De Palchi, Alfredo, Paradigm: New and Selected Poems 1947-2009, ed. John Taylor, New York: Chelsea Editions. 2013.
ISBN 978-0-9884787-1-8
Review by Stephen Massimilla
Paradigm: New and Selected Poems is the most comprehensive single collection to date of the original, provocative, and uncompromising poetic oeuvre of Alfredo de Palchi. As one of the trustees of the Sonia Raiziss-Giop foundation, De Palchi has done a great deal to support and promote poetry in translation in the United States. He founded the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award at the Academy of American Poets; and he provided funding for the Bordighera Poetry Prize, for bilingual book publication, at CUNY. De Palchi was also the long-time Editor-in-Chief of Chelsea magazine; and, with Sonia Raiziss, he has been an accomplished pioneer translator of such Italian poets as Eugenio Montale. Paradigm comprises selections from all of the author’s major volumes, as well as new poems, in the original Italian complete with en face translations by six accomplished poet-translators. The book also includes an extensive bibliography of critical works on the poet.
This volume showcases the poet’s various styles, ranging from the dark and curt to the somewhat more prosy or plain-spoken. The work is generally—for all its frequently frank, hard-edged anti-lyricism—also mysterious, rhythmical, and emotionally rich. Although De Palchi is not a narrative poet, his poems often fit together in long sequences that recount stories.
Whole cycles are at times delineated in a few turns of phrase. (I will quote from the English translations, though it is important to look at the Italian, which is generally more lyrical than the translations, to get a better sense of the original music.) In a world “boiling with seed” (71), birth itself is represented from the start as an affliction that engenders the trials of life—possibilities, sufferings, the struggle for self-preservation: “The first cause / engrafts the nebulous aorta / and quickens consciousness / with the abject drop that splits / the egg / starting the womb / fit for affliction” (5). And the related “black / sunflower seed” evoked on the next page simultaneously signifies the urgency involved in writing, in reading back into the embryonic past “behind / the unconscious,” only to face the advancing “nebulae” of uncertainty and inquietude (7).
This early sequence was written while the poet was incarcerated; and the darkness surrounding the “nebulae” reflects the historical context in which de Palchi came of age. His work is not only haunted by wartime atrocities—he refers a bit later to “El Duce’s camps” (75) and “Gesthemanes where an entire people are ground to ash” (79)— but also to his own experience as a political prisoner in Italy. The poet was himself tortured in his youth by the Fascists and later by the Communists—background information that sheds a poignant light on his cryptically spartan realism.
Among the selections from Sessions with My Analyst, the poet speaks of scratching on stone, digging inward to extract inspiration despite and through his unjust confinement: “I don’t know how, where in my geologic age, / to begin, to extract the magma: / impossible to communicate / the twisted inconclusive gibberish, / a thicket alive with snakes” (83). In this sequence, the often-repeated word “difficult” describes communication as much as survival. The Modernist theme of “non-communication” (115) as inseparable from the truth is central to all these “sessions.” Even beyond any literal prison, reality and human relations themselves involve entrapment. It is in this light that, in the title poem of the preceding collection, De Palchi’s speaker freed the trapped moth beating against the window pane, only to insist, “I persist in doing the scorpion’s / dark dance” (The Scorpion’s Dark Dance, 11). That “dance” is the dark art of the poet in search of the truth. And as De Palchi much more recently emphasized in an interview, “I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but there is not one false word in my poems” (Panella, Giuseppe, The Poetry of Alfredo de Palchi: An Interview and Three Essays, trans. Jeremy Allen, New York: Chelsea Editions. 2013. p 53).
That assertion of honesty can recall a political context—“because I told the truth I was beaten, / forced to silence by fascists / then tortured by partisans” (99)—but it also underscores De Palchi’s commitment to speaking, spitting out what is most essential. This fierce aesthetic serves as a bitter tonic to the inauthentic soppiness of many a pointlessly popular poem. Thirty pages later, we are told with regard to communicating “openness / to the love of mankind” that “I shun every request, any effusiveness” (131). Instead, the poet generally favors a poetics of reticence and interruption involving a network of hyphens, caesuras, commas, periods, spaces, and elisions: an intense hermeticism that is at times—as in the sections of the poem “Hamletic Fungus”—almost haiku-like (256). And like Emily Dickinson, De Palchi never includes titles with his poems.
It is fitting that so many of these laconic but ironic and sardonically outspoken pieces should be populated by snakes, spiders, worms, maggots, microbes, bacteria, moths, rats, and scorpions. Even in the earliest work, we inhabit a world “of trees swallowed whole by / the concrete spider / and the festering blister of night” (37). Elsewhere, as in Addictive Aversions, we encounter creaturely evocations of frank eroticism: “my sex lurks, / an obsessed rat” (193). And even very recent poems addressed to those who may lie in “a worm-thick mucilage” include allusions to the Christian mythos that nevertheless defy the sanctimonies of religion: “the visions of too many a mother of Christ / in your cell/ can’t save you….” (517). Spurning platitudinous notions of beauty, De Palchi insists on unsentimental expressions of anguish, sexuality, and anger, as well as on rapt, unadorned observation.
Indeed, he is a devotee of indifferent natural and scientific processes, even “plankton that entangles me in the abyss” (83). It is in this light that the poetry of Anonymous Constellation describes a harsh, humbling “begetting devouring” universe of dust to dust: “Everywhere dust on all things on all of us dust” (157). In Sessions with My Analyst, we are told that “I love technical knowledge that is / speechless” (141). This realm could be said to include everything from “the anthill that forms a solemn cathedral” (67) to the “voracious insects” of De Palchi’s most recent collection (429). As in the eyes of the astronomer, the geologist, and the biologist, impersonal nature will of course win out in the end—as in the beginning. In one poem, the speaker even asserts, “I spit on my own origin where the cormorants sweep by me on the primeval banks” (101).
In the later erotic sequence entitled Carnal Essence, a different speaker returns to the “originary water” (321) of creation, descending into the chaos of the germinative unconscious, with the “serpent” as a figure of rebirth. In fact, the poet has sowed “fecund…ground” for this realm of “carnal religion” (327) by much earlier establishing that “any snake egg” contains the embryonic proto-form of a person, and that the storm in the serpent’s eye holds “the paradigm” of the human capacity for creation and regeneration (275). It is in light of this at once scientific and outrageously pagan, almost Pharaonic metaphor for the imaginative process that we can view the persona that one poem presents as “the diabolical priest who irks / and burns old age” (283) in a context that points all the way back to the “primeval banks” and the “black seed” of origin with which this review began. Indeed, in a related recent poem, the thorn-throated, mock-Christ figure that “withdraws into the ditch” is restored as “the purely green fossil / that I am at the dawn /of the other light” (347).
Productively yoking many contrastive tendencies, this entire volume, which samples the poet’s vast and varied production, amply demonstrates a lifelong dedication to gritty lyricism, forthright reticence, scientific inspiration, visceral imaginativeness, and ultimate originality—a vividly unsentimental paradigm of beauty and truth.
Leave a Reply