NEW OBJECTIVISTS NOUVEAUX OBJECTIVISTES

NEW OBJECTIVISTS
NOUVEAUX OBJECTIVISTES
NUOVI OGGETTIVISTI
edited by
sous la direction de
a cura di
Cristina Giorcelli – Luigi Magno
LOFFREDO EDITORE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
4
Pubblicato con il contributo del Dipartimento di Studi Euro-Americani
e del Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere, Università
degli Studi Roma Tre – Via Ostiense, 236 e Via Valco di San Paolo, 19
– 00146 ROMA
ISBN 978-8-887564-641-7
Finito di stampare nel mese di ottobre 2013
In copertina: Tony Smith, Marriage (1961)
© LOFFREDO EDITORE UNIVERSITY PRESS s.r.l.
Via Kerbaker 19 – Napoli 80126 (NA)
www.loffredo.it
[email protected]
5
Indice
I
Cristina Giorcelli
Introduction
11
Bob Perelman
1 + 1 = 1: Louis Zukofsky and Question of Unity
17
Bob Perelman
A Guide to Homage to Sextus Propertius
The Job
Rome
31
42
43
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Objectivist Poetics and the Work of Drafts
45
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Draft 104: The Book
Draft 106: Meant to Say
61
66
Noura Wedell
Transforming Service: Radical Documentary
and the Promise of Objectivism
71
Maria Anita Stefanelli
Bargaining with the American Language:
Lina Angioletti’s Translations
89
6
Cristina Giorcelli
William Carlos Williams’s Objectivism
105
II
Luigi Magno
Objectivistes américains et nouveaux objectivismes dans
la littérature française. Un parcours
123
Geneviève Cohen-Cheminet
La mémoire vive de l’Objectivisme: un “héritage
précédé d’aucun testament”
143
Benoît Auclerc
“Rapport objectif (sic)” – A propos de Ponge
159
Jean-Marie Gleize
Un Objectif
179
Jean-Marie Gleize
Suite d’une histoire de la poussière
193
Annalisa Bertoni
“Les choses existent une à une” dans l’œuvre de Suzanne Doppelt
199
Suzanne Doppelt
Cosmic dérive
211
Jean-Jacques Poucel
Radicaux-Subjectifs (de Reznikoff à Hocquard et après)
215
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III
Cecilia Bello Minciacchi
L’oggetto appeso, la parola incollata, il sasso.
Su alcuni montaggi di Nanni Balestrini (1961-1967)
233
Antonio Loreto
Marco Giovenale e Michele Zaffarano:
una matematica della realtà
249
Marco Giovenale
CDK
five prose pieces
a girdle of color
essential oil
263
266
269
271
Michele Zaffarano
Prose marxiane / Marxian prose pieces
Scavate buche nello spazio / Dig holes in space
273
278
Massimiliano Manganelli
Nuove scritture italiane. Tra fasi e ridefinizioni:
Alessandro De Francesco e Giulio Marzaioli
283
Alessandro De Francesco
Corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale –
Foreign Body in Ascending Motion
Ridefinizione – Redefinition
295
299
Giulio Marzaioli
[estratti da] Quattro fasi
309
Contributors / Auteurs / Autori
319
Introduction
“De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair”
(Paul Verlaine, “Art Poétique”)
“the line is the meat, not what it says”
(William Carlos Williams, “A New Line Is a New Measure”)
Poetry must be “precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling”
it “presents the thing in order to convey the feeling”
(L. S. Dembo, “The ‘Objectivist’ Poet”)
In 2012 I have had the great pleasure of holding a second Conference on Objectivism, actually, on New Objectivisms. This year I renew the
pleasure by publishing its proceedings.
In 1998, when I launched the Conference “The Idea and the Thing in
Modernist American Poetry,”1 it was the first and only one dedicated to
Objectivism in this country up to then. A collection of excellent essays
resulted from that Conference – written by scholars such as Burton
Hatlen, who would surely have been with us in 2012 and would be present in this volume if his life had not been tragically cut short. We do miss
him! Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Bob Perelman, present at the “The Idea
and the Thing in Modernist American Poetry” Conference and in its proceedings, however, are lending continuity to this new enterprise. “New”
in that some of our opinions may have changed and, with an additional
fourteen years of reading and teaching, we may hopefully have achieved
new insights.
But “new” also because when, with Luigi, we decided to organize a
Conference on New Objectivisms, we immediately resolved it should be
“different” from the previous one. Thus, not only is the French perspective
now taken into consideration together with the American and the Italian
ones, but creative writers of the three nationalities have been invited to
12
participate not as showpieces, but as equal partners. I say this to make it
clear that Luigi and I, as critics, are quite aware that our work is ancillary
to that of the creative writers or, at best, it interacts with theirs. After so
many years of voicing and preaching supremacist and totalizing critical
theories, we felt that some sense of proportion had to be re-established.
Luigi and I – and the audience at the Conference, together, possibly,
with the present readers – were curious to know why the Objectivists, a
small group of tenacious American poets who carried some of the Modernist tenets to their utmost extremes, who were marginalized in their own
country for most or all of their lives, and who were rediscovered by the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (among them, Bob Perelman, Rachel Blau
DuPlessis, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian) in the 1970s,
have today a following both in France and in Italy. We wished indeed
to explore the reasons why the contemporary French and Italian poets,
who have adhered to the Modernist aesthetic theory of revivifying contemporary verse by drawing new strength from alien sources, have
turned, in their two non-English languages, towards the Objectivists –
so idiosyncratic in their own land!
Furthermore, we desired to find out whether it was precisely because
of the Objectivists’ near rejection at home, of their being “voces clamantes in deserto,” that these contemporary poets were attracted to them.
And, therefore, whether they too feel as alien at home as the Objectivists did. The answer, of course, is that all artists do to some extent, but
by choosing to follow such ecrivains de niche, the question is: are these
contemporary French and Italian poets deliberately making an elitist
stand – that is, a marginal stand taken with pride, if not with defiance
– or, on the contrary, do they simply and frankly think that the time has
come for Objectivism to collect its due? And, in this case, why?
We think we have discovered (in these matters, tentativeness is de rigueur!) that the Objectivists’ “influence” entails many distinguos – eightytwo years from the publication of the 1931 February issue of Poetry in
which the poetics of Objectivism first saw the light have not passed in
vain. Such distinguos are probably not due solely to the fact that the Ob-
13
jectivists’ poetic credo has been fertile in languages and cultures different from their own. Another significant reason may be that the world is
no longer what it was and, consequently, the words to express it and the
attitudes behind the need to give expression to one’s observations/emotions, have changed – in many ways, dramatically. In addition, the constant, reiterative exposure to novelties that come from the most diverse
fields – visual arts, photography, popular music, advertisements, films –
may also have offered these contemporary poets many different and
stimulating contributions to be added to that of Objectivism.
Moreover, we were eager to assess whether for these contemporary
poets – as for their precursors – words are still audio-visual “things” in
their own right, “material objects,” sensory objects made of letters and
sounds emitted by breath: objects in space, particles of matter in motion, material artefacts to be torn apart and recomposed for the sake of
punning and self-reflexivity as well as for the sake of revealing their roots,
their etymology, that is, their entire history. And we wanted to apprehend if for these poets language is still a code to be scrutinized in order
to disclose, if only partially, how “opaque, impenetrable, mysterious, and
resistant,”2 that is, how problematic, words are.
We were much interested both in learning how – if at all – the Objectivists’ “sincerity” had been re-interpreted, what meaning Zukofsky’s “objectification” as “rested totality” had assumed, what had become of what
he called “clarity,” if “thinking with the things as they exist” was still a goal
for these contemporary poets as it was for him; and also in estimating
whether these contemporary poets are de-centering the lyrical “I” and centering representation, instead, on the “eye,” the organ of vision. Such terms
and word-play (but much more than just that) were very important for
the Objectivists, even if these concepts and choices did not always entail
the same meaning and applications for all of them. Since the Objectivists
were anything but “naive empiricists,”3 as Hatlen aptly put it, our concern
was to see whether these contemporary French and Italian poets are achieving similar ends without having to resort to “thorny cadences, impacted
syntax, and shifts of verbal registers,”4 as Zukofsky did.
14
The questions we had in store for these contemporary poets were numerous. A few examples: is their purpose still that of writing poems that
are “modes of social observation”5? And does denotation, for them too,
take precedence over connotation as well as metaphor and, therefore, to
avoid symbolism and description, is the dynamics of relationships still
a constructive principle for them?
Just as crucial, perhaps, was our intent to ascertain what impact the
Objectivists’ elders – foremost among them, Pound, Stein, Williams
(and in a less immediate and direct way, Marianne Moore and Wallace
Stevens, and even a Modernist, experimental novelist like Willa Cather),
with their insistence on an “economy of words,” on playing with calembours, on writing poetry that would express “no ideas but in things,” and
on creating upon the page “the inexplicable presence of the thing not
named, the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it,”6 – what
impact, if any, such predecessors have had on these contemporary poets,
either directly or through the mediation of translations: some of them
by poets who, while transferring the works of these American artists into their own language, could not but also interpret them.
But we were also anxious to figure out whether the Objectivists’ epistemological delving into language had been turned by these poets into
a moral quest, as was the case for the Objectivists; and, at a time of general disheartenment about the possibilities of communication, of an
honest and profitable exchange between people, to estimate whether
these poets still believe that the world outside is relevant, real, true, and
knowable, as it was for the Objectivists. Finally, we were hoping to understand whether these contemporary poets still maintain – as it was
with the Objectivists – the belief that, palingenetically, a new attention
to the word, freed from its auxiliary (“predatory,” as Zukofsky called it)
function as transmitter of meaning, will be able to create a new world.
For reasons that it is worthwhile to investigate, some of the Objectivists – lumped together as co-sharers of the same poetics, but actually
quite different from one another – have been “opted” in one of these
15
two European countries rather than the other. In Italy, as far as I could
detect, only parts of Zukofsky’s Some Time have been translated by Salvatore Rosati in Botteghe Oscure in 1950 and parts of “A” have been
translated by Giovanni Galtieri in book-form in 1970; parts of Reznikoff ’s
Holocaust have been published in a journal, L’Ulisse, N. 15, and translated by Andrea Raos in 2012; and only Oppen’s Of Being Numerous has
been translated by Irene Floriani in book-form in 2006. Rakosi does not
seem to have been translated at all.
American predecessors to the Objectivists, such as Emerson and Whitman, whose poetic project they carried on, can unavoidably be traced in
the nineteenth century. The present day French poets have their own nineteenth-century predecessors who may have paved the way for a reception
of the Objectivists: Flaubert, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire, for
instance. The Italian poets do not come from such an innovative nineteenth-century poetic tradition – except, perhaps, for Leopardi who can
be considered, from a certain perspective, a formidable forerunner, intellectually and poetically – but they may have some less remote twentiethcentury fathers, like Eugenio Montale or, in prose fiction, Carlo Emilio
Gadda. Therefore, how did the Italian poets chance upon the Objectivists
and how did they come to profit by their lesson?
The routes are complex and intricate. The many questions I raise
(none of them purely rhetorical) may help convey the expectations that
the Conference, in the first place, and now this volume are likely to engender: about the comprehension of the Objectivists, of course (since
so much has still to be unearthed), of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets,
and, especially, of the younger generation of poets in France and Italy,
who have openly, if only partially at times, elected the Objectivists as
their maestri.
With this volume we aspire to fill a gap in the knowledge of what lies
behind some of these contemporary poets’ achievements, and to discover
what makes them so enticing.*
Cristina Giorcelli
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Notes
The Idea and the Thing in Modernist American Poetry, ed. Cristina Giorcelli (Roma: Ila Palma, 2001), pp. 372.
2
Burton Hatlen, “A Poetics of Marginality and Resistance: The Objectivist Poets
in Context,” The Objectivist Nexus. Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), p. 52.
3
Ibidem, p. 42.
4
Mark Scroggins, The Poem of a Life. A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Washington,
DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007), p. 368.
5
Blau DuPlessis and Quartermain, “Introduction,” The Objectivist Nexus. Essays
in Cultural Poetics, cit., p. 3.
6
Willa Cather on Writing, Ead., “The Novel Démeublé” (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 50.
1
* Due to financial restrictions, we apologize for having imposed strict page limitations on all contributors.

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