This paper presents my close reading of some of the writing of Giulia Niccolai, raising some fundamental aesthetic and epistemological issues that are significant within the broader context of a poetics of the avant garde. Spanning European and American practice and theory, these can only be touched upon in this context. I place Niccolai and her cohort (e.g. Emilio Villa, Adriano Spatola, Luciano Caruso) as bridging figures "between the historical and contemporary avant gardes." [Paul Vangelisti, preface to Foresta Ultra Naturam p.5]
In 1975 a bilingual edition of Giulia Niccolai's poetry was published by Red Hill Press under the title Substitution (Sostituzione.) The first section of the book, Dai Novissimi, consists of a set of poems she "constructed" in 1970 using phrases culled from a critical essay by Alfredo Giuliani in the 1961 anthology I Novissimi.1 It was from I Novissimi, Paul Vangelisti has written, that "the Italian neo-Avant garde took off."
"Avant garde" poetic practice is in effect, a sub-set of modernism that has been represented in the form of a slender triangle like the top of a tall pyramid. Its original provenance is the military concept of a small force sent ahead to open a front for troops. Suppose we transform the metaphor applied to this shape? I'd like to propose that an avant garde functions for literature or art the way mystical sects 2 function for world religions: to revitalize their traditions from within (occasionally initiating new ones.) We can view the avant garde as a splinter sect of modernism. In some ways extending existing aesthetics and in other ways radically challenging their basis or effectively breaking with them.
One of the fundamental consequences of modernist practices was the blurring or critical repositioning of formal boundaries between genres and ultimately between media themselves. Michael Davidson, reminding us that modernism was not as abrupt a rupture with tradition as it may have seemed, argues that this boundary blurring can be seen as an extension of the "pervasive romantic skepticism over questions of formal categories" [Post-Modern Genres, p.77] The softening of rigid categorical boundaries yields work in which process is privileged over product. Because such procedural operations are often "more readily identifiable in the world of painting and sculpture than in poetry," as Roger Cardinal wrote in his essay "Enigma", many examples in this paper come from the visual arts. (20th Century Studies p.33-44)
As the 19th century became the 20th, it was in painting where the impulse common to avant garde practices was most visible. Painters deliberately privileged process over product by aggressively attempting to involve viewers in noticing how they were looking at paintings and how that "looking" was produced. As Cardinal suggests, this constituted a "stage [of art] in which surface is preferred to depth." A few writers, of course, were involved in this very early on, but they remained culturally marginal. The prime exemplar of this is Gertrude Stein, whose work was for a long time most often discussed in relation to cubist visual practices. In Stein's writing, as Michael Davidson suggests, "the question is not what she means but how." [TLB]
An ongoing branch of the avant garde -- including dada, surrealism, lettreism, text-sound poetry, visual poetry, and other practices -- has been devoted to experiments on the boundary between the linguistic and the graphic, the oral and the musical, the written and drawn, and so on. In literature, a parallel convergence (e.g. of critical and poetic impulses) has taken place; this has been more visible in Europe due perhaps to a greater regard there for the theoretical bases of artistic practices. However, the leakage over traditional divides between lyrical and expository modes of discourse is an ongoing tendency in both Europe and the U.S. 3 This is seen in a widespread activity of cross-reception in which criticism is read as if it were poetry and poetry scrutinized like a critical text. A recent example is Garret Caples comment on Barbara Guest's Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature commented that "Rocks does not so much explicate a poetics as embody one." 4 (We'll see another example presently in relation to one reading of the writing of Marjorie Perloff.)
In this spirit, the neo-avant garde was an attempt, in Paul Vangelisti's phrase, "to involve poetry in its own maneuvers." Texts that reflect and comment on their own purpose in effect invite the reader to an epistemological rather than ontological engagement. This is the basis of Giulia Niccolai's work.
"Scattering fragments and clippings
In a sort of slow dissolve
It collides with the framework of the text
(a result of its own process)"
"Seminando frantumi e ritagli
In una specie di dissolvenza incrociata
Investe la membrature del testo
(oggetto della propria operazione.)"
from "Sintattico e verbale"
Niccolai explains that her aim is to "[allow] the reader to experience the same sort of excitement one has in reading a philosophical text." Note how closely this corresponds in intention to William Empson's notion of "ambiguities" as a procedure via which a variety of meanings is permitted to be generated by the reader. Foregrounding the relation of the poet with the methods and devices of production, Niccolai has characterized this as a search for a dynamic or an "internal tension" that language possesses; an energy that can be wrought as art by the poet. One way of achieving this is to momentarily un-yoke language from the usual burden of specific referentiality it bears so that:
"It becomes simple again
The result and function of the difficult:
It is not born from an assumption of fact
But from encountering an effect"
"ridiventa semplice
come risultato e funzione del complesso:
non nasce dall'assunzione di un fatto
ma dalla costruzione di un effetto."
from "Risultato e funzione del complesso"
Niccolai, who grew up in Italy with an American mother, is fluently bilingual. She co-translated, with Paul Vangelisti, the poems of Substitution. This and many other collaborations under the auspices of Vangelisti and John McBride's Red Hill Press opened a unique and valuable channel of communication between Italy and the U.S. The activities of Red Hill included the periodical Invisible City and many chapbooks and anthologies during the period 1970 to 1990. Red Hill Press was to my knowledge one of the few projects that truly enacted a direct connection between European and American poetic practices during that period.
One of the broader issues this subject raises is why there seems to have been such a dis-connection between the American and European "avant garde" -- at least in terms of identification and theory (in practice, many poets were, in my opinion, enacting a kind of neo-surrealism in their poetry of the 1970s, particularly on the west coast. )
American critic and scholar Marjorie Perloff most explicitly addresses and perhaps embodies the blurring of boundaries between genres and between media themselves as a fundamental aspect of modernism. David Zauhar recently observed that "The writings of a critic like Perloff … are more interesting when treated like extended essays which are trying to do something, rather than just say something. 5 In other words, Zauhar is suggesting that Perloff's work can be better understood if it is read the way she reads poetry -- as an enactment in language of a particular aesthetic and ideological stance in which the question of how language is employed matters more than 'what is being said.' Perloff's book, The Poetics of Indeterminacy is sub-titled From Rimbaud to Cage -- that is, from a French 19th century poet to an American 20th century composer -- emphasizing both the continuity between European and American avant garde practices, and an interpenetration or easy conversion between media.
In Poem # 6 of dai novissimi Niccolai takes us squarely to the question of process and production by addressing and describing both the poet's activity-of and relation-to
production of the text and the reader or listener's role as generator of possible meanings for the text:
"Raccogliere un corona o una linea
Guardando da un determinato punto di vista"
"to gather a wreath or a line
gazing from a determined stance"
and
"le cose che manovriamo.
Siamo manovrati
Certamente in relazione
Con qualcosa che si vuol trovare"
“The things that we steer
We are steered by
In relation certainly
To something we wish to find."
Not only is the syntactical relation between these phrases ambiguous -- the last phrase of one sentence seemingly also an alternate beginning for the next -- but, for the reader who is even slightly Italian-English bilingual, there is also room for tremendous play in the translation of the nuances. For example, the word manovrati can carry the meanings "driven" or even "manipulated" (which would emphasize a psychological facet.) It is here (correctly) rendered in English as "steered". But since a primary meaning of "una manovra" is in fact "a maneuver" the noun form makes it clear that the attempt "to involve poetry in its own maneuvers" to which Vangelisti refers in the introduction, is indeed central to this practice.
Poem #9 begins with the phrase "la capacita' delle contraddizioni …" and ends with "il particolare procedimento / aperto". The latter is translated as a "passage / wide open". Another translator might have chosen to translate procedimento as "the proceedings", or perhaps as "process" or "procedure", especially in light of what was said above about revealing process. At any rate, by slightly unhinging the language from specific reference and keeping open a space in which more than one meaning could thrive ("mantiene aperto il significato") here is a text that tends to "do" what it "says". The translator, in choosing one equivalent over another, sets up a new path in the target language that is likely to spark another set of possibilities, making other branchings among which the reader can choose.
This has a strong relation to what Michael Davidson was trying to define when he wrote "an art that examines its own modes of production … which regards itself as form of knowledge rather than a strategy in its pursuit; ….. an art that incorporate[s] the moments in which language loses its purely instrumental character and becomes a mode of humanizing practice." This description appeared in the 1984 anthology called The Language Book. [Davidson TLB p 150]
Bruce Andrews, who edited The Language Book with Charles Bernstein, asserted that poets were seeking "ways of releasing the energy inherent in the referential dimension of language … [in order to make] the structures of meaning in language more tangible and in that way allowing for the maximum resonance for the medium -- the traditional power that writing has always had to make experience palpable not by simply pointing to it but by (re)creating its conditions." [TLB; p p115, 134-135]
Poetry's involvement "in its own maneuvers" is a way of allowing such resonance and demonstrating the power of language. This can also result from a reversal of meanings or conditions, as in Niccolai's poem "Positivo & negativo":
"… that which is opposed
may be always overturned
to its opposite."
"E ci'o che ad esse si oppone
pu'o essere sempre rovesciato:
nel proprio contrario.”
Or in poem #1 of dai novissimi
"La descrizione di un paesaggio
mentale, l'unit'a del desiderio
Di esaltare gli opposti"
"The description of a mental
landscape, the unity of the urge
To exalt opposites."
Having enacted such a reversal in the first poem of the collection, Niccolai goes even further into this paradoxical realm, proposing, in the poem "Sostituzione":
"Cosi'
La reversibilita del segno
L'evanescenza del senso
L'opposto dell'insensato
una moltiplicazione d'insensatezza
Una farsa inventata con arte"
"Thus
The reverse of a sign
The evanescence of meaning
The opposite of what is senseless
a multiplication of senselessness
An artfully invented farce."
Identifying itself as an artfully invented farce, this same poem directs the reader (but also the poet herself) in the singular familiar ("sostituisci") to "substitute the loss of a center" for "the loss of meaning." Alternatively, the verb "sostituisci" may be understood to be not in the imperative but the ongoing present -- that is "you (habitually) do this." Meaning in such a text cannot be found in one fixed place, it must be generated in progress, in the process of writing and reading. Piece by piece, without a master plan, the writer/reader is compelled to construct provisional meanings. This is both positive and negative, for in this dizzying array of possibilities ("una vertigine di inversionsi infinite e diverse) we need not be lost. We are (at worst) at loose ends and (at best) set free. At any rate, to experience a loss can also be a liberation.
Another poem, "Il soggetto 'e il linguaggio" offers:
"Non un reciproco accordo di parole e di cose
ma il gusto della manomissione"
"not a mutual agreement of words and things
but the pleasure of interfering."
One of the connotations of "manomissione" (which shares with manovrati the Latin root word for "hand", manus) is "tampering." Such interference is a form of the ludic, the joyous, anarchic play that was so salient a characteristic of Dada and Surrealism. This sense of play and multiple possibilities is opened when language is slightly unhinged from specific reference. This is highly consonant with Charles Bernstein's idea that the aim of such literary practices is "a recharged use of the multi-valent referential vectors that any word has, how words in combination tone and modify the associations made for each of them. "
The project of poetry proposed by Bernstein and Andrews involves "repossessing the sign through close attention to, and active participation in, its production." It forcefully opposes "turning language into a commodity for consumption." This formulation has much in common with the manifestoes of early surrealism as it does with Niccolai's repeatedly articulated commitment to exploration of language's "internal tension." The Red Hill edition of Spatola's Zeroglyphics (a book of graphic poetry) bears an epigraph by Max Bense that reads "To write means to construct language, not to explain it."
Marjorie Perloff quotes Jerome Rothenberg in a 1973 interview as saying, "My own discomfort isn't with Symbols per se … but with that "symbolism" which substitutes interpretation for presentation…" Reference itself, Bernstein argues "is not a one-on-one relation to an object but a perceptual dimension." When it is deliberately "deprived of its automatic reflex reaction of word-stimulus-image- response" it can "roam over the range of associations … shooting off referential vectors like the energy field in a Kirillian photograph." ["Semblance" in TLB]
In the poem "Il soggetto e’ il linguaggio", Niccolai states:
"il soggetto e’ dunque il linguaggio
con cui perpetrare una personale violazione."
"The subject is therefore the language
with which to commit a capitol offense."
The reader open to this sort of intimate internal transgression as a form of renewal is "the true and secret hope of all critics" insist Vangelisti and Adriano Spatola in their introduction to the anthology Italian Poetry, 1960-1980: from Neo to Post Avant Garde.
"The physical medium [of] George Oppen's action aesthetic … becomes as much the subject as the means of production" writes Michael Davidson. "[In] writers like Susan Howe, Bob Perelman, Kathy Acker, Bruce Andrews, Michael Palmer, Ken Irby, Paul Metcalf and Clark Coolidge who make extensive use of "found language" "… the material nature of the sign and its specifically social and discursive context become major features of composition", Davidson writes. [Davidson, Post-Modern Genres, p.88]
This is the context of Giulia Niccolai's work. At this point the making of poetry becomes a social action or branch of philosophy. As Niccolai puts it in "Sostituzione", the title poem of the collection:
"puoi individuarlo nella misura
in cui e
imprendibile"
"it may be defined as much as
it is elusive"
The poems in Dai Novissimi and Sostituzione are characterized by compression, a reduction or minimization of means and material, and the problematizing of referentiality -- all of which are hallmarks of modernist practice. These also demonstrate, I believe, a desire to discover, extend or transcend the constraints of the medium itself. Compression or reduction (as opposed to elaboration or expansion) is also perhaps part of a poetic legacy connected to the lyric tradition in the sense that the lyric is in Helen Vendler's phrase, "vowed to compression." 6 But in this context the relevance of reduction or compression is phenomenological, in that it foregrounds a kind of tension of the absent. Is there or is there not something implicit in the poem but not explicitly present?
Perloff addresses this under the rubric of a "mode of undecidability", emphasizing a frequent "oscillation between representational reference and compositional game" in twentieth century poetry. [Poetics of Indeterminacy p. 34] What is the ontological status of the sign in the work of art? This partakes in its turn of the long often explicit dialogue in the (European) arts on the problematic relation between the representation of a thing and the thing itself.
That famous canvas on which the words "ceci n'est pas une pipe" ["this is not a pipe"] appear along with the painted image of a pipe -- Belgian artist Rene Magritte's arguably best-known work -- is only the most explicit (and wittiest) instance of the ongoing dialogue on representation and referentiality. American minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre insisted that what they made were simply objects in themselves, not objects pointing, referring to or about something else. Resisting metaphor and allusion, they wanted materials and forms to speak for themselves. Arte Povera addressed viewers reactions and responses to the presence of objects, forces or processes -- a scintillating flame, a fragrant tangle of rope, a massive sheet of slate or plate glass, a charred tree trunk -- not because they represent other things or ideas but as phenomena in themselves. This reflected a desire to confront and then extend or transcend the constraints of medium. Rather than mounting or fabricating a conceptual construct, these artists sought direct acknowledgement of and confrontation with the viewer's act of perception.
As "attention is switched onto the analysis of textual perception" the eye "continually poses problems to itself," Niccolai declares in her afterword to the 1976 reissue of Zeroglyphics. Calligraphy, typewriting, typography and collage -- techniques of "reorienting the arrangement of signs in aesthetic space" -- are for Niccolai "ritual forms of visuality" implicit in the history of writing itself. "The presence of the iconic" she writes, is enabled through "annullment of semantic message." Very close in intention to this is what Davidson calls palimsestic writing, in which "[f]orm is 'discovered' in the act of writing, not imposed from without." [San Francisco Renaissance, p. 8]
Thus, in the poem "syntattico e verbale"
"la buona materia raccolta nei testi
acquista un netto e immediato risalto
una raccapricciante volonta' pensare (I believe this should read "di pensare")
"The suitable matter found in the texts
Acquires a clear and precise tension
A dreadful will to think"
Niccolai speaks of unmooring the instrumental to allow multiple layers of meaning, thereby setting free the energy implicit in every sign. [in Oggi Poesia Domani p.64] Davidson links west coast poets through their emphasis on performative aspects of poetry. [SF Renn.P 20-21] The common goal is restoration of the primal power of language. Stephen Vincent, discussing the turn toward the concrete and physical among poets in California in the 1970s, says this explicitly. "[Taking] poetry into a deeper and fuller association with the physical [was] a way of restoring its power." [The Poetry Reading p.35] Vincent saw this tendency as motivated by a "distrust in language."
At the same time, all of these writers recognize the necessity of finding a balance point that is dynamic and productive without reacting to former paradigms by condemnation and extreme position. For Bernstein and Andrews "the idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference" is "as bothersome and confusing as the assumption that the primary function of words is to refer -- one on one -- to an already constructed world of "things [intro to TLB.] Not in "mutual agreement" but certainly in "the pleasure of interfering" between them, as Niccolai has it. And so, in "Sintattico e verbale" she asserts:
"obviously one cannot say
it continually seeks to destroy itself."
"Evidentemente non si puo dire
Che vuole distruggersi di continuo."
Because where there is paradox, compression, the problematizing of referentialty, and a pervasive sense of play, chance or accident interacting with design or a rigid or arbitrary structure, the result is that
"… in it
one may actually
mirror oneself
"E per l'appunto
li' ci si specchia"
So another of the broad questions raised in a reading of Substitution is that of originality and of voice in relation to the use of appropriated text. In poetry that sees itself as a form of philosophy, this points at the most fundamental level to the "self ." The Self is the title and theme of issue number nine of Poetics Journal. In his essay, Michael Davidson maintains that the questioning of referentiality and emphasis on the materiality of language constitute an assault on the self [p.6] Davidson sees this assault as an ideological constant of poetry in our times. Even among "language" poets -- sometimes skewed in the U.S. toward the confessional and psychological -- he identifies a lineage (e.g. Zukofski, Stein, Creeley, Spicer, Ashbery) of "writers who cast the integrity of self into doubt ." Likewise, Alfredo Giuliani, in his essay in the 1961 Novissimi anthology, suggested that "reduction of the self" was a goal of their work. 7
But to trace the connections of that aspect would take another paper. For the present I hope I have pointed to some of the points of commonality between American and European avant garde poetic practice in the 20th century and stimulated in readers an interest in re-reading Niccolai's Substitution.
Notes
1. The "novissimi" was a group of five Italian poets: Nanni Balestrini, Alfredo Giuliani, Antonio Porta, Edoardo Sanguinetti, and Elio Pagliarani.
2. Sects can begin the formation of new major religious traditions, as is generally understood to be the case with Judaism-Christianity-Islam and with the Hinduism-Buddhism constellation. But in the shorter run they can have as much in common with each other as with the separate mainstream religions they grow out of, as evidenced by the suffusion of Sufism in central Asia or the major spread of buddhist practices into the Judaeo-Christian culture of the United States since the 1950s.
3. See "A Stream that Runs its Own Course" essay by David W. Seaman in Lettrism: into the present curator, Stephen C. Foster Univ. of Iowa Museum of Art exhibition catalog, 1983.
4. San Francisco Chronicle, Book Review, Jan 9-15, 2000. Garret Caples reviewing Barbara Guest's Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature. Wesleyan Press, 1999.
5 "Perloff in the Nineties", electronic book review by David Zauhar, located February 2000 at internet site www.altx.com/ebr/
6. Helen Vendler reviewing Enright in New York Review of Books, Feb 2000.
7. It's interesting to note that Giulia Niccolai has subsequently over many years become a practicing buddhist, within a Tibetan tradition, at a center in Milan. I believe her lifelong artistic quest for liberating language and transcending the self can be viewed as an aeesthetic form of this same process.
Works cited
All poems quoted in this paper are from Substitution by Giulia Niccolai. Los Angeles & Fairfax, California: Red Hill Press, 1975. Translated from Italian by the author and Paul Vangelisti. Numbered poems quoted in text are from Dai Novissimi, section one of the volume; titled poems are from Sostituzione, section two of the book.
Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein, editors. The L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e Book. Southern Illinois University Press 1984. An anthology of essays on poetics which appeared between 1978 and 1982 in the bi-monthly journal, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Fontana, Giovanni and Adriano Spatola, editors. Oggi Poesia Domani: rassenga internazionale di poesia visuale e fonetica (a cura di Adriano Spatola and Giovanni Fontana.) Fiuggi: Biblioteca Communale. September 1979.
Foster, Stephen C. Lettreisme: into the future Iowa: Sart Museum, Univ of Iowa 1983-84.
Kostelanetz, Richard, editor. Text Sound Texts. New York: Wm. Morrow, 1980.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Princeton U.P. 1981
Perloff, Marjorie, editor. Postmodern Genres. Vol 5 Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory. University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. A collection of essays by various critics and scholars on music, sculpture, performance, photography and other media.
Spatola, Adriano and Paul Vangelisti, editors. Italian Poetry, 1960-1980 From Neo to Post Avant-Garde. Los Angeles/San Francisco: Red Hill Press, 1982
Spatola, Adriano. Majakovskiiiiij. Translated by Paul Vangelisti. Los Angeles/San Francisco: Red Hill Press, 1975.
Spatola, Adriano. Zeroglyphics. Los Angeles/San Francisco: Red Hill Press edition, 1977.
Vangelisti, Paul, editor. Foresta ultra naturam -- verses & visuals by Emilio Villa, Giulia Niccolai and Luciano Caruso. Translated by Pasquale Verdicchio, Ippolita Rostagno and Paul Vangelisti. San Francisco/Los Angeles: Red Hill Press/Invisible City, 1989.
Vangelisti, Paul. Portfolio Red Hill Press 1978.
Vincent, Stephen and Ellen Zweig, , editors. The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language and Performance.. San Francisco: Momo's Press, 1981.
Poetics Journal #9 The Self. Berkeley CA, June 1991.