Dear Erminia--it's so lovely to my ear, the way you refer to this poem as
your "poemetto," because I hear it also as "palmetto," which means a kind of
weaving as well as palm tree, with _that_ "palm" in turn meaning the part of
the hand that bears all the lines--and keeps fast, for the sake of both, her
words in yours--Candice



on 2/20/02 7:42 PM, passermin at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Dear Rebecca,
>
> thank you indeed for this reference.
> I will certainly go and read Grossman's idea on this
> kind of exchange which I  call linguistic
> transvestitism.
>
> I myself used my mother speech before she died: the
> result was a combination of my formalist preoccupation
> with poetry as a language-code and her language as a
> trace of her poetics.
>
> The poet of that 'poemetto' was her? It is me? This is
> not possible to be established: what was due to be
> accomplished was the result of this combination. I
> doubt that such a thing could arise from one person
> only (unless madness intervenes).
>
> The story of that poemetto(she was partly aware of
> it,I believe) needed her illness which impaired her
> speech: poetic utterances resulted from linguistic
> aphasia: the re-organization of this has produced what
> one might see as a beckettian absurdist dramatic
> monologue.
>
> The 'poemetto' received attention because of this
> meta-literary objective that was achieved saving the
> poeticity of the original speech which occurred
> outside any poetical structural project of work - in
> my mother's voice - unless, we decide to call that
> spontaneous aphasic organizational tendency to produce
> metaphors: poetry, ( as the French and non-French
> symbolist poets  were aiming at proving, with Yeats,
> for instance, experimenting this tool with his wife
> speaking in a state of trance).
>
> In the case of my mother, it was neither trance nor
> dream, but a comatose state which still allowed her
> the possibility to speak. I recorded on a note book
> whatever she said (she was evidently not unconscious:
> therefore, it was not her subconscious affecting her
> speech, but a mental alteration of the system  through
> which language reflects reality).
>
> If one composed and formalized such phenomenons, who
> is the author, there? I do feel authorship in the case
> of my poemetto: I do not thing it was emphaty the
> output for that  sharing of poetical meanings.
>
> I cannot deny that in spite of the fact that my mother
> was in that extreme condition, I did put an attention
> to her words as potential poetry to be grasped,
> recorded, made known, and not to be dispersed: I was
> looking at my mother 's  speech as poets look at
> language for shaping their ideas or feelings.
>
>
> Erminia
>
>
>
>
> --- Rebecca Seiferle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> <<It is the only voice and persona which appeaces
>> me,
>> in poetry.
>>
>>
>> Erminia>>
>>
>>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
>>  Erminia, you can read Grossman's ideas about this
>> in
>> The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers
>> and Writers, by Allen Grossman with Mark Halliday. A
>> very interesting _collaboration_ between two very
>> different poets, but here's further explanation from
>> Grossman, and how it bears upon this anxiety of
>> authorship and poetic authority:
>>
>> "My poetry is, in the most literal sense, the speech
>> of my mother, or rather, the completion of the
>> speech.
>> My mother is a strange, dreaming person, and she is
>> at
>> this very moment in Sri Lanka seeking a place where
>> dreams are real.  The sense in which my poetry is
>> organized to justify hope goes deep back into a
>> personal history of intimacy, of a mother who was
>> restlessly and in some sense destructively
>> dissatisfied with the world around her. The
>> prolongation and, as it were, consummation of her
>> will
>> toward a golden world is as veracious an account as
>> I
>> can give of my motive to art. . .
>>
>> Yes, I have insisted...on the notion that it is
>> _precisely_ her speech. . .  I feel about poetry
>> that
>> it is a demonized activity, that it is not. . . the
>> speech of a mortal or merely singular person. Poetry
>> in _my_ view has its power because it is the speech
>> not of an individual but of another who is more than
>> and different from the individual."
>>
>> Rebecca
>>
>> http://www.thedrunkenboat.com
>>
>>
>> --- Erminia Passannanti <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 20 Feb 2002 09:18:40 -0800, Rebecca
>> Seiferle
>>> <[log in to unmask]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Allen Grossman saying that he
>>>> always "speaks in his mother's voice" which he
>>>> identified with the division between the Orphic
>> and
>>>> Philomelic traditions  to the crudest
>> practitioners
>>> of
>>>> those who speak  "for those who have no voice."
>>>
>>> How interesting, Rebecca, also I have used my
>>> mothers' voice, in a huge
>>> number of poem and in my poemetto called 'In
>>> Iugoslavia with my feet on
>>> the ground'.
>>>
>>>
>>> It is the only voice and persona which appeaces
>> me,
>>> in poetry.
>>>
>>>
>>> Erminia