LUCA LENZINI. INTRODUCTION TO "IL ROVETO"

 THE IRONY OF ROSES

*Introduction to the collection Il Roveto (Troubador ublishing Ltd.,, 2005) by Luca Lenzini

ABSTRACT: In his introduction to Il Roveto, Italian literary critic Luca Lenzini explores the intersection of experimental poetry and the New Baroque, tracing the collection’s distinctive logic as it weaves together diverse linguistic registers. We invite you to consider how this hybridized lyric idiom challenges conventional poetic boundaries and gestures toward a new form of cultural and poetic dialogue.

Critical discourse around the poetry of Erminia Passannanti has largely mobilized conceptual categories rooted in twentieth-century modernism: surrealism, dreamwork, the fragmentation of the self. These terms are not misapplied. On the contrary, they touch upon some of the deeper currents animating her poetics—manifest also in Il Roveto—which unfold in a liminal zone between reality and imagination, between the unconscious and rational cognition, wherein the subject becomes the stage for a choreography of apparitions and erasures governed by a “fantastic logic” (in Guido Guglielmi’s phrase): unpredictable, disobedient, and critically insurgent.

Such a logic operates both at the level of poetic construction and linguistic articulation, through displacements and feverish mutations. In this collection, it reveals itself above all in the continuous contamination of heterogeneous and often contradictory registers: the collocation of colloquial expressions—such as “not for nothing” or the Christologically charged “arrivederci e ciao”—with archaisms that verge deliberately on the kitsch; the juxtaposition of religious diction with shards of bureaucratic jargon, procedural technospeak, or anglicisms. The result is a hybridized, creolized idiom that no longer lays claim to a native home.

Thus, we encounter “snowy expanses” alongside a “dark threshold” in the same line; liturgical Latin jostling with “subsection 3 of article bis”; “joyous arcana” mingled with “anguished mysteries,” “bolus” beside “brothel,” “socially determined” with “redemption.” High and low, sacred and profane, somatic and intellectual, concrete and abstract—these oppositions enter the poetic weave on equal footing, not as jarring incongruities but as elements in pursuit of a vision “beyond the veil and the cloud of impermanence.” The ambition is high. So much so that—by no means uncommonly—the drive toward a recomposition or sublimation of subjective fracture within the multifaceted mirror of the text (a dynamic that has led some to evoke Sylvia Plath, though other names could be summoned) turns paradoxically into a modality of irony: a dialectica destruens through which the trace of transcendence, that elusive promise of fullness, is approached via negation or regression, only to be continually deferred or denied.

“In distance, hope / in outline, the day / in immediate presence, absence / for their capacity to grasp therein / ideas inadequate to close inspection.”
(Teoria della pintura)

And by a specular inversion, the baroque exuberance of a mimetic enterprise that tends toward the limitless—imaginatively extroverted and audacious—can at times turn toward more restrained, meditative tones, the lyric subject transfigured into “the sole spectator among many empty chairs” (Il sentiero delle more).

In Roveto III, a poem that may be read as a keystone within the collection, the verb to seek occurs eight times. The structure of the text—and arguably its very metrics—offer the reader the imprint, the echo, of a quest, one traced along the paths of the great mystics. Yet it is telling that the poemetto—so it is styled on the title page, despite consisting of discrete, autonomous compositions—is defined not by narrative teleology but by a drive which, informed by the dialectical and theatrical dynamics already described, might best be characterized as “pedagogical.” A pedagogy, however, of the ungraspable—its object ever receding, ever falling outside of doctrinal containment, even as the texts teem with rites, prayers, and devotional tropes.

At times, both in the search for a structuring order pursued outside narrative and, more markedly, at the level of diction, there emerges a formidable genealogy—an intellectual lineage of considerable gravitas—in which special weight must be given to La poesia delle rose (1962) by Franco Fortini, a work Passannanti has both translated and commented on. This is difficult terrain: in Fortini’s text, the collision of reason and unreason, order and disorder, activates a symbolico-cultural universe of rare density, a figurative dialectics both artfully orchestrated and fundamentally ambivalent, wherein inside and outside contest one another while continually exchanging places. The polylingualism and ironic desublimation (Luperini has described Passannanti’s strategy as one of “humorous doubling”) that traverse Il Roveto stage a different kind of via crucis, one equally marked by psychic discontinuity but less obscure and more erotically wounded.

But then, what kind of knowledge might one salvage at the end of this itinerary of dérèglement and refusals? What lesson, if any, does the counterfeit liturgical table set forth in the text portend? An enigmatic prelude at the book’s threshold gestures toward an answer. A gnomic prose fragment closes with:

“War is continuous, incalculable. The transmutation of consent into ignorance is the condition of survival.
This is my perception of power relations: of abuse and legitimacy.
Everything is allegorical.”

It is rare to encounter statements so categorical and yet so measured within the elegiac, often introverted domain of lyric poetry. But those seeking direct and situated references to the historical present—rather than oblique fragments or lexical residues thereof—will be disappointed, and might suspect that the final declaration, “Everything is allegorical,” functions merely as a catchall to smuggle in impulses of a purely subjective order. And yet there is no smuggling here. For in Il Roveto, the exposition of subjectivity and the allegorical drive coexist in a strange, estranging symbiosis. Just as the intellectual element of irony does not dissolve but rather sharpens the mystical fervor of the imagery, so too the mention of “war” casts light on the latent violence that circulates throughout the texts—a violence ritualized and dispersed, frequently figured in sacrificial terms.

After all, what is it that irony and allegory share if not the gesture of pointing elsewhere? The verbal fabric of Il Roveto, saturated with religious overtones, proliferating across verse and prose, seems designed to translate—deliberately and to excess—the myriad forms of abuse, rendering them profane and challenging tradition in order to expose domination. Yes, everything is allegorical. At least for the reader who does not capitulate to the eternal così è broadcast from screens and repeated daily by the shrill chorus of opinion-makers; for the gaze that refuses surface appearance and seeks elsewhere, striving to decipher something beyond the tautological violence of normative doxa.

There is an echo of this in the meticulous—one might say pedantic—somatic instructions for the education of the spirit that Il Roveto metes out with bureaucratic sadism. This, perhaps, is the most radically new territory explored by the author in comparison with her previous work: a kind of script for the expiation of a character suspended between Beckett and Almodóvar. But against this imposed order, the disorder of the self responds with obstinate intensity—its conflicts, its dazzling visions: the bramble path, monks descending alone into the mountains, a face of radiant beauty.

For this reason, the prescriptions of Esercitazione all’ascolto should not be taken lightly. There is another order—undecipherable, unheard-of—whose trace poetry bears like the cross, or the thorn, of an invisible tattoo.

Luca Lenzini, Siena 2005.