Andrea Inglese’s Inventari
Inglese’s volume Inventari draws on a multiplicity of complex materials, says Andrea Raos, and leaves contradictions deliberately unresolved; yet it is characterized by ‘a compactness and unity of vision’.
“To try to touch the least plucked cords of today’s poetry, while running inevitably into that philosophical and lyrical memory that for us means above all Leopardi, but that today also means the late Wittgenstein: the logical boundary of private experience, how much the outside constitutes the inside, how much this limit is anchorage and ultimate defense of silence.” This is how Biagio Cepollaro synthesizes the character of Andrea Inglese’s poetry in the critical note at the end of the book. It is an effective synthesis, which expresses the height of Inglese’s ambitions well. He is a writer who is too clear and cultured to yield without resistance to the call of autonomy as an absolute claim on him, and to the lack of thought in literary writing, but also a writer who is too defenseless in the face of the invasion of the real not to have to express it precisely in poetry.
His poetry is a place where reality accelerates to the point where, paradoxically, it can even seem immobile.
Inglese’s technical and theoretical apprenticeship was long: on the one hand, it went from the first pieces that he wrote for literary magazines, to his collaboration with musicians and video artists from the Milanese group Sincretica, to his first collection of poetry (in Sesto Quaderno italiano, edited by Franco Buffoni for Marcos y Marcos in 1998, with a dense and beautiful note by Giancarlo Majorino), to this first collection of his own work. On the other hand, we have L’eroe segreto. Il personaggio nella modernità dalla confessione al solipsismo (The Secret Hero. The Character in Modernity from the Confession to Solipsism), University of Cassino, 2003, an important reflection on the limits of subjectivity in literature, which was Inglese’s doctoral thesis. In addition, there are the theoretical and critical works in the collective volume Ákusma. Forme della poesia contemporanea (Forms of Contemporary Poetry), published by Metauro in 2000.
These two strands – or multiple strands – in his work have produced these Inventories, which are characterized by a compactness and unity of vision. If, in fact, the greatest risk of Andrea Inglese’s poetry has always been a weakening dispersion due precisely to the multiplicity and complexity of the materials that he brings together, this is not at all the case in the four sections of this explosive first work. If the title poem, which opens the volume, proposes a plunge into the world and into its deliberately unresolved contradictions, ‘Modi comuni’ (‘Common ways’), ‘Duo da camera’ (‘Chamber duet’), and ‘Rilievi’ (‘Reliefs’) continuously contract and expand the field of vision, the point of attack, the breath of the verse, in a ceaseless systole/diastole movement.
This is the general overview, but in reality the book’s movement is more complex. In addition to the sections made up solely of inventories (that is, to put it hastily, poems of considerable length), all the others are articulated in two specular moments, each embodied by a precise stylistic option.
Thus, a first phase of focusing, so to say, on a given point of reflection is entrusted to brief texts that are often of great incisiveness. In ‘Modi comuni’, (‘Common ways’), for example, it seems to me that this point is death, the borderline experience par excellence, the apparent apotheosis of private experience. In Inglese, however, death is dissected and overturned in its historical matter, in its formidable essence of pre-conscious act of memory, of simple feverish graffiti on the cerebral cortex (precisely the ‘common way’).
In the second phase the scope broadens (with the appearance of other inventories) and the poetry becomes at the same time more rational and at times more narrative. The twofold temptation to depict or in other words to novelize verses is in fact very strong in Inglese. Long works and structures of vast scope are relatively rare in recent Italian poetry, even if they seem to reappear in the most recent: for example Giuliano Mesa’s Quattro quaderni (Four Notebooks) or Florinda Fusco’s Libro delle Madonne scure (Book of the Dark Madonnas). At the same time, the mythomodernist efforts in this sense are less convincing to me (I am thinking for example of the biography in verse of Van Gogh, which was attempted a few years ago by Danilo Bramati). The assumption that a ‘master poem’ must necessarily be an ‘epic poem’ is especially questionable and leads inevitably to kitsch.
Inglese, on the other hand, who is always conscious of the fragility of his own utterances but is never resigned to silence (to the hypocritical gurgling of a certain type of verse, which says it is remaining silent), employs two simultaneous processes: one of dilation and one of proliferation. An example of dilation can be found in ‘Inventario della posizione’ (‘Position inventory’): six stanzas of variable length, from a maximum of 23 lines to a minimum of 10, each one hinged to the first line by very simple Volponian rhyme-words, (respectively, “position”, “direction”, “prostration”, “ration”, “excoriation”). Each of these words subsequently follows its own course, each stanza its own rhythm: in Inglese’s poetry it is not the forms that are firm, but rather the gaze that one fixes on them. Thus, Volponi again, an explosive Volponi torn from his obsessiveness (and further in the background, a certain Cattafi) who presides over certain phenomena of lexical proliferation, in which verbal matter extends itself by assonance and spreads itself over reality.
All of this is in Inglese’s poetry, leading to a temporary state of final maturity, an achieved equilibrium between a subject continually exposed to crisis (which sharpens his capacities for resistance) and the state of a world that is (objectively) shaky:
The truce is not less true than war.
This much I have understood. I have educated myself again
to weigh all and with scales always
more precise. And I also feel a needle
of rosemary, now, in the palm of my hand.
And it is a detail that becomes central to the picture.
And I will also be gentle with the rosemary,
I water it and observe it under
different lights, I gave it liquid fertilizer,
I tied the cracked flowerpot
with a cord from a clothesline.
And torture exists. And rosemary flowers exist.
