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Sunday, August 30, 2020

OTHER SHEPHERDS - NINA KOSSMAN - poems with translations from Marina Tsvetaeva - a Review


 


Other Shepherds

Nina Kossman

Poems with Translations from

Marina Tsvetaeva

                                                             Poets and Traitors Press

( 99 pages )

 

The very first poem, the very first translation by Nina Kossman of a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva I should point out, holds me because of the context of the poem in its historical setting, which is Russia during the revolution of 1917. This is the context, and this, of course, is the way in which you should perceive the poem.  Here is the first verse.

 

I remember the first day, the infantile brutality;

The languor and the divine dregs of a swallow.

The carelessness of the hands, the heartlessness of the heart

Falling like a stone – and like a hawk – onto my chest.

 

So, likewise, the historical context of my reading of the poem is equally as important, in order to reclassify the original context above, and the current historical context of my reading is six months into a global pandemic, that of Covid 19 at the end of August, 2020. My daughter went to school today, despite the fact that the Minister of Health announced that there will more than likely be a return to Lockdown, school children across Europe have already returned to school, and spikes of new cases have appeared only just this same week. I, myself, received an email from my supervisor at work, informing me that I too would be returning to work, in a couple of weeks. I am a teacher and have been teaching online, rather happily, for the last couple of months. So, now you, the reader, whatever your historic context may be, are aware of the background informing the following review.

‘infantile brutality’ is the first collocation that springs to mind- remember that I am reading this poem/translation while reports are coming in on a daily basis of police brutality in the USA with the killing of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, but also after the prolonged rioting in Paris with the gilet jaune or yellow jackets which were going on throughout 2019, and also current tensions which are escalating in the South China Seas, between the USA, Japan, Taiwan and Australia on the one hand and China on the other, while in the Mediterranean Turkey and Greece would appear to be also at loggerheads, all of which is playing out against a further backdrop of governmental corruption in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland where governmental ministers in both countries have been seen to be callously disregarding their own Covid guidelines concerning travelling and quarantine restrictions, so that the unease and scepticism among the public in both islands is daily mounting. ‘the carelessness of the hands, the heartlessness of the heart Falling like a stone – and like a hawk – onto my chest.’

This is the poetry of one who has suffered, and who understands what it means to suffer. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s  life reads like a dramatic historical movie- her daughter was to die soon after she wrote the lines above in the famine which followed the events which she is describing, namely civil war, and who would eventually hang herself in 1941 after  her husband was killed, he was accused of espionage, but not after she had had numerous affairs, including one with Osip Mandelstam, from this experience she wrote a collection Milestones; spent 13 years living in Paris, she studied at the Sorbonne; contracted TB, and travelled literally all over both Western and Eastern Europe. Like Rimbaud, Tsvetaeva had giant appetites. Though, unlike the Frenchman, she was born into a world of privilege; her father was a Professor of fine art while her mother was a concert pianist.

 

And now – trembling from heart and pity, what’s left

Is this: to howl like a wolf, this: to fall at your feet,

To lower my eyes, knowing the penalty of pleasure –

A convict’s passion and cruel love.

 

As well as having had an affair with Mandelsam, around the same period of the composition of this poem Tsvetaeva also had a very deep and long- lasting affair with the poet Sophia Parnook. So, outside the greater narrative of the Russian revolution, which certainly frames the poem, there is also the microcosm of the poet’s own power plays with trysts with lovers. The ‘penalty of pleasure – A convict’s passion and cruel love.’  

The historical context informs the work, as it gives to the voice an authority that is implicit in the lines, her personal experience imbues the words and phrases with the particular forensics of the empiricist’s science, to which the reader trusts implicitly. It is not the explicit woe is me that is all too familiar to hear these days by so -called spoken word poets, those apologists for mediocrity and tedium. Rather, this is the quiet, studied nuance of the sheer barbarism of all so called ‘civilised’ encounters, once the mask of appearance has been pulled down.   

Her translator, the poet Nina Kossman, has a similar tragic background, in terms of her family; the majority of her father’s, a Russian Jew born in Moscow, were exterminated by the Nazis during the second world war in extermination camps. Kossman herself grew up in New York and is a vibrant presence in the Russian expat community organising online poetry readings in Russian, while inviting foreigners like me to participate. I find her whole engagement with the poet Tsvetaeva a fascinating one, as like Nina, I too am prone to translation. It is an integral part of multi-lingual poets who inhabit multiple worlds outside of their maternal tongue. Kossman, in fact, describes in the introduction to Other Shepherds her own very complex relationship with the Russian language as she grew up in various parts of the USA as a child.

 

You, who are lost,

who were you then,

when time stood still

like a hollow rock,

where can you find it,

in what far flung night?

You said it was yours,

time was your god, you said,

or did you want to say

that you were its servant?

But now it has abandoned you –

you are a withered king

on a solitary throne

“She is my love, my bride my very own…”

Ah, but where is she now,

your queen, your soul?

in the ground she lies,

in a wooden coffin,

under a heavy stone.

 

This is Kossman’s reply to Tsvetaeva’s opening poem, the translation given at the start of this review, and such is the structure of the book Other Shepherds which I must say I like very much, this idea where both the poet and the translator gather together in unison to enter into an even greater communion with the subject of the book. The poem above, her response, is so good too. I love the way she echoes the ‘hollow rock’ at the beginning with the ‘heavy stone’ at the close of the poem. It is wonderfully crafted and conceived as it would echo the further echo of the response of the poem to her own translation of the original. All translations being merely readings, or at least the residual trace of a particular reading, by the translator poet at a particular place in time. How far will they stand up to the further scrutiny of time is anyone’s guess, but I think that we can be pretty sure from reading the above poem, the response, that it will stand the test of time, as time and its rather ephemeral nature is the very subject of it, which is a timeless one in poetry, at least. Real poetry, at least, I feel almost obliged to add. Timeless poetry which is concerned with the timeless themes of both women and men, such as – mortality!

And indeed, how long I have waited to read a good poem on the subject of mortality!

From your arrogant Poland

You brought me flattering words,

And a sable hat,

And your hand with long fingers,

And bows, and endearments,

And a princely coat-of arms with a crown.

 

-          But I brought you

Two silver wings.

 

 M. T. (1917)

 

 

Words for wings, less for more,

As sea is for mope[1],

red for white

sweet for dry,

petals for a flower,

a flower as a gift:

something that wilts

for something that lasts,

something that passes

for something that stays…

Repeat: Mirror for memory-

I shan’t accept this gift.

 

N.K

 

 

  Here is the second offering, I print them as they are upon the page. The same theme is treated, yet in a totally different way. The mood alters, so rapidly. But, time passing, time passing. And, again, it is this very human identification process which the poet translator Kossman brings to this whole enterprise that I find fascinating. Kossman engages with Tsvetaeva in the translation which reads so natural, she is addressing her husband in this poem, if I am not mistaken, who was of noble Polish descent. The stark contrast in gifts, the worldly heaviness of the masculine, contrasted so beautifully with the natural élan of the feminine. And how Kossman replies, ‘Words for wings, less for more,’ always being sold short. ‘as sea is for mope’ the crime of translation. Russian is a very beautiful language, I have heard Kossman reading in Russian with its wonderful musicality – the cadence and rhymes which English cannot come close to. By the way, the publisher which published the book is called Poets and Traitors Press which specialises in translation, rather funnily. It is a beautifully produced book too, in terms of material for the cover, typeface and the paper that is used. ‘something that wilts for something that lasts’, Kossman goes on ‘something that passes for something that stays… Repeat: mirror for memory – I shan’t accept this gift.’ The closing lines leave me puzzled. Which is it she means, the general bullshit of men? or the superficial image of one’s face projected onto a two dimensional surface which is reflected back to one in place of the things and events one actually remembers? For the life of me, I have no idea! But then, Kossman’s poems, like Tsvetaeva’s were meant to be read slowly… piecemeal… savoured, over the passage of time. If such an exercise is what you look for in a collection of poems – translations, look no further.     


Peter O'Neill - August 2020


https://www.poets-traitors.com/



[1] mope – sea ( Russian )  


Saturday, August 29, 2020

LVI. - CHANT D'AUTOMNE PAR BAUDELAIRE - AUTUMN SONG


                                                           Skerries, North County Dublin, Ireland.




  

 

LVI. - Chant d’Automne

 

Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres ;

Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts !
J’entends déjà tomber avec des chocs funèbres

Le bois retentissant sur le pavé des cours.

Tout l’hiver va rentrer dans mon être : colère,
Haine, frissons, horreur, labeur dur et forcé,
Et, comme le soleil dans son enfer polaire,
Mon coeur ne sera plus qu’un bloc rouge et glacé.

J’écoute en frémissant chaque bûche qui tombe ;
L’échafaud qu’on bâtit n’a pas d’écho plus sourd.
Mon esprit est pareil à la tour qui succombe
Sous les coups du bélier infatigable et lourd.

Il me semble, bercé par ce choc monotone,
Qu’on cloue en grande hâte un cercueil quelque part.
Pour qui ? - C’était hier l’été ; voici l’automne !
Ce bruit mystérieux sonne comme un départ.

 

 

II

 

J’aime de vos longs yeux la lumière verdâtre,

Douce beauté, mais tout aujourd’hui m’est amer,

Et rien, ni votre amour, ni le boudoir, ni l’âtre,

Ne me vaut le soleil rayonnant sur la mer.

 

Et pourtant aimez-moi, tendre coeur! Soyez mère,

Même pour un imgrat, même pour un méchant ;

Amante ou soeur, soyez la douceur éphémère

D’un Glorieux automne ou d’un soleil couchant.

 

 

Courte tâche ! a tombe attend ; elle est avide !

Ah ! laissez-moi, mon front pose sur vos genoux,

Goûter , en regrettant l’été blanc et torride,

De l’arrière-saison le rayon jaune et doux !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LVI. - Autumn Song

 

 

I can already hear the funeral sound of the fallen

Wood ringing out on the paving stones in the courtyard.

Adieu, living clarity of our too short summers!

Soon we will plunge into the glacial darkness.

 

Like the sun in its polar hell

My heart will only be a frozen red block.

All of winter will enter my Be-ing: anger

Frissons… horror, hate and forced labour!

 

My spirit is like the tower which succumbs

To the blows of the axe, indefatigable and heavy.

I listen shivering at every branch which falls,

The scaffold which we erect has not such a deafening echo.

 

By being held in its monotonous impact, it seems

That a great coffin is being made for someone.

But for whom? Yesterday it was summer, and now it is autumn!

This mysterious sound sings like a hallowed departure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

 

 

I love the greenish light of your eyes,

Gentle beauty, but everything tastes bitter today.

And nothing, not your love, not the bed, nor the hearthstone

Is worthy of the sunlight shining upon the mercurial sea.

 

And yet love me, tender heart ! Mother me ,

Even if I appear ungrateful, even if I appear mean ;

Lover or sister , be as the ephemeral gentleness

Of a glorious Autumn evening sunset.

 

A brief chore ! The tomb awaits ; it is avid !

Ah! Leave me to rest my forehead upon your knee,

Taste , while regretting the torrid white summer,

 The ray of golden light of the Fall.     



Monday, August 17, 2020

BEETHOVEN


Beethoven by Andy Warhol





Beethoven

For Daniel Wade 

 

 

The breath of harnessed pulmonary winds

Which orchestrate the wind section

Paralleling the storms is Beethoven;

The great wind will of his mind.

 

The very breath inhaled by the players

Likened to the rose of winds,

His symphonies and concertos playing out

Offering direction to the longitudes and latitudes

 

Of the great skies and plains of his many moods.

Hearken to the maple of the bassoons,

African blackwood in the clarinets and oboes.

 

Hear the superb craft volleying along the walls

Of the innumerable concert halls of old Europe,

Then gage the mammoth in the awakening silence. 

 

Saturday, August 15, 2020

SONG OF THE HIGHEST TOWER


Mary Magdalene by Marc Di Saverio




Song of the Highest Tower

for Marc Di Saverio



Only through maximum extension will we ever find peace
On this earth. Love is the metaphor.
Gargantuan appetites will only see us through.
Wolf and gorge upon rocks and thighs

Gentle Alphas whose crucifixion is rose-
Coloured, just as Homer's fingertips of dawn,
 Will come trumpeting with cloud and duty.
Rosa mundi - rose of this crucified world

Which lies torn in the violent bloom of our words,
Creating a Venice of the mind whose lagoons and belfries
Toll alternate histories embracing  both Christian 

And Babylon, singing the Orient in each dip of the oars,
The plaintive croon of the Gondoliers 
Pealing gently back the skin of the waters. 



15/08/2020


 

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

To the Reader - Transversion from Les Fleurs Du Mal



This is a reading of my transversion of the opening poem to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal. I have taken, of course, some liberties, re-contextualised certain passages, particularly the bestiary which normally figures towards the end of the poem. 

This transversion is more in line with an age of Gangster Capitalism.

It is the opening work in The Enemy - Transversions from Charles Baudelaire published by Lapwing Press in Belfast in 2015. See link below to purchase in either eBook or traditional format.

I am not finished working on Les Fleurs Du Mal, my intention is to transverse the entire work. The poems transversed in The Enemy cover almost all of the first section Spleen and Ideal. It is an epic endeavour, more of a life work, so I am working on it piecemeal while I continue working on other projects. But, I am quite happy with the progress so far. I am becoming stronger, more confident in my working methods, as the years go by.

Les Fleurs Du Mal is a book that you return to again and again at different stages in your life, like all through canonical works. As a working poet you learn a lot from such long-standing engagements, as you are learning from the very best. If was to give some advice, to any young poets, forget about workshops. Learn another language, find a great poet who speaks to you in it, and start transversing his/her works. In my experience, this is the very best way to learn the craft of writing. All the really important writers did so, so that should tell you something. At the very least, its shows real commitment, and dedication.








Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Seamus Heaney’s Aeneid, Book VI - a poem made up of 2 sonnets, and mare ...



If you are interested in getting a copy of the broadsheet, or Einblattdruck , from the publisher PalmArtPress in Berlin, please go to the following link where you can procure one - see Einblattdruck Nr. 110. 



These two sonnets which make up the poem Seamus Heaney's Aeneid, Book VI are part of an unpublished collection called mare nostrum which treats the ancient Roman presence at Drumanagh Promontory at Loughshinny Harbour here in north county Dublin, not far from my hometown of Skerries.

I should like to take this opportunity to thank all the team at Fingal Arts who were responsible for making me the Writer in Residence at the Boathouse there during the spring of 2016. It was a truly magical experience for me which I have very fond memories of. 

I am a blow in from Cork, so to be up here writing about the ancient Roman presence at the promontory must appear to some of the locals kind of funny, but this is what us blow ins do.

I will leave some further links to this particular project here. If you happen to be a publisher, the book is quite unique and remains unpublished...

As I say in my short film, Thomas Brezing and I gave a copy to Marie Heaney who seemed very content with the Einblattdruck at the time. She is a lovely woman, and it was a very real pleasure to meet up with her.




  

Friday, August 7, 2020

HOLY CRITO! - A CRITICAL ESSAY OF CRITO DI VOLTA BY MARC DI SAVERIO - GUERNICA EDITIONS MARCH 2020

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.