Crito di Volta by Marc Di Saverio
Holy
Crito!
Crito
di Volta
An
epic hybrid
by
Marc
Di Saverio
Guernica
Editions, 2020
(
pages 173)
A
Review by Peter O’Neill
The publication of Crito di Volta – An epic hybrid by
the Canadian poet Marc Di Saverio published by Guernica Editions earlier this spring
must surely be considered a major literary event of 2020. Indeed, if one were
given to hubris, one could posit further that Di Saverio’s book has no equal,
at least in scope – which is epic, mind, since Derek Walcott’s take on Homer in
his Omeros, 1990. That is thirty years ago! Or, if one really wanted to
make people sit up, one could invoke James Joyce and his mammoth Ulysses,
first published back in 1922 by Sylvia Beach in Paris, with her fledgling
Shakespeare and Company. The point being that Marc Di Saverio’s Crito di
Volta has more in common with Joyce’s epic, concerned as it is with
revolution and modernism, more so than Walcott’s paean to his native Saint
Lucia. So, what is it all about? Why is it so revolutionary? Indeed, why so
modern? Let’s go straight to the title, as the key is always hidden in the most
obvious place, which for a book is always the title.
Crito comes from Plato, he is the famous
character who attempts to arrange for Socrates escape after the philosopher has
been imprisoned and is awaiting his execution having been found guilty of
corrupting the youth of Athens, by the Elders. Socrates famously refuses
Crito’s offer, as he believes it would be unjust to do so, and he tells
Crito that rather than escape his punishment with him he will remain in jail,
thus accepting his sentence. So in relation to Crito di Volta, the epic
hybrid poem by Marc Di Saverio, the title is also the name of the poem’s
protagonist who, very much like the author himself, has been institutionalised
for a number of years, suffering from manic depression, yet in a Socratic twist,
Di Saverio turns Crito’s story on the reader; Volta being the
term used to describe the key moment in a sonnet, traditionally in the eight
line, when the sonnet goes from insult to praise, as in Shakespeare’s sonnet
number 130, with the unforgettable line My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like
the sun; and the Bard goes on to say, after comparing her to countless
other natural beauties that…I think my love as rare As any she belied with
false repair. Only, in Di Saverio’s hybrid epic, the turn is when Crito addresses
the reader to inform them that they will – with this book – if they so choose, be released from the mental prisons which
they are all self-confined in. It is a beautiful conceit on the author’s part,
and truly an epic gambit, if he can ensure to pull it off. So, does he? Does
Marc Di Saverio manage to write an epic poem, hybrid or not, and worthy of the
name in the English language? Well, such is the stuff of the following
engagement.
So firstly, in order to see if Di Saverio’s poem is
truly Epic, let us remind ourselves what exactly are some of the requirements
of an epic poem. Aristotle informs us, in his Poetics, that an epic poem
‘should involve a single action, whole and complete in itself, having a
beginning, a middle, and an end[i]’. In other words, it
should have three parts, and typically, should start with an invocation to the
Muse. So, let us go through the four listed items and not only crosscheck, but
attempt to evaluate how the author treats each item. To the Muse, first and
foremost, and to Di Saverio’s dedication.
Typically, in epic poetry, the poet invokes the Muse
to aid and inspire him in his epic journey, this is called the invocation, and
an epic poem typically begins with one. John Milton invokes Urania, famously,
in Paradise Lost. Unusual perhaps, in that he should particularly single
out the daughter of Mnemosyne, the head of the muses who understandably was
considered to be the most important, as she is the protector of memory. But
poets, down throughout the ages, have always worked within the confines of the tropes
of the epic in their own particular way, in fact we as readers we have come to
expect that of them, it is a sign of their particular skill, for example, how
they work within the confines of the structure of the epic poem. Homer, for example, merely invokes the muse,
without naming any specifically. There are nine, remember. Joyce also invokes Urania
in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake in the sign of thunder which he got via Vico
who in his New Science invokes the self-same muse in Book 2, Poetic
Wisdom, reminding us that Homer called her the ’knowledge of good and evil’[ii]. Whilst, Samuel Beckett
in Comment C’est/How It Is starts his epic retelling of Pim by using an
invocation, yet merely alluding to the muse in French with the pronoun elle –
the English in a sense then seems much less poetic.
Marc Di Saverio, in his dedication of Crito Di Volta,
states on the very first page that Michelle Fabris, the Canadian Civil Rights
Activist (1971- 2018), is ‘the Muse of these verses.’(p.3). She is also the
person who inspired the character Flavia Vamorri to whom Crito addresses his
first canto A Letter to Flavia Vamorri, an obvious play on the Italian amore
and morrire, love and death respectively and this sets the
tone[iii]. I am reminded immediately of Joyce and Beckett,
and their thoughts on this subject. ‘Wombtomb’ is the apt phrase they used, I
believe. [iv] In relation to Marc Di
Saverio, the opening lines of the first canto set firmly the register of all
that is to come.
Flavia,
my eyes are red as the sunrise this first time I swallow
my
speed and hope…
Teetering
on the street like a bull full of swords, the sunbeams
stabbed
me while wishes to see you staggered me across
to
the Diplomatico, where, calvaried in the laughter
of
the patio, hunchbacked in misfitness, I saw your
sword-splitting
eye-light boil my wounds into a
moment
of balm.
From the poem’s very inception, language is drunk.
ALIVE. Joyce springs to mind, literally, and the earlier poems of Beckett, when
he was heavily under Joyce’s influence. The Christian imagery and use of
Italian are two cues, particularly in respect to Joyce. The way the poet has
made a verb of the famous place name, referencing the crucifixion. But to offer
a comparison, here are the first few lines in Beckett’s poem Home Olga which
perfectly capture the mood of bravado that I am alluding to and which I find
very similar in Di Saverio.
J
might be made sit up for a jade of hope ( and exile,
don’t
you know)
And
Jesus and Jesuits juggernauted in the haemorrhoidal isle,
Modo
et forma anal maiden, giggling to death in stomacho.
E
for the erythrite of love and silence and the sweet noo
style,
Swoops
and loops of love and silence in the view of the sun
And
the view of the mew,[v]
The ‘sweet noo style’ referenced by Beckett above is
of course a reference to Dante Alighieri and the ‘bello stylo che m’ha fatto
onore’[vi]taken from Canto 1 of the Inferno
which Dante attributes to Virgil, and which Di Saverio translates with the
aid of his father who is Italian, a fact which is recorded in the
acknowledgements, and which is given in its entirety in Canto XVI. Dante later
makes an appearance in Crito Di Volta in Canto XX which we shall come
to. But first, I would ask you now to read back over the opening lines of Di
Saverio’s poem and then Beckett’s on Joyce. Notice the similarity in register,
the light, almost playful engagement with the language, the use of enjambment
and alliteration to help smooth the light passage of the poem along. The
lyricism.
May
you always be the dandelion growing into blows
of
perpetual steps, and never the iris growing into
passive
opulence. (p.11)
This is the third line of Crito Di Volta, still
the invocation to the muse of the epic poem and to whom it is dedicated to. The
poem takes the form of an email, the poem is an epistolary work. The email
addresses of the protagonist change three times during the work, each time
signalling a new movement or part to the book. Remember Aristotle’s criteria
for epic poetry? An epic poem should have three parts; before, during, and
after. So, what are these three parts?
Part 1 of the epic poem Crito Di Volta can be
identified by Crito’s email address which starts off in part 1, before Flavia’s
death, as patient.power@gmail.com
. Crito Di Volta, the character in the poem, rather like Marc Di Saverio its
author, spent almost a decade going in and out of medical institutions due to
treatment for his chronic manic depression. Marc told me himself that he is
perhaps one of the most medicated people in Canada, he is currently on amphetamines
which keep him energised so much that he can barely sit down. All of which is
the subject material of Crito Di Volta, which is clearly a very
semi-autobiographical account, apart from the moments of obvious fantasy. Take
the following lines, still from Canto 1.
Flavia,
the amphetamine’s working!
…
After the T.M.S and the E.C.T, after the Clozapine and
the
exorcising, after years of pitch darkness with an
autumn
wasp, after the Sanatoriums and the psych
ward
queens who snuffed themselves despite having
sworn
on my soul they would never, and who did not
leave
a note behind – I feel like a Romantic, again…
Flavia,
be in me the strength of an orphan supermanning
in
his sorrows and calamity. ( p.12)
The context, Crito is on a weekend pass, and feels
alive. On a more personal note, reading the text, I was reminded of my own
family here in Ireland and two family members who struggled for years against
depression. Ireland has one of the highest percentages of depression in the
world, apparently. Both my mother and my older brother had it, the latter
eventually committed suicide also. So, while reading the above, I was, of
course, quite moved as will anyone who has had family members, or friends, who
have, or indeed are, struggling with this most frightening illness. Notice too
the unusual verb usage of the now o so familiar Nietzschean common noun, this
is important as Nietzsche’s concept of the Overman plays a key role in Di Saverio’s
epic which brings us on nicely to the overall topic of the first part of the
book. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is certainly a useful comparative
study in the descent in madness which occurs in Crito Di Volta, as
Marc Di Saverio paints a picture of institutional life which, as in Kesey’s
novel, is deeply shocking.
Let’s
go to the Sanatorium’s One Hundred And Twenty-Fifth
Anniversary
Summer Solstice Dance, where the patients’
auras
mingle into proto-palpabilities.
Let’s
breathe the afflatus of the ‘manics.’
Let’s
dance the steps of the ‘schizophrenics’, channelling
a
music we will never hear.
Let’s
share our cigarettes, pot, and beer; while they share
The
light that has gone out in the world.
The
Sanatorium, where the best minds of our time share no
majestic
court, and steer Mankind despite its shame
of
them. (p.14)
Here you have, in this single short Canto, number 4,
the overall feel and endeavour of the book, or epic hybrid poem, by Marc Di
Saverio. It is a question that has been posed by many an author, who indeed are
the sick? The ones who run the Sanatorium, or the ones institutionalised for going
against societies’ norms? Peter Weiss’s stage play The Persecution and
Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of
Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade and which was made
into a movie by Peter Brook and Adrian Mitchell ( 1967), immediately springs to
mind.
But for the poet Marc Di Saverio, there is an older
influence and that is the American poet Ezra Pound who was also
institutionalised, and who, again like Di Saverio, was obsessed with epic poets
and poetry, particularly Dante, and who also wrote an epic work The Pisan
Cantos. Pound, like Dante, also makes an appearance in Crito Di Volta,
first in Canto III New Year’s and then again in much later on in the
book in Canto XV I Break a Pact With You Ezra Pound. Let us treat the
first poem first, before moving on.
When
I soon visit
L’Isola
di San Michele
I’ll
sing you the future of newness with a lute
and
atomize your infamy with lasers of my lines-
I’ll
bribe the grave-diggers with our songs
to
let me lie by you till dawn. ( p.19)
It is interesting to note how Di Saverio paraphrases
Pound’s famous dictum Make it New in the third line ‘I’ll sing you the
future of newness with a lute’. It would appear to me that this is highly
unusual composition in written poetry today, at once lyrical and hugely
ambitious. Epic! Marc Di Saverio chose to spend a decade writing an epic poem
in which both Ezra Pound and Dante Alighieri appear and in which he would
launch a poetic manifesto called Mortarism, inspired by both Pound and Dante,
and which was devised by him explicitly to tear apart the so called writing
being written today, particularly in university MFA programmes, while at the
same time exposing the horror of institutionalised life in our sanatoriums. In
Canto V. Psych a Doctor is exposed for being a sexual predator, preying
on the female patients put into his care. This is before Di Saverio introduces us to the
concept of the Overpoet in Canto V1 who will eventually launch the manifesto
for Mortarismo. Again, Nietzsche’s phraseology is borrowed for the
purpose of critiquing once again contemporary society, and particularly the
state of the art of contemporary poetry.
The
Overpoet will survive the “poets” noose
of
slack, finally, after all the years of jeers,
which
hunchbacked his spirit like Keats’ critics.
Why
do the “poets” always mock the seers
and
laugh at vatic voices? A vatic voice
like
a spoke-poking stick, will hurl the Dada rider
skyward
then down to the jetty of his mind;
and
the Overpoet, an outsider,
will
lead his jeerers first, then humankind. ( 28/29)
And there we have it! Di Saverio, whatever you might
think, is quite adamant. He is one of those destroyer creators. In other words,
in order for him to create a new poetics, he must first destroy the current .
Such is the unique spirit behind Mortarista which forms the body of Canto VII. I
must admit that while first reading this Canto I was, for the first time in the
poem, that is after having read the first thirty pages, beginning to feel just
a little uneasy. But, when I saw the page number and when I realised that I had
just read the first six cantos of his epic poem without experiencing a similar
feeling, I relaxed, and let the feeling happen. After all, Crito Di Volta is
an epic poem, and being so is by definition long, and so there are bound to be
passages that are less interesting than others, I reasoned, and pressed on.
Perhaps, it was the rather prosaic nature of the canto that kind of lost me,
after having been transported by the lyricism and beauty of the previous
cantos. The rather banal assertions that are sometimes voiced reminded me a
little like those of the second section of Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore
Ducasse, the so called Poésies which apparently Albert Camus found less
appealing to the Chants themselves. But, after bypassing a few pages in
italics, I finally came upon the following.
Mortar:
v.
1. to bombard and destroy
n.
2. a cement used in building
Take
my MORTARIO,
my
MALTA ET PIETRA!
Through
the moonless, starless, endless night of Now;
with
the forth-swinging, blazing, wrecking ball of Mortarism;
with
the steel cables of our spirits; with the operator of our
history
lessons; with the crane of our hate for the emergency
present-
let’s demolish the star-stickered, light-blocking ceilings
of
present Western “Verse,” “Art” and “Democracy”. (
p.34)
On reading these lines, I remember being taken back to
a visit to the Tate Gallery in London, and being reminded of the deluded mass
of wandering visitors who, after experiencing the wonders and delights of the
early European surrealist painters of the twenties, thirties and post-war
years, right up to representative painters such as Francis Bacon in the fifties
and sixties, where then swamped in a mass of dull abstraction and installations
of the last thirty or so years. The absolute mass of so called poetry that is
published these days, most of it which is written by people who have absolutely
no interest in reading the canon, and I thought how unusual it is to find a
contemporary poet like Marc Di Saverio these days, and my old fears of the
banal were quickly silenced. Firstly, the idea of inserting a kind of manifesto
within an epic poem is novel, and the idea of Mortarism I simply find quite
delightful. Afterall, I have been saying it too for years, and I am sure I am
not alone.
Beware
of MFA programming!
Beware
of MFA programming!
Beware
of MFA [rpgramming!
Beware of MFA programming! (
p.34/35)
MFA programmes are Master in Fine Arts programmes,
with creative writing and poetry being included in many university programmes.
In the USA and Canada, these have been going on for years now, while here in
the Republic of Ireland and the UK, they are still in their honeymoon stage.
So, I am familiar with Marc Di Saverio’s gripe, it is one that has been
expressed by many writers, over the years. The idea of a certain school of
writing being approved by university writing programmes, you can see it
everywhere, and yes it does create a banal wash of tedium. Pre-formulated
discursive patterns with an overt use of rather obscure words inserted for
linguistic effect, and with the
insidious brand of post-Kantian morality, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon
block, with its ever-present fetishes of current strains of feminist theory,
abhorring all signs any way suggestive, god forbid, of sexual objectification,
my own particular bugbear. So, yes, I for one was totally on board with Di
Saverio’s assessment that the current trends in poetry and Art needed to be
mortared, before being reassessed, and anyone who is similarly unimpressed with
the direction that the arts and particular that of poetry have taken in the last
twenty or so years, mirroring the socio-political morass that has consumed us
with the rise of neo-liberalism, will indeed possibly welcome with open arms
Marc Di Saverio’s damning critique of contemporary society.
I
dream the Amorocracy, one of the many bust-jutting saplings
I
imagined might spring from the seeds of Mortarism, which
would
be watered by the sweat and blood of the Mortarists.
I
dream of I Amoristi, The Amorists, who, in advanced stage
of
Mortarism, will struggle to eventuate a society wherein love
replaces
money as the general currency of a nation, to create a new
harmony
among the State. ( p.47)
Try to imagine Donald Trump reading the above. Since
when have poets appeared dangerous to the state? This question alone is surely
a testament at how bad the state of poetry has become, when once, long ago, it
was the place of choice for the disenchanted to turn to, now, apart from the
odd singular voice, it is but a shallow zone for the innumerable horde of over-opinionated,
talentless, social media savvy illiterates who have no concept or understanding
of the poetic tradition, and who have reduced the art to a mere bandstand for
open-micers, ‘spoken word’ artists, and the assorted motley crew of feminists
of the new order, totally unfeminine sex haters for the most part, and the
unending plethora of dissipating egoists who are merely looking for a platform
for their latest agenda - Oh yes, as a practising poet myself who has
participated for the last few years on the contemporary scene, I have pretty
much seen it all! It is frightening how low the cultural tide has become.
Harold Bloom foresaw it all, of course, and wept at the state of contemporary
literature. I think he would have applauded Marc Di Saverio’s Crito di Volta
as, whatever you may say about the ideas of its author, at least it is informed
by the poetic tradition. It does engage, and on a truly Epic level. For
example, who among contemporary writing poets today would ever even dare to
conjure up the appearance of Dante in an epic poem? And yet, this is what Marc
Di Saverio does in the second part of his hybrid epic poem Crito di Volta. The
second part of the epic, after we have passed through the, at times, wonderful
and playful inventiveness of the Mortarismo[vii],
Part 2 of Crito di Volta is signalled in Canto
X. A Second Letter to Flavia Vamorri when Crito’s email address changes to il.mortarista@gmail.com .
Flavia,
a patient in the sanatorium like Crito, suffers from manic episodes like Crito.
Di Saverio, knowing only all too well the extreme duress of such episodes,
writes beautifully and with great compassion.
While
passing through the Sanatorium like a master
sewer’s
thread the eye of a needle, I realise:
revolving
doors would fit the place the most.
I
wonder: has Flav been Seroquelled, again, tonight?
Her
Icarousian mind has blown skyward like a red leaf
about
to land in the gutter of a ghost-street.
Her
Icarusian mind has blown skyward by the winds of
mania
and here, there, breezes of her falling fears-
she
must always be rising to feel just right. (p.103)
Remembering also that the character of Flavia is but
the persona taking the place of Michelle Fabris ( 1971-2018) to whom the epic poem Crito di Volta is
dedicated. Together, Crito and Flav, Marc and Michelle, plot the demise of the
infernal system that they are caught up in.
There
is a fine line between
madness and genius since, recently, as if
society
would
care, scientists have proven that the two share a
similar
genetic makeup, called Neuregulin 1. We revere and
adore
van Gogh, Wolf, Plath, Cobain, Sexton, Nash,
Nelligan,
Hemingway, and other great minds affected by
Mood
disorders, or schizophrenia; we love our mad genius,
we
are eager to take his gifts, but we often reject the
very
illness that spawns the gift, and thereby reject the
person.
( p.109)
In a consumer society like our own the product, or production,
is more precious than the person who produces it, in the end, or at least once
the product has gone into production, the producer is now disposable. In a
further dig at the politics of the day, which follow trends and fashions, again
at the dictates of the merest whims of consumers, Flavia tells Crito that she
will ‘recruit my friends from Mad Pride, who know it is impossible to be proud
of one’s self when one is not only openly treated unequally, but one is also
scorned, mocked, hated, abused, mistrusted, beaten, murdered…’(p.110). And, so,
the two go together and lead the uprising, gathering a number of colourful
characters to their side; Tristan Dion, the Sergeant Ivan Proschenko, a veteran
of Afghanistan, the singer Josh Homme, the singer of the Queens of the Age, and
there is an epic battle which culminates in Canto XX. When Dante himself
appears. [viii]
holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Dante
Alighieri!
Dante Alighieri,
haloed
here before me in this wood
no
longer dimly with the dying light!
O
visage with the strangest smile!
O
blackened brow and tan from hell!
O
eyes wherein white sight still swims with style-
who’ll
out-see your eyes no one can tell! ( p.140)
And as Crito di Volta engages with the ancient poet, Marc
Di Saverio the poet would have Dante respond to his creation like so.
“Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Crito
Di
Volta! Crito Di Volta,
found
amid this wood upon a cliff,
overlooking
the city he was born in.
O
Crito – you sorrowed forth
like
Leopardi – I love you; and, after
following
my footfalls a while, you will
freely
shepherd hosts of souls to Paradise,
while
on your way there – you’ll understand,
like
your first language, more about
just
who and what you are.” ( p.149)
It is a remarkable culmination in the overall poem,
Canto XV1 of Crito Di Volta is already a translation of Canto 1 of
Dante’s Inferno, it is a wonderfully fluent translation into English, so
along with Ezra Pound, Dante, appears in Marc Di Saverio’s epic poem as the
Epic poet personified. Particularly, when one considers the many references to
Christ, Dante’s appearance in the poem comes really as no surprise, yet more as
a natural progression in the already remarkable events which have gone before.
After passing some words together, Dante eventually
leads Crito to Joan of Arc who baptizes him in a river to finally make him
ready to face his God.
I
dripping like one who has known water;
I
dripping like one who’s known air for the first time;
I
feeling just the pinch of water-fall mist,
I
knowing that, henceforth, I must do
the
will of God, alone, unmingled with
my
own; and surrender to Him, alone,
speaking
only when He opens my mouth
with
His voice, when he explodes me
into
Scripture, any-where, or newly-
refracts
His orders through me, from Heaven. (p.143)
And so we come to the third and final section of Crito
Di Volta which is signalled to us by the third and final change in the
email address of Crito who now writes from san.franciso.ave@gmail.com
In Canto XXI, Crito receives an email from Flavia
Vamorri who announces to Crito that she can’t go on. A suicide note! After
attending the funeral, and speaking with her family, Crito then enters into
this final phase in his spiritual awakening. The poems in this final section of
Crito di Volta take on a sublime spiritual dimension. Take the sonnet While
Begging Under February Stars which I shall quote here in full.
While
begging under February stars
that
I might be my closest to the beggars
and
scatter my soul through the forecasted storm
and
brave them on toward the laze and warm
of
spring, a stinging wind ascended and engraved
in
my ear the whimper of a girl I had saved
from
her own hand, inside the freshman dorm;
then
nursed, at once, from her childhood wars.
She
whispered, “please reverse the weather in my
eyes,”
empty as two open sunless graves,
which
simply realigned the little troth
I’d
sided for the sewing of my wounds;
back
to the Father and the snow falling
on
the woman in my arms, no longer calling. ( p.153)
After Ezra Pound and Dante, a third poet makes his
appearance in Crito di Volta, it is the Canadian poet Emile Nelligan who
like Marc Di Saverio is profoundly Christian. Nelligan wrote in French coming
from Montreal, and Di Saverio’s translations into English are, once again, quite
remarkable transversions; poems in their own right, as opposed to being mere
translations. Emile Nelligan had a rather tortured life, spending much of it,
like Di Saverio, in institutions. He has been compared to the visionary poet
Arthur Rimbaud, having written most of his poems in his teens. Anyone who
questions the sincerity of Marc Di Saverio’s stance in Crito Di Volta,
I would merely ask them to read over the final, third section of the poem
as it is the culmination of over a decade of travail which had this reader
thinking of another visionary; the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.
Immediately after writing the above, I go over in my
mind, once again, the whole experience of reading Marc Di Saverio’s hybrid epic
poem Crito di Volta. I’ve just come off the phone talking to the author
and he has mentioned to me the whole what he sees as the ‘inclusive’ nature of
the book, referencing very much the ending and how Crito, the protagonist of
the poem, and the very book itself, is Him. I find myself replying to him that the
epic poem is ontological by its very register, so of course the book and man
very much BEING the same, in many respects. In this respect, Marc Di Saverio is
truly unique, I believe. In fact, I cannot think of a single contemporary poet,
or author, who is so of his time. In a world when scientists, worldwide, are
warning us that we are on borrowed time in terms of the environment, we face
truly Epic consequences if we do not face up to our collective destinies. Epic
poets, from Homer, have always been of the tragic strain. Homer was blind,
after all, a price, one could say, for such profound vision. Beethoven, the
epic composer of the Eroica symphony, was deaf. Indeed, his deafness came just
when he was composing his greatest work. Even Joyce was half blinded,
struggling to write Ulysses and later Finnegans Wake, so much so
that he took to wearing white smocks like chemists do in order to transfer what
little luminance might enter his room, onto the page, holding onto a great
pencil with which he marked his words. It’s almost 100 years since the publication
of Ulysses and Eliot’s Wasteland two epic modernist masterpieces.
Their world was coloured, as has ben recently remarked by many a social
commentator, by the Spanish flu which came just at the end of the first world
war. Times of epic social change. Now, here we are, with Covid 19 entering its
second phase, with talks of further lockdowns, and the great fear of an epic
recession looming above us all out on the horizon. But, perhaps even more than
that, in certain quarters there is additionally the talk of war. Into such an
environment has Marc Di Saverio’s hybrid epic poem, a poem that is truly worthy
of the epic tradition might I add, been thrown. Perhaps it is timely. It would
certainly appear to be so. Poets, and
non- poets alike, brace yourselves – a new day has dawned. It is time to adjust
the register, be heroic!
BIO
Marc Di Volta is also the author of Sanitorium
Songs ( 2013), and the book of translations Ship of Gold: The Essential
Poems of Emil Nelligan ( 2107). He is currently writing his first novel The
Daymaker.
Peter O’Neill is the author of five
collections of poetry, a volume of translation – Transversions from Baudelaire,
and the short prose work More Micks than Dicks – a hybrid Beckettian novella in
3 genres.
Bibliography
Beckett, Samuel: Comment C’est How It Is and / et
L’image , A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Édition Critico-Génétique, Edited
by Edouard Magessa O’Reilly, Rutledge, London, First Paperback Edition 2016.
Di Saverio, Marc: Crito Di Volta, A hybrid epic
poem, Guernica Editions, Toronto, 2020.
Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, with a n
Introduction by Len Platt, Wordsworth Classics, London, 2012.
Ducasse, Isidore: Les Chants de Maldoror, Oeuvres
completes, NRF Poésie/ Gallimard, Paris, 1973.
Milton, John: Paradise Lost, An illustrated
edition with an introduction by Philip Pullman, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
First Published 2005.
Plato: The Last Days of Socrates, Translated by
Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant with Introduction and Notes by Harold
Tarrant, Penguin Classics, London, 2003.
Shakespeare, William: Sonnets, Edited by John
Kerrigan, Penguin Books, London, 1999.
Notes
[i] Aristotle: Poetics,
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by James Hutton, preface by Gordon M.
Kirkwood, W.W. Norton, New York, 1982, p.71.
[ii] Vico, Giambattista: New Science,
Translated by David Marsh with an Introduction by Anthony Grafton, Penguin
Classics, London, 2001, p.153.
[iii] The opening quotation of the book is Love
Him alone; don’t you fear God, even when you are dying?- New Testament’.
[iv] There are many
references to the collocation ‘womb tomb’ in connection with Beckett and Joyce.
Far too many to list here.
[v] Beckett, Samuel: Collected
Poems in English and French, Grove Press, New York, 1977, p. 8.
[vi] Alighieri, Dante: Inferno,
Edited and Translated by Robert M. Durling, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996,
p.30.
[vii] Unfortunately,
space does not allow me to explore in more detail the concept of
Orphomusocracy, for example, derived from Orpheus, an imagined possible
offshoot of Mortarsism in which Overpoets would be primarily musical; De Saverio’s
knowledge and skill at prosody allows him to conceive of such events, cultural
shifts. The point being, if one does not have knowledge of such things, how can
one possibly imagine such wonderful alternatives to what is going on, or not
going on, more to the point. For example, in a very comic interlude Di Saverio
takes a well -aimed critical shot at Haikuists, those tediously annoying
enthusiasts of the Japanese 17 syllable three- line poetic tradition who
invariably clog up your Facebook page with their paltry offerings. Di Saverio
creates for them the marvellous concept of Verso D’Oggetti or Objective
Verse ( p.68) in which a photograph of 17 objects, in the place of syllables.
‘Primarily an exercise for those poets who have lived so long in their heads,
or in their ivory towers, that they have literally lost touch with things.’ Or,
for example, the sonnet made up of fourteen YouTube links – see ( a sonnet
of two juke-box selectors) p.75. Again,
a wonderfully satirical critique of the rather asinine attempts at certain so
called poets published in certain journals today, who, being so ludicrously
self-deluded into their own mystique may consider every second, every
act of their all so precious lives, an act of art itself; hence, their mere
preference for specific pop and rock songs, which the link contains, being, in
their deluded eyes, worthy of publication itself!
[viii]
This whole
section of the poem is very reminiscent of the film If ( 1968) produced
by Lindsy Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell which portrays an insurrection
in a British public school. When I questioned Marc Di Saverio about the film in
relation to Crito di Volta he was very happy at the comparison, it being
a favourite film of his.
