Adele Bardazzi: I thought of starting this interview by taking a metaphor that is at the heart of your last collection, Filamenti [Filaments], published by Einaudi in 2020. The ‘filament’ is an organic, biological and, finally, poetic fibre that binds the work of excavation into language and its fundamental interactions between body and mind, material and immaterial, personal and literary. I will now try to re-use this ‘filament’ that energises all poetry to track down several constants that run through your work starting from the first collections. In particular, I’d like to start by reading some lines from your second book, entitled Uova [Egg] and published in 1999. ‘I have written about myself in another language / and dreamed doubled / thought in a different way’. Re-reading these lines, it seems to me that they contain summarised ideas about your approach to poetry. The elements that will return in successive collections are already there: otherness and language.
Elisa Biagini: I think that the text you refer to is one I wrote following my move to the United States to obtain a doctorate. Clearly, that poetry refers in a very literal way to the journey I made between Florence, Paris and New York. That move became a real experience, tangible, and I have tried, as one always does in poetry, to make a metaphorical leap to suggest ideas about identity. This move no doubt implies a relationship with language that I was already experiencing then, more so in the constant immersion within another language, one that I continue to experience thanks to my work teaching English which allows me to speak about poetry in another language.
I have always found the chance to have two languages to be a very powerful enrichment and have never experienced it as a condition in which one language takes something away from the other or substitutes it. For me, seeing how one can address the same theme with a culturally diverse linguistic patrimony has been very interesting, somehow making the most of this constant co-presence. I’m aware of the importance daily life has in the practice of writing: it is a complete openness to things. It’s obvious that this openness presupposes a risk of harm as well, at times difficulties in communication, the inability to explain some of the language’s nuances. Nonetheless, I am deeply convinced that this is a risk that whoever fully occupies themselves with poetry must run.
When I started writing during this period, when I was using English eighty percent of the time, it allowed me to experiment with forms that were far from the Italian poetic tradition, trying to cultivate an aesthetic approach that might be nourished by this distance and making it an opportunity for enrichment, for translation.
AB: I’d like to ask you to dwell for a moment on that aspect of translation: how does the work of translation – or self-translation – enter your poetic practice?
EB: I learn an enormous amount when I work with my translators in English. I rarely self-translate because I’m very interested to see what others working in this practice of constant translation do. Now, for example, a new book of mine is coming out in translation and it is interesting to revisit earlier books, which have been closed for years, thanks to an exchange with a translator: turning back to see the work again, understanding it with them, in some way returning in one’s own footsteps. Through translation, I understand a lot about my language of origin; in a way I retrieve and revitalise it.
AB: I find this aspect of exchange very interesting, above all in relation to the theme of the double: what value does this theme have in your poetry? How does the mechanism of doubling link with the age-old question of the identity of the lyric subject?
EB: I have never put that question to myself directly. Now that you make me think about it, I’ll also refer to more recent collections where I make people speak who I believe to be my relatives: in Filamenti the figure of my grandmother takes on the same role in poetry as Mary Shelley and Nikola Tesla. Because we’ve spent time together for so long, this collection is now for me a true, real family.
I give them a voice, following the logic of recovering what’s lost, another act of translation of what lies hidden between the lines, inventing Mary Shelley’s own diary or Tesla’s poetry. This is still a way of ensuring a dialogue with more voices, an exercise in listening – it is never writing ‘in the manner of’, or an attempt to enter the voice of those days. Above all I’m interested in the stories, but the voice is mine, it is always absolutely mine.
AB: Many of the voices speaking in your poetry are women’s voices: would you say a gender characteristic exists in the poetic voice? Is there a link between language and gender in poetry? Do you think there is a stylistic difference between men’s and women’s writing?
EB: I don’t believe in these categories. I think there is good and bad poetry, what in poetry makes you think, reflect, go beyond what is on the page and then leads to a discussion about ourselves, our relationship to things. A poem that is certainly not consolatory. In Italy there has always been the following discourse at the critical level: in this country there is poetry and women’s poetry. Consequently, women have to speak about child-rearing, the body, limit themselves to certain themes often interpreted using old categories that clearly make some literary critics comfortable. Those unfortunately continue to be a majority, men infected by a good dose of misogyny. I don’t think there is any honest intellectual research which is coherent, carried out seriously, with the female voice at its centre as its only keystone. In my case, I’m very happy to give a voice to Paul Celan and Nikola Tesla, two very different poets, and that Emily Dickinson lives on the page together with my grandparents.
A woman of my generation hoped and thought that certain things might be overcome, it would need work at so many levels, a debate to establish how particular authors, not only women, are explained. That’s why we are, in fact, speaking about a more profound discussion, or rather how poetry is taught. You only have to consider the bias at the academic level in recommendations for which male and female authors are ‘canonised’ or ‘canonisable’. First, one needs to work on re-education, including various institutions that are involved in the means to access poetry: from school to university, through the editing and publishing of literary journals.
AB: You referred to the fact that you give voice to a poet like Paul Celan in your collection Da una crepa [From a crack]. That reminds me of another device you often use and that involves in some way another aspect of this poetic act of ‘giving a voice’, of this dialogue that vitalises your poetry: ‘The one who speaks the truth speaks shade’, reads a line taken from ‘Giving water to the plant of dreaming (dialogo con Paul Celan)’ [conversation with Paul Celan]. What role does absence, the dialogue with the dead, play in this and other collections of yours? What role does a discussion about ‘shades’ play in your poetry?
EB: In this line, we see the term ‘shade’ but for me that line of Celan’s clearly refers to the theme of absence. In the subject that I first developed as an installation and that then constituted an entire section of Da una crepa, this attempt at dialogue implies a discussion about the ‘shade’ not only in terms of absence but of the three-dimensional significance of the word. I’ll try to make it clearer: a poetic word that is so strong, so selected, so considered, and so truly present on the page, that it can even create ‘shades’ and have the ability to project, in some way. That’s what my Celan’s letter was meant to be, using his great lesson in which the poetic word, even at that moment when it casts this long ‘shadow’, doesn’t abandon itself to emotions, not even a negation of emotions. It consubstantiates itself as a relationship with ‘shades’ and absences of all kinds, even with its own ‘shades’ (or rather what they were and no longer are in the present), as long as there is always a part of us that we drag behind like a shadow. In my poetry, the discussion with shades is never sentimental, it never really wants to be about abandonment. This is the beauty of poetic language and of its many ‘shades’ that allow the personal dimension to be explored: then being able to effectively speak beyond time, beyond geographies. Succeeding in embracing the father in a way that is very different to Aeneas’s embrace of Anchises, with that figure who remains ‘shade’; an embrace in which the tangibility of the poetic word remains and is even able to give physical substance to these projections on the page.
AB: We have spoken a lot about the link between poetry, identity and its doublings. I suggest that we now take a step back and return to the body, and in particular the atomisation of a body seen in its single fragments and parts – it is not by accident that all your collections are crossed by metonymic chains and etymological figures.
If I think of your collection, Da una crepa, it seems to me that three principal parts emerge from your body-writing:
- the ear, where listening (‘the ear’s whirring’) seems to be the eyes of this body-poetry;
- the mouth, with which we inevitably meet voice, breathing (‘is flooded’ ‘stumbles’ ‘gets caught on’), and breath (‘a breath mended with the darkest thread’ to quote another of your lines). The mouth is related to the question of the tongue, a tongue that rolls, unrolls, trips up, all the images that recall the movement of a ‘thread’;
- and finally, hands, hands that are also writing: hands-poetry that have ‘under the nails the black of the word scratched away today’.
In the light of this, I wanted to ask you what role this metonymic chain, which you create by including ‘body-poetry’ in your poetics, plays?
EB: That is a perceptive reading, especially in relation to the hearing dimension that for me is a profoundly political dimension, not just a concrete one. One must listen to the world, listen to what is happening, listen to others, not only always be shut inside ourselves. Above all it is a biological position. My tongue wants to be one that speaks about itself and so interrogates itself about its own nature, questioning it. It is not a tongue that justifies itself, that would not work at all.
I am very interested in the discussion about hands: without doubt there is the actual manual skill and the hand-made dimension of the practice of writing, from every point of view. In the various drafts themselves, imitating this migration made from one piece of paper to another, onto the computer and then redone on paper. I really like this actual dirtying of one’s hands with graphite or ink and it is something that allows me to achieve direct contact with the tongue, with the body it originated from.
Now thinking about it again, I’d say that it certainly played a part in an experience I had with blind actresses with whom I organised two performances and who worked on my poetry, always with texts in braille. There was a theatrical context where they created a dramatisation of the text. The aspect that clearly left its mark was this seeing with hands.
The question of the fragment is also linked to this fragmentation of both body and text: it is the state that allows the dialogue to open up and be stitched again in a new way on the page together with the white, the body of the text, and the single shadows projected by these parts, these atoms of the body. And so the process of writing becomes an act of stitching designed to rebuild a whole, where my story becomes your story. Well, I believe in this a lot and again I insist on the act of listening in its political sense.
AB: Your poetic production is also accompanied by a series of installations that I’d like to call ‘textile poems’ where the textile element and the poetic word are set in dialogue. I wanted to ask you how these works relate to your poetic practice and why you have particularly chosen that textile element, a material tied to the practice and traditions of women from Penelope to Arachne, to Louise Bourgeois, also Maria Lai to name an important Italian example, where a presumed linear reading of the written word focused on the search for a unique and individual ‘meaning’ is constantly questioned.
EB: Yes, these installations I made are always born out of poetic texts. I am primarily an artist who has worked with both language and image. When I was an adolescent, there was a time when I was undecided and produced many works of this kind, smaller collages, installations with recycled objects. Then I realised that the word was stronger. The plastic arts always fulfil an ancillary function in relation to the text: first the text is born and then, secondly, depending on what we’re talking about, the installation follows. The aspect I find by far the most interesting is when performance-based installations are commissioned. I really like that approach. Now I am working, for example, with Galleria Continua who have asked me to submit an audio piece, a completely re-worked poem linked to the work of the artist Savrina Mezzaqui. She has produced a series of objects and I will intervene in the creative process with my poetic texts. That is extremely stimulating for me because it is a highly charged dialogue.
AB: It reminds me of how the presence of these objects in your work can often be linked to something female that may be a domestic space such as the kitchen or even the element of textile.
EB: In fact, I find that this is more related to the theme of childhood than the female. This desire to dig into childhood has always existed in my poetic research. Also, in my last book Filamenti, the first section is in fact recounted by my grandmother who brought me up; all the first poems speak directly about her bringing me into the world, of what we did together when I was a little girl, and her becoming more distant through language, then physically, and finally her disappearance.
Childhood is an infinite reserve of ideas, memories, melancholy, tears. The important thing is to avoid sentimentality. For that reason, I tend to relate the sphere of childhood to that of the body more than to the domestic. My poetry speaks of the complexity of existence and clearly it is a complex language. I am impelled to try to guess what falsehood is on the one hand and, on the other, which are the true, real convictions. It can also take on the role of a public diary.
AB: In relation to that, I wanted to ask you to speak a little about the relationship between poetry and personal micro-story. What is the role of a ‘diarism’ which, through a dialogue with other voices, creates a network of memories that can be shared beyond the merely individual experience?
EB: That is why writing helps us, precisely to overcome the introspective sphere of the private: so, I have my little notebook where I note down reflections, prompts, someone else’s fragment, a phrase heard in the supermarket and all the rough material in the form of personal micro-story, mine and others’. I weave it together creating a tapestry that recounts the world around me. This is where the hand-made work of the poet and, at the same time, its intellectual dimension, resides: an assumption of responsibility when speaking, even through some banal detail. I know it sounds pretentious, but this is the true purpose of my writing. What is created is a continuous approaching and moving away and approaching and moving away again, constantly working to measure space. I have written few texts that are really tied to a specific event but one can reflect on history as a concept: it is actual reality, the being here, being here together in a collective sphere. To succeed in doing this, one must have total control over the lyric and its context to ensure that one avoids a certain kind of rhetoric that hides around every corner.
AB: Speaking of this ethical, collective, pluralistic incentive, do you think that the ecological dimension of poetry might be one of the new approaches to exploring the relationship between lyric poetry and historical representation?
EB: Definitely, and something which I have tried to investigate with Antonella Anedda in a volume of essays and interviews edited by Riccardo Donati, Poesia come ossigeno [Poetry as oxygen]. It addresses this: the commitment to confrontation, intervention, responsibility in didactic terms. Through ecology we speak of nature, which for me is a mystical dimension: in the natural dimension I feel the horizontal relationship that I have with nature and animals as a continual source of education. I find this last form of dialogue fundamental to getting rid of the anthropocentrism which is so harmful in a real as well as metaphorical sense. So, ecology can allow the poet to cultivate an attitude and a new position, a way of seeing the self and others: this is certainly one of the ethical principles I adhere to when I write, or at least I try to.
Elisa Biagini: I think that the text you refer to is one I wrote following my move to the United States to obtain a doctorate. Clearly, that poetry refers in a very literal way to the journey I made between Florence, Paris and New York. That move became a real experience, tangible, and I have tried, as one always does in poetry, to make a metaphorical leap to suggest ideas about identity. This move no doubt implies a relationship with language that I was already experiencing then, more so in the constant immersion within another language, one that I continue to experience thanks to my work teaching English which allows me to speak about poetry in another language.
I have always found the chance to have two languages to be a very powerful enrichment and have never experienced it as a condition in which one language takes something away from the other or substitutes it. For me, seeing how one can address the same theme with a culturally diverse linguistic patrimony has been very interesting, somehow making the most of this constant co-presence. I’m aware of the importance daily life has in the practice of writing: it is a complete openness to things. It’s obvious that this openness presupposes a risk of harm as well, at times difficulties in communication, the inability to explain some of the language’s nuances. Nonetheless, I am deeply convinced that this is a risk that whoever fully occupies themselves with poetry must run.
When I started writing during this period, when I was using English eighty percent of the time, it allowed me to experiment with forms that were far from the Italian poetic tradition, trying to cultivate an aesthetic approach that might be nourished by this distance and making it an opportunity for enrichment, for translation.
AB: I’d like to ask you to dwell for a moment on that aspect of translation: how does the work of translation – or self-translation – enter your poetic practice?
EB: I learn an enormous amount when I work with my translators in English. I rarely self-translate because I’m very interested to see what others working in this practice of constant translation do. Now, for example, a new book of mine is coming out in translation and it is interesting to revisit earlier books, which have been closed for years, thanks to an exchange with a translator: turning back to see the work again, understanding it with them, in some way returning in one’s own footsteps. Through translation, I understand a lot about my language of origin; in a way I retrieve and revitalise it.
AB: I find this aspect of exchange very interesting, above all in relation to the theme of the double: what value does this theme have in your poetry? How does the mechanism of doubling link with the age-old question of the identity of the lyric subject?
EB: I have never put that question to myself directly. Now that you make me think about it, I’ll also refer to more recent collections where I make people speak who I believe to be my relatives: in Filamenti the figure of my grandmother takes on the same role in poetry as Mary Shelley and Nikola Tesla. Because we’ve spent time together for so long, this collection is now for me a true, real family.
I give them a voice, following the logic of recovering what’s lost, another act of translation of what lies hidden between the lines, inventing Mary Shelley’s own diary or Tesla’s poetry. This is still a way of ensuring a dialogue with more voices, an exercise in listening – it is never writing ‘in the manner of’, or an attempt to enter the voice of those days. Above all I’m interested in the stories, but the voice is mine, it is always absolutely mine.
AB: Many of the voices speaking in your poetry are women’s voices: would you say a gender characteristic exists in the poetic voice? Is there a link between language and gender in poetry? Do you think there is a stylistic difference between men’s and women’s writing?
EB: I don’t believe in these categories. I think there is good and bad poetry, what in poetry makes you think, reflect, go beyond what is on the page and then leads to a discussion about ourselves, our relationship to things. A poem that is certainly not consolatory. In Italy there has always been the following discourse at the critical level: in this country there is poetry and women’s poetry. Consequently, women have to speak about child-rearing, the body, limit themselves to certain themes often interpreted using old categories that clearly make some literary critics comfortable. Those unfortunately continue to be a majority, men infected by a good dose of misogyny. I don’t think there is any honest intellectual research which is coherent, carried out seriously, with the female voice at its centre as its only keystone. In my case, I’m very happy to give a voice to Paul Celan and Nikola Tesla, two very different poets, and that Emily Dickinson lives on the page together with my grandparents.
A woman of my generation hoped and thought that certain things might be overcome, it would need work at so many levels, a debate to establish how particular authors, not only women, are explained. That’s why we are, in fact, speaking about a more profound discussion, or rather how poetry is taught. You only have to consider the bias at the academic level in recommendations for which male and female authors are ‘canonised’ or ‘canonisable’. First, one needs to work on re-education, including various institutions that are involved in the means to access poetry: from school to university, through the editing and publishing of literary journals.
AB: You referred to the fact that you give voice to a poet like Paul Celan in your collection Da una crepa [From a crack]. That reminds me of another device you often use and that involves in some way another aspect of this poetic act of ‘giving a voice’, of this dialogue that vitalises your poetry: ‘The one who speaks the truth speaks shade’, reads a line taken from ‘Giving water to the plant of dreaming (dialogo con Paul Celan)’ [conversation with Paul Celan]. What role does absence, the dialogue with the dead, play in this and other collections of yours? What role does a discussion about ‘shades’ play in your poetry?
EB: In this line, we see the term ‘shade’ but for me that line of Celan’s clearly refers to the theme of absence. In the subject that I first developed as an installation and that then constituted an entire section of Da una crepa, this attempt at dialogue implies a discussion about the ‘shade’ not only in terms of absence but of the three-dimensional significance of the word. I’ll try to make it clearer: a poetic word that is so strong, so selected, so considered, and so truly present on the page, that it can even create ‘shades’ and have the ability to project, in some way. That’s what my Celan’s letter was meant to be, using his great lesson in which the poetic word, even at that moment when it casts this long ‘shadow’, doesn’t abandon itself to emotions, not even a negation of emotions. It consubstantiates itself as a relationship with ‘shades’ and absences of all kinds, even with its own ‘shades’ (or rather what they were and no longer are in the present), as long as there is always a part of us that we drag behind like a shadow. In my poetry, the discussion with shades is never sentimental, it never really wants to be about abandonment. This is the beauty of poetic language and of its many ‘shades’ that allow the personal dimension to be explored: then being able to effectively speak beyond time, beyond geographies. Succeeding in embracing the father in a way that is very different to Aeneas’s embrace of Anchises, with that figure who remains ‘shade’; an embrace in which the tangibility of the poetic word remains and is even able to give physical substance to these projections on the page.
AB: We have spoken a lot about the link between poetry, identity and its doublings. I suggest that we now take a step back and return to the body, and in particular the atomisation of a body seen in its single fragments and parts – it is not by accident that all your collections are crossed by metonymic chains and etymological figures.
If I think of your collection, Da una crepa, it seems to me that three principal parts emerge from your body-writing:
- the ear, where listening (‘the ear’s whirring’) seems to be the eyes of this body-poetry;
- the mouth, with which we inevitably meet voice, breathing (‘is flooded’ ‘stumbles’ ‘gets caught on’), and breath (‘a breath mended with the darkest thread’ to quote another of your lines). The mouth is related to the question of the tongue, a tongue that rolls, unrolls, trips up, all the images that recall the movement of a ‘thread’;
- and finally, hands, hands that are also writing: hands-poetry that have ‘under the nails the black of the word scratched away today’.
In the light of this, I wanted to ask you what role this metonymic chain, which you create by including ‘body-poetry’ in your poetics, plays?
EB: That is a perceptive reading, especially in relation to the hearing dimension that for me is a profoundly political dimension, not just a concrete one. One must listen to the world, listen to what is happening, listen to others, not only always be shut inside ourselves. Above all it is a biological position. My tongue wants to be one that speaks about itself and so interrogates itself about its own nature, questioning it. It is not a tongue that justifies itself, that would not work at all.
I am very interested in the discussion about hands: without doubt there is the actual manual skill and the hand-made dimension of the practice of writing, from every point of view. In the various drafts themselves, imitating this migration made from one piece of paper to another, onto the computer and then redone on paper. I really like this actual dirtying of one’s hands with graphite or ink and it is something that allows me to achieve direct contact with the tongue, with the body it originated from.
Now thinking about it again, I’d say that it certainly played a part in an experience I had with blind actresses with whom I organised two performances and who worked on my poetry, always with texts in braille. There was a theatrical context where they created a dramatisation of the text. The aspect that clearly left its mark was this seeing with hands.
The question of the fragment is also linked to this fragmentation of both body and text: it is the state that allows the dialogue to open up and be stitched again in a new way on the page together with the white, the body of the text, and the single shadows projected by these parts, these atoms of the body. And so the process of writing becomes an act of stitching designed to rebuild a whole, where my story becomes your story. Well, I believe in this a lot and again I insist on the act of listening in its political sense.
AB: Your poetic production is also accompanied by a series of installations that I’d like to call ‘textile poems’ where the textile element and the poetic word are set in dialogue. I wanted to ask you how these works relate to your poetic practice and why you have particularly chosen that textile element, a material tied to the practice and traditions of women from Penelope to Arachne, to Louise Bourgeois, also Maria Lai to name an important Italian example, where a presumed linear reading of the written word focused on the search for a unique and individual ‘meaning’ is constantly questioned.
EB: Yes, these installations I made are always born out of poetic texts. I am primarily an artist who has worked with both language and image. When I was an adolescent, there was a time when I was undecided and produced many works of this kind, smaller collages, installations with recycled objects. Then I realised that the word was stronger. The plastic arts always fulfil an ancillary function in relation to the text: first the text is born and then, secondly, depending on what we’re talking about, the installation follows. The aspect I find by far the most interesting is when performance-based installations are commissioned. I really like that approach. Now I am working, for example, with Galleria Continua who have asked me to submit an audio piece, a completely re-worked poem linked to the work of the artist Savrina Mezzaqui. She has produced a series of objects and I will intervene in the creative process with my poetic texts. That is extremely stimulating for me because it is a highly charged dialogue.
AB: It reminds me of how the presence of these objects in your work can often be linked to something female that may be a domestic space such as the kitchen or even the element of textile.
EB: In fact, I find that this is more related to the theme of childhood than the female. This desire to dig into childhood has always existed in my poetic research. Also, in my last book Filamenti, the first section is in fact recounted by my grandmother who brought me up; all the first poems speak directly about her bringing me into the world, of what we did together when I was a little girl, and her becoming more distant through language, then physically, and finally her disappearance.
Childhood is an infinite reserve of ideas, memories, melancholy, tears. The important thing is to avoid sentimentality. For that reason, I tend to relate the sphere of childhood to that of the body more than to the domestic. My poetry speaks of the complexity of existence and clearly it is a complex language. I am impelled to try to guess what falsehood is on the one hand and, on the other, which are the true, real convictions. It can also take on the role of a public diary.
AB: In relation to that, I wanted to ask you to speak a little about the relationship between poetry and personal micro-story. What is the role of a ‘diarism’ which, through a dialogue with other voices, creates a network of memories that can be shared beyond the merely individual experience?
EB: That is why writing helps us, precisely to overcome the introspective sphere of the private: so, I have my little notebook where I note down reflections, prompts, someone else’s fragment, a phrase heard in the supermarket and all the rough material in the form of personal micro-story, mine and others’. I weave it together creating a tapestry that recounts the world around me. This is where the hand-made work of the poet and, at the same time, its intellectual dimension, resides: an assumption of responsibility when speaking, even through some banal detail. I know it sounds pretentious, but this is the true purpose of my writing. What is created is a continuous approaching and moving away and approaching and moving away again, constantly working to measure space. I have written few texts that are really tied to a specific event but one can reflect on history as a concept: it is actual reality, the being here, being here together in a collective sphere. To succeed in doing this, one must have total control over the lyric and its context to ensure that one avoids a certain kind of rhetoric that hides around every corner.
AB: Speaking of this ethical, collective, pluralistic incentive, do you think that the ecological dimension of poetry might be one of the new approaches to exploring the relationship between lyric poetry and historical representation?
EB: Definitely, and something which I have tried to investigate with Antonella Anedda in a volume of essays and interviews edited by Riccardo Donati, Poesia come ossigeno [Poetry as oxygen]. It addresses this: the commitment to confrontation, intervention, responsibility in didactic terms. Through ecology we speak of nature, which for me is a mystical dimension: in the natural dimension I feel the horizontal relationship that I have with nature and animals as a continual source of education. I find this last form of dialogue fundamental to getting rid of the anthropocentrism which is so harmful in a real as well as metaphorical sense. So, ecology can allow the poet to cultivate an attitude and a new position, a way of seeing the self and others: this is certainly one of the ethical principles I adhere to when I write, or at least I try to.
The original interview is part of the Non solo muse project co-ordinated by Adele Bardazzi and Roberto Binetti and funded by the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford. The project examines and problematises the notion of women’s writing within the Italian poetic context by interviewing more than fifteen poets, among whom are Maddalena Bergamin, Elisa Biagini, Maria Borio, Maria Grazia Calandrone, Giovanna Frene, Carmen Gallo, Mariangela Gualtieri, Franca Mancinelli, Dacia Maraini, Giulia Martini, Laura Pugno, Francesca Santucci, Gabriella Sica, and Sara Ventroni.
All interviews were recorded during Summer 2021. The material will also be collected in a forthcoming book represented by the literary agency Curtis Brown.
All interviews were recorded during Summer 2021. The material will also be collected in a forthcoming book represented by the literary agency Curtis Brown.
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Elisa Biagini has published several poetry collections such as L’Ospite (Einaudi, 2004), Fiato. parole per musica (D’If, 2006), Nel Bosco (Einaudi, 2007), The guest in the wood (Chelsea editions, 2013, 2014 Best Translated Book Award), Da una crepa (Einaudi, 2014), The Plant of Dreaming (Xenos books, 2017), Depuis une fissure (Cadastre8zero, 2018; Prix Nunc 2018), Filamenti (Einaudi, 2020), Filaments (Le Taillis Pré, 2022) and TRÅDAR (Bökforlaget Edda 2023). Her poems have been translated into fifteen languages and she has translated several contemporary American poets for reviews, anthologies, and complete collections (Nuovi Poeti Americani, Einaudi, 2006) as well as a selection of Paul Celan’s poems. She teaches Writing at NYU Florence and is the artistic director of the international poetry festival Voci Lontane, Voci Sorelle.
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Adele Bardazzi works on issues of form and interpretation, poetry and poetics, lyric theory, gender and women’s studies, verbal-visual glitches. She joined the University of Utrecht as Assistant Professor in September 2023 and is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford since September 2021. She has also been awarded various visiting fellowships, among which at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Groningen, University of Southern California, New York University, University of Toronto, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3.
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Roberto Binetti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, where he is working on his fourth monograph Italian Poetry in the Age of Nuclear Anxiety. Binetti’s research has been featured in leading journals such as Italica, Studi Novecenteschi, Ticontre, and the Journal of World Literature. His publications include the monographs Poetics of Becoming: On Italian Women’s Poetry (Peter Lang, 2023), La domanda dell’inconscio: Linguaggio e vita interiore nella poesia di Andrea Zanzotto e Amelia Rosselli (Mimesis, 2024), and Anne Carson. Letteratura liquida (Mimesis, 2024).
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