POUNDIAN POETRIES

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MASSIMO MANDOLINI PESARESI

Seldom are the beginnings of a process to be seen as a prefiguration of its future developments – pace the Structuralists’ expectations. My first verses were prompted by the reading of Dylan Thomas, an author I kept rediscovering over the years: experiments in Hermetic writing, unwittingly Imagistic in character. Over time, the Modernist voice became more and more self-conscious, and the verses of Hart Crane accompanied my exploration of the worlds of NYC where I lived in the early 80’s. Only later did I approach the oracles of the Cantos:  there I could hear resonate the timeless myths that had haunted my reveries since my Lycaeum days. In Pound I could also face the mortal perils of being true to the unshattered core of one’s own vision. All along, my writing witnessed, discreetly, my studies of poetry in different languages, from the familiar Greek and Latin to new forays in the areas of Arabic and Hebrew. The fascination with the "sacredness" of a word in an ancient/foreign language, opened for me the arcane of Pound’s verbal cameos: some sort of presumption that I too had been there.

Rather suspicious of the stance of the engagé poet, I have always believed that poetry is poetry: its intensity and integrity must not be compromised by programmatic intents, which could introduce a new form of usura into its design. For many years, my views on society were kept carefully insulated from my verses, until I came, almost unexpectedly, to a form of writing that was poignantly responsive to human suffering in a social and "political" context.  The arena for such poems has mostly been the Middle-East, a region whose languages I had passionately studied.

The following verses, with the exception of  "A Dreamer’s Duty" and "Midsummer Triad," have been selected from my collection The Marble Wave (2014), whose title is taken from the last line of  "A Rose Snaps," the single poem on which I labored, adding and changing and reshaping, for almost four years.