u201d only to face the advancing \u201cnebulae\u201d of uncertainty and inquietude (7).<\/p>\n

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This early sequence was written while the poet was incarcerated; and the darkness surrounding the \u201cnebulae\u201d reflects the historical context in which de Palchi came of age. His work is not only haunted by wartime atrocities\u2014he refers a bit later to \u201cEl Duce\u2019s camps\u201d (75) and \u201cGesthemanes where an entire people are ground to ash\u201d (79)\u2014 but also to his own experience as a political prisoner in Italy. The poet was himself tortured in his youth by the Fascists and later by the Communists\u2014background information that sheds a poignant light on his cryptically spartan realism.<\/p>\n

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Among the selections from Sessions with My Analyst<\/em>, the poet speaks of scratching on stone, digging inward to extract inspiration despite and through his unjust confinement: \u201cI don\u2019t know how, where in my geologic age, \/ to begin, to extract the magma: \/ impossible to communicate \/ the twisted inconclusive gibberish, \/ a thicket alive with snakes\u201d (83). In this sequence, the often-repeated word \u201cdifficult\u201d describes communication as much as survival. The Modernist theme of \u201cnon-communication\u201d (115) as inseparable from the truth is central to all these \u201csessions.\u201d Even beyond any literal prison, reality and human relations themselves involve entrapment. It is in this light that, in the title poem of the preceding collection, De Palchi\u2019s speaker freed the trapped moth beating against the window pane, only to insist, \u201cI persist in doing the scorpion\u2019s \/ dark dance\u201d (The Scorpi<\/em>on\u2019s Dark Dance<\/em>, 11). That \u201cdance\u201d is the dark art of the poet in search of the truth. And as De Palchi much more recently emphasized in an interview, \u201cI don\u2019t know how many times I have to say this, but there is not one false word in my poems\u201d (Panella, Giuseppe, The Poetry of Alfredo de Palchi: An Interview and Three Essays,<\/em> trans. Jeremy Allen, New York: Chelsea Editions. 2013. p 53).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That assertion of honesty can recall a political context\u2014\u201cbecause I told the truth I was beaten, \/ forced to silence by fascists \/ then tortured by partisans\u201d (99)\u2014but it also underscores De Palchi\u2019s commitment to speaking, spitting out what is most essential. This fierce aesthetic serves as a bitter tonic to the inauthentic soppiness of many a pointlessly popular poem. Thirty pages later, we are told with regard to communicating \u201copenness \/ to the love of mankind\u201d that \u201cI shun every request, any effusiveness\u201d (131). Instead, the poet generally favors a poetics of reticence and interruption involving a network of hyphens, caesuras, commas, periods, spaces, and elisions: an intense hermeticism that is at times\u2014as in the sections of the poem \u201cHamletic Fungus\u201d\u2014almost haiku-like (256). And like Emily Dickinson, De Palchi never includes titles with his poems.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is fitting that so many of these laconic but ironic and sardonically outspoken pieces should be populated by snakes, spiders, worms, maggots, microbes, bacteria, moths, rats, and scorpions. Even in the earliest work, we inhabit a world \u201cof trees swallowed whole by \/ the concrete spider \/ and the festering blister of night\u201d (37). Elsewhere, as in Addictive Aversions<\/em>, we encounter creaturely evocations of frank eroticism: \u201cmy sex lurks, \/ an obsessed rat\u201d (193). And even very recent poems addressed to those who may lie in \u201ca worm-thick mucilage\u201d include allusions to the Christian mythos that nevertheless defy the sanctimonies of religion: \u201cthe visions of too many a mother of Christ \/ in your cell\/ can\u2019t save you\u2026.\u201d (517). Spurning platitudinous notions of beauty, De Palchi insists on unsentimental expressions of anguish, sexuality, and anger, as well as on rapt, unadorned observation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Indeed, he is a devotee of indifferent natural and scientific processes, even\u00a0 \u201cplankton that entangles me in the abyss\u201d (83). It is in this light that the poetry of Anonymous Constellation<\/em> describes a harsh, humbling \u201cbegetting devouring\u201d universe of dust to dust: \u201cEverywhere dust on all things on all of us dust\u201d (157). In Sessions with My Analyst<\/em>, we are told that\u00a0 \u201cI love technical knowledge that is \/ speechless\u201d (141). This realm could be said to include everything from \u201cthe anthill that forms a solemn cathedral\u201d (67) to the \u201cvoracious insects\u201d of De Palchi\u2019s most recent collection (429). As in the eyes of the astronomer, the geologist, and the biologist, impersonal nature will of course win out in the end\u2014as in the beginning. In one poem, the speaker even asserts, \u201cI spit on my own origin where the cormorants sweep by me on the primeval banks\u201d (101).<\/p>\n

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In the later erotic sequence entitled\u00a0Carnal Essence<\/em>, a different speaker returns to the \u201coriginary water\u201d (321) of creation, descending into the chaos of the germinative unconscious, with the \u201cserpent\u201d as a figure of rebirth. In fact, the poet has sowed \u201cfecund\u2026ground\u201d for this realm of \u201ccarnal religion\u201d (327) by much earlier establishing that \u201cany snake egg\u201d contains the embryonic proto-form of a person, and that the storm in the serpent\u2019s eye holds \u201cthe paradigm\u201d of the human capacity for creation and regeneration (275). It is in light of this at once scientific and outrageously pagan, almost Pharaonic metaphor for the imaginative process that we can view the persona that one poem presents as \u201cthe diabolical priest who irks \/ and burns old age\u201d (283) in a context that points all the way back to the \u201cprimeval banks\u201d and the \u201cblack seed\u201d of origin with which this review began. Indeed, in a related recent poem, the thorn-throated, mock-Christ figure that \u201cwithdraws into the ditch\u201d is restored as \u201cthe purely green fossil \/ that I am at the dawn \/of the other light\u201d (347).<\/p>\n

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Productively yoking many contrastive tendencies, this entire volume, which samples the poet\u2019s vast and varied production, amply demonstrates a lifelong dedication to gritty lyricism, forthright reticence, scientific inspiration, visceral imaginativeness, and ultimate originality\u2014a vividly unsentimental paradigm of beauty and truth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

De Palchi, Alfredo, Paradigm: New and Selected Poems 1947-2009, ed. John Taylor, New York: Chelsea Editions. 2013. ISBN 978-0-9884787-1-8   Review by Stephen Massimilla   Paradigm: New and Selected Poems is the most comprehensive single collection to date of the original, provocative, and uncompromising poetic oeuvre of Alfredo de Palchi. As one of the trustees […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1055,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions\/1055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}