“The machine of your brain has useful deliriums”*
Poems that Open the Summer of Your Mind
The best reading experiences seem to happen in summer. You’re finally free from the overbearing school year. You get to pick up the books whose petticoats you’ve been peeking up. Yesterday I turned in my grades for the science fiction class I was teaching and felt my first afternoon of summer. I picked up The Dragonfly, the poems of Amelia Rosselli translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace, published by Chelsea Editions.
I was lucky enough to receive a copy of this beautiful book from Deborah who was one of my literature professors at the University of Washington in 1995 and who has remained a generous mentor to me ever since. And though Deborah is worlds beyond me intellectually—and, therefore, so are her interests and her work—I found The Dragonfly to be accessible. If I read it in winter or even this fall, maybe I’ll dig further into the philosophical layers and poetics, but now, in a summer state of mind, it purely entertained and infused me with the delirious logic that I love to soak in when reading poetry.
Roselli uses repetition to dizzying effect. Do you remember how delicious it is to roll down a grassy hill? Roselli’s hills are covered in wildflowers, cottonwood puffs, feathers, leaves, grasses, strings, and as you roll you collect, becoming nestly and wild. She does this best in the title poem, “The Dragonfly,” which was originally published in Yale Italian Poetry. Here’s an example of what I mean:
I don’t know if I rhyme from bliss or beleaguered
pain. I don’t know if I rhyme for enchantment or for reason
and don’t know if you know that I rhyme exclusively
for you. Too much sun has the sea drunk in its
placid prison, where the embroidery of the
sea refuses to lay a hand on sunken vessels.
Dawn shades to gray in the distance… (95)
The world of “I don’t know” rolls from intense feeling to intimacy to untamed natural imagery that is stuck in the confines of needlepoint and perspective. Here’s some more rolling and wild gathering:
Squander,
if you can, if you know, if you have the time
and the desire, if it’s the case, if it’s possible, if
you don’t feebly lament, this unlamenting
life of mine. Squander the mountain that keeps me
from seeing you or moving on; nothing can be squandered
that isn’t already spent. (113)
Here “ifs” roll in and out of squander. If goes along with squander. The two are about possibility and musing. And I love the idea of squandering the mountain, something so untouchable though we climb it, ski it, drive it, roll down it, it is virtually unmovable. The rolling, dizzying poem, “The Dragonfly” ends in a final, grand downhill run:
Destroy
the house the guard brings you, destroy the bird
that doesn’t dream of staying in your tidy nest,
destroy the ink that sneers at your
ingratitude, destroy the archangels who don’t
know where you hid the angels who
know no fear. (123)
Amelia Roselli is the quintessential artist who suffered greatly—her father was assassinated under Mussolini’s orders when she was seven. This event is credited as being at least partly responsible for her subsequent “paranoid depression” (12). Eventually, she committed suicide by jumping out of her window into the apartment courtyard.
While at times Roselli’s musings turn so far inward that she seems overly enamored of her own mental delirium, she doesn’t fail to make accompanying her worth a reader’s while. You will find the wildness of your inner mind when you read her poems, which, even when spiraling uncomfortably inward, she locates so glitteringly well:
O fleeting life you lay down beside me when
I was a little girl and you perch ‘pon my shoulder
to listen, and don’t demand rhymes. I
stretch out my legs and sell fenders in an
affected color, you consume yourself contentedly in a glitter
of bad habits. (85)
*from “Jottings,” page 249, The Dragonfly
Tags: Amelia Rosselli, Chelsea Editions, Deborah Woodard, Giuseppe Leporace, Italian Translations, The Dragonfly
This is really cool, Shira, and I love what you say about it. Lots of energy. I will check it out.
Thanks Sweet, Brilliant Melina!
I think I’m going to start saying Nestly and wild at least six times a day. I love it. And of course I will credit you, Shira, when friends and strangers with whom I converse take delight in the phrase!
You’re a nutter. I love that about you, Nestly. Oh, no, it sounds like Nestle.
I thought I wouldn’t want to read anything but fluff once summer started because of all the heavy hitters I crammed into my thesis list at the end. Instead I’m devouring books by fantastic writers and revisiting classics I never finished. Summer rules!
What are you reading? Sometimes summer is the best time for the classics for me, because I often have so much more head space available.
Love the exploration of repetition! Happy reading my dear.
I really love what Rosselli does with repetition–that which is repeated is a slightly different shape or color each time we see it and feel it. In my mind it’s like clay being smooshed and smooshed and smooshed. Each time it’s similar to how it was before and also completely different. But what she presents is far more beautiful than the clay of my mind.
Thank you, Shira, for this lovely, lively, and insightful meditation. Rosselli’s use of repetition was a key hook for me in translating her, and rolling down the hill is a perfect trope for the experience of reading “The Dragonfly.” I’m not sure, however, that what she does is far more beautiful than the clay of your mind, which, after all, came up with “nestly and wild.”
Deborah, you are such an inspiration to me. You make life seem exciting to live. Thanks for reading bark.