Thank you very much Kent for having singled out my
point about the self as the narrator and the self as
the author. I think my point emerges from my personal
experience of being one among many and the
predominance of other people's narratives over my own:
of course I have written a relevant number of personal
poems in the sense that they relate to people and
events that were closely mien: but, after all, those
people and events, with the passing of the time, also
transferred themselves to other spaces and times, so
that the same person - for instance - I had loved and
gone on holiday to Capri with - was lately loved and
went to Capri with another woman: well this makes me
feel I am` not so different from that other woman so
when I speak about my personal feeling of that love
and that going to Capri I always remind myself that
experience was in fact not unique, but shares, and I
better write about it also open to the possible
feelings that the other woman had...and this is of
course only an example...)So, lyric poetry> Can it
ever be the lyricism of one person only?
Ciao, Erminia
--- KENT JOHNSON
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Erminia, what you say below is very interesting. I
> do wonder,
> though, why, in such poetic circumstances, you would
> stamp
> these emergent other voices with the legal
> denomination of your
> empirical person? Have you ever considered seeing
> what might
> happen if, as Pessoa did, for example, you treated
> them as actual
> authors, with public authority *of* and
> responsibility *for* their
> voices? There might be other, further, openings into
> unsuspected
> regions-- in other words, these voices might have
> more to say, and
> more surprising ways of saying, if not framed as
> conventional
> Browningesque personae.
>
> Kent
>
> **
>
> Erminia said:
>
> I say this to help limit a too close identification
> of these personas
> which I let speak through my poems with me, as the
> author. I
> sometimes
> even assume a masculine gender, or enter a
> character of an age
> dramatically distant from mine, referring
> psychological and
> physiological
> states and events which are intended to be utterly
> alien from what I
> normally experience. I guess I have found this mode
> to step out of
> that 'self' that is supposed to be my major
> concern, as a poet,
> and,
> consequently, relate about other people’s feelings.
> The fact is that
> most
> often, in my view, other people's feeling are
> closer to our own than
> we
> wish to see. This is why the title of my first
> collection was Noi-Altri
> (We-Others).
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