2023-09-11 12:08:57
by PAOLO DI STEFANO
The literary critic’s new book will be released on 12 September by Fazi Carte Correnti: an investigation into the protagonists of the poetic scene closest to us
As the garden grows with the design/ the design grows with the garden. We read these two verses by Bertolt Brecht in a key passage of Roberto Galaverni’s new book, Carte Correnti (Fazi). With that couplet, Brecht probably wanted to indicate the relationship of mutual strengthening between reality and poetic representation. How to focus on life through the words of poetry and the words of poetry through life. this is one of the recurring motifs of Galaverni’s lessons on four Italian masters of the twentieth century (Montale, Zanzotto, Sereni, Fortini) and on as many authors born in the fifties (Remo Pagnanelli, Fabio Pusterla, Valerio Magrelli, Milo De Angelis). More precisely, Galaverni focuses his attention around individual compositions chosen by virtue of their exceptionality (all very beautiful texts) and also because they present themselves as poetic identity cards: verses that in making, voluntarily or not, stage the process of forming poetry.
In reality, something similar happens with Galaverni’s critical way: in reading a poem, in illustrating its salient points, in grasping the reasons, contents and forms of expression (but without abuse of stylistic tools), the peculiarities and the relationships with the global work of the author, the relationships with the precedents and with the epigones, stages what Maria Corti called the paths of invention. And she does it obsessively, indeed she seems almost desperately given the unattainability of the objective. Because if verifying the reasons and profound modalities of the creative process, let’s say from the first inspiration to the final draft, is always an excessive demand, for Galaverni it is however the ultimate goal to aim for. Thus we are made participants in his own path which is certainly not linear, that is, in his experience as a reader. Furthermore, as an excellent militant critic (for Lettura and for Corriere), Galaverni does not hesitate to give judgments by pointing out the risks that a given poet faces (he does so in particular for the last three, Pusterla, Magrelli and De Angelis ).
therefore, his is a strange essayism that measures itself with the amphibious nature of poetry, that double direction (the poet is a bisexual being, Mandelstam wrote), whereby through language one tries to account for reality in the very moment in which reality is adapted and defined by us. The state of necessity from which every good poem is born, be it doubt, uncertainty, disorientation, desire for testimony or truth, involves a comparison with reality, a vision of the world, a question about the meaning of life but also a question about the meaning it has. It is for each poet to translate that necessity, that question, etc. into verse. Therefore, Galaverni continually asks himself how this poetic formalization of life is determined. As we proceed, even his interpretation becomes amphibious itself, so that sometimes we don’t really know where to take it from.
The nature of the eel that Eugenio Montale put into verse in the famous eponymous poem of 1948 is amphibious. Fish-monster that goes against the adverse flood for an exceptional poem-monster that sails equally against the current, becoming a snake, an eel in turn (eel anagram of the language): just as the continuity of the flow is opposed by the harshness of the mountainous landscape, so the liquid music of the verse is continually broken by stony and harsh sounds. But the ethics of this poetry also goes against the tide, decidedly aimed at movement, compared to the usual Montalian survival instinct led to anchoring and conservation.
a poem which, says Galaverni, almost seems to have slipped out of the poet’s hands as he made it, and which then slipped away a second time into the river of poetic history, producing a large lineage of eel-like poems, up to Pusterla’s The Rhine Eel which, which appeared in 1985, is examined as a bet between continuity and overcoming: read by Galaverni as a poet of the border and of transit, in turn a ferryman of the twentieth-century tradition towards the posthumous condition of the end of the millennium, in a sort of genealogical challenge Pusterla makes Montale’s monster fish is given a real spin by imagining it in an ecological catastrophe scenario.
Simplifying a lot: in Gnessulgo, almost a manifesto by Zanzotto on how to put life into the form of words, an individual moves like a diviner in a forest and without deciding whether to go this way or that he makes the same oscillation that language makes, so the disoriented identity of the subject corresponds to the commuting of writing. Duplicity of an eel that has lost its compass. Zanzotto, the bridling poet who has to say everything every time, the great representative of the age of the oxymoron, of the saturation in which everything really boils down (obviously said with the utmost respect).
Still simplifying, in Sereni’s The Disease of the Olmo (1981), an intense Sunday glimpse in a landscape between the river (the Magra) and the sea, the traveler-critic Galaverni finds a cartography of the most explicit, the script of all the contrasts: between fixity and movement, between fidelity and renewal, between personal memory and openness to life, Sereni, the poet of experience and metaphorical concreteness, achieves an unthinkable expansion of the boundaries of lyric poetry.
Continuing to simplify Galaverni’s complex argument, in the aqueous system so practiced in poetry we find Boats on the Marne (1938), the Montalian poem that the critic identifies as probably the most authoritative opponent of the Eel: if the eel is hope running towards salvation, the water of the Marne, like the water of the sea, in Leopardian terms is only a force that annihilates, which, if anything, a cuttlefish bone can resist. Montale telluric poet one of the many definitive flashes that Galaverni gives us. Like the progressive snapshots that photograph Fortini as a poet of allegory, of divergence and of risk, a personality poised between extreme awareness and extreme candor. A chapter dedicated to the commentary on the most eloquent poem about poetry, To Boris Pasternak, from 1957. And as for definitive flashes, we then move on to the necrophilic game which becomes a poetic game by Pagnanelli, writer of erasure, and to his objects which are not bearers of memory but of oblivion: and this is perhaps the most surprising chapter of the book, because it is surprising the little-known biographical and poetic personality of Pagnanelli, a Marche native who committed suicide in his early thirties in 1987.
And still speaking of Galaverni’s courageous definitional fury, here is the comedy of deceptions by Magrelli, poet of baroque illusionism: in Porta Westfalica, from 1992, we find another subject in search of a gap between words and things. Here is the oscillating trend around De Angelis, an extremist poet, as well as a poet of failed action, as well as a poet of the imperturbable ego, prodigious impersonal mutant, whose solitude is all the more true the more it is recited (Fortini scripsit).
It will be understood that the interweavings and distant references are so many in Galaverni’s monster-essay that no reviewing attempt would be able to fully account for them. But suffice it to say here that during the individual lessons internal links are opened which illustrate words, concepts, threads and possible comparisons. Some examples: on the transition from Montale to Sereni imprinted in the formula occasion (metaphysical) vs situation (existential); on the tension between poetics and poetry starting from Pound and going back to Dante; on the poetic generations between the end of the Seventies and the Nineties, united by the feeling of the end of an era. But what matters is that after this journey into the meaning of poetry, the texts explored not only become better known but loved more.
The book and the meeting in Pordenonelegge
Carte Correnti by Roberto Galaverni (Fazi, pp. 684, €25) comes out in bookshops on 12 September. Roberto Galaverni born in Modena in 1964 and lives in Berlin. Literary critic and essayist, he writes for the cultural pages of Corriere della Sera and la Lettura. Among his publications: New contemporary Italian poets (Guaraldi, 1996), The places of poets (Palomar, 2001), After poetry. Essays on contemporaries (Fazi, 2002), The poet a Jedi knight. A defense of poetry (Fazi, 2006), Italian Poems 2017 (Elliot, 2018), PPP Poesie Per Pasolini (Mondadori, 2022). Galaverni will be a guest in Pordenonelegge on Sunday 17 September at 5pm (La Libreria della Poesia – Palazzo Gerogoris) for the meeting The voices and the sense of poetry. He will be in dialogue with Alberto Bertoni.
September 11, 2023 (modified September 11, 2023 | 12:07)
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