On Fri, 1 Mar 2002 11:57:26 -0600, KENT JOHNSON
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:


>Erminia,
>
>I don't think your use of Futurism (or Surrealism, much less the
>Baroque!) as an analogy in this discussion is apropos, as it
>represents a movement or tendency

Movements have aesthetic achievements which represent their 'forms'.
The futurist had specific texts they produces and they soon established a
trend: see Marinetti, in touch with artists such Balla and Depero: one
discourse through various genre, and each genre its own peculiarities.
Futurist texts were very much in touch with - say - the Dada.
Have you seen Marinetti 'velocity' poems? They have a peculiar appearance:
so, true, Marinetti was the founder of a movement (the author of the
Futurist manifesto, first published in France)who would get crazy about
the joys of mechanical forces (an aesthetics that tragically, for Europe,
intrigued also Mussolini, among the audience), but he was also part of a
group of authors which started experimenting futurist forms. So, I believe
Futurism has a particularly concrete correlative objective: the mechanical
poem itself.

Then, you ask what is the postmodernist Italian pastiche poem: (poetry
assuming as themes and techniques what Eco was doing in his novels): I was
going to e-mail you the poems by Baino, Voce and Cepollaro: they are
monstrously dense and verbose, so it would take me ages to type them down.
I will try to see if my scanner can accept such a textual complication:

but let me summarize the trend of the postmodernist Italian pastiche
poetry:
here are a few technical characteristics which make it all together
distinguished from collaborative poems and quotational poetry:

- despite and plan to establish a linguistic connection with past
traditions by now dead (as Benjamin suggested to do).
- acquisition of a parodistic version of an antique language (say pre-
dantesque Florentine derived by old documents - like in the Name of the
Rose -
- creating of a persona, which is the combination of 3,4,5 famous authors
of the ancient times (poets, philosophers, rascals, whatever).
- profuse use of proverbs and antique expression in total disuse that
would always bear a fain aura of the past
- quotation and allusion to central passage of major works, both in the
literary field and in the for instance the juridical, ecclesiastical.
- continual mixing up of centuries and questions, for instance long trials
long wars, long diatribes, the witches, the Inquisition, the French
Revolution, whatsoever.
- dissimulation of the sources so no mention is made of where the
inspiration comes from, the effect of which is the presentation to the
audience of an hybrid creature speaking an hybrid voice.
- connection - as in Nobel Prize Dario Fo and his theatre - with medieval
comedies, characters, topoi, and so on, with sudden intersection with
Renaissance themes and voices.

As I said , the dramatic persona is ephemeral and ungraspable. It
presentation of knowledge has turned into a pastiche itself (pasticcio
meaning 'pulp'). The mechanical functionality of the texts mocking itself
as much as it ancestors (antecedents exploited sources). The medium of the
main character's learning being textual in essence, and removed from real
life.
Each information - however minimal - passes through the linguistic
structure aiming to formalize chaos into a bizarre order of multilayered
voice. And attention : even the rhetoric of the text is quintessential
literary.
In a word, if you have read Umberto Eco’s novels, and if you know the
Italian ancient texts – from Dante, to St Francis,The Patristica, the
Inquisition, the Vatican Enciclicas, Vico, Machiavelli, and so on and so
on, then you will be able more and less to grasp what this gropu called
the Gruppo ’93 were doing in the field of poetics as ‘children’ of the
Italian intellectual debate on the ’60 and ’70 ties, which they mocked,
with their rationalization of the situation serving to cloak the matter of
parody. Readers might think that their work is the product of each of them
as distinctive authors, but they, as authors, are not a given function of
their own texts out of the compositional melting up of voices from
everywhere.
(Uff!)

(fellows! this definition I am making here for you about the Italian
postmodernist pastiche techniquein in the poetry of the Nineties is my
own, it is nor derived from any other source, therefore I bear authorship
of this critical analysis, so if you use this material in the future, be
so kind to remember to mention me. I am going anyhow to publish it on line
on Trasference).


These poets Baino and Voce and Cepollaro where prized in the National
poetry competition the year before I got the my first prize, so I know
them closely. They were all making attempts towards this postmodernist
poetry pastiche, up to the point, at one poetry reading, I got fed up
because their group, who had started with three elements, became a group
of traveling troubadours, all writing more or less the same staff but of
course at different level of ability and inspiration. I remember I was
there in 1993 with Luperini who was the critic who supported them mostly
and I said to him: 'This is already become manneristic. Enough with this
form. I sense it has already stale." He was surprised, but lately agreed).

Kent, it is true that in our Western tradition there are antecedent of the
pastiche, see Tristam Shanti.


Well, I am exhausted, and in a few minutes four nice women poets will
arrive here at my house to reherse our communal-reading planned for this
coming Sunday at Phoenix , as part of the Womens Film Festival in Oxford:
so I better go to prepare the bottles to celebrate the evening with them
and most of all the fact that we have survived).

I am very pleased to have had this talk today,
so warm regards,
Erminia









one that encompassed a
>variety of compositional predispositions and forms, whereas with
>"pastiche" you've *seemed* to be talking about a specific form or
>sub-genre. [nota: Some Russians might give you an argument on
>the Italians "inventing" Futurism; the Italians certainly invented
>*Italian* Futurism, but the Russians always claimed their version
>was home-grown and preceded by more cutting-edge avant-garde
>work in first decade of century than existed in Italy-- Khlebnikov, for
>example was writing very futuristic stuff before 1909. And,
>incidentally, I believe the Russian artists Komar and Melamid were
>practicing this technique with a vengeance before the poets you
>mention.]
>
>But I say that "with 'pastiche' you've *seemed* to be talking about a
>specific form or sub-genre," because I'm not entirely sure that
>you've made clear what the topical parameters are in your
>argument. You keep insisting on Eco as the original inventor (you
>have mentioned both The Name of the Rose and Foucault's
>Pendulum). But it's here that things get confused, because, and as
>I said before, it's obviously not the case that either one of those
>novels is composed *entirely* via pastiche, and that the technique
>of appropriation, quotation, and collage is just that-- a *technique*,
>not a "form," and this technique is nothing new. So partly for this
>reason I've questioned the accuracy and motivation of assigning
>Italian postmodern "origin" to a compostional strategy that is well-
>known as a hallmark of early poetic modernism, not to mention
>much earlier examples.
>
>Finally, since for you the enactment of individual composition
>seems key to the generic definiton of the pastiche "form," let me
>say that the renga is *usually* a collaborative form, but that there are
>also many examples of solo-renga. In some of these, pastiche, via
>paraphrase and quotation, is freely used, from the 15th century
>master Sogi up through the more radical and cross-generic
>collages of poets of the OARS group in the 70's and 80's. No doubt
>there are other non-western examples of pastiche in poetry. So
>again, I think it's somewhat innacurate, in this case, at least, to
>wave national banners over a particular "technique."
>
>Kent
>
>**
>
>Erminia said,
>
>>>>Dear Kent,
>
> you seem to resent that Italians of the Gruppo '(£ along with Eco
>invented
>
> the pastiche, but I am 10-0 per cent sure that you do not resent or
>negate
> or confront the fact that the Italian Futurists invented Futurism, and
>you
> surely do not resent the fact that the Commedia dell'Arte was an
>Italian
> theatre convention: you surely do not oppose the fact that the
>sonnet was
> an Italian form, and so on...
> Is your resistance a political one? If yes, I deeply respect it.
> Or is because we all need somewhat 20 years before
>acknowledging fashions,
> modes, heroes and myths?
> You and Alison are trying to pull your cords in the hope to derail
>the
> official description of where and what and who made the first
>attempt at
> postmodernist poetry of pastiche: which if you want I could here
>describe
> and which is not collaborative poetry, or simple quotational poetry
> (although quotation is at its very core). It is a form that springs out
> from such a complex network of influences, philosophical in fact,
>and
> anthropological (since the importance of Backtin in this field in Italy
> has been enormous, so that you could not enter any literature
>class
> without knowing how to quote Backtin theory of the Carnival and
>the
> plurivocity by heart.
> But , well, why am I trying to convince you? For what?
> If you wish to negate the Italian origin of postmodernist pastiche,
>then I
> expect next you will negate the fact that surrealism was originated
>in
> France (and maybe find out that Breton had copied its Manifesto
>from some
> other author), and you might say that Baroque was infact an
>invention of
> the Chinese, as much as the spaghetti (which of course it is true).
> I have to go: my job of a cab-woman starts now, at 12.00.
>
> Regardissimi,
>
> Erminia
>
>
>
>
>------- End of forwarded message -------