Comments on: Lady Range. Domenico Iannaco

By: guardafili

guardafili — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:54:16 +0000

acknowledged sorry..

By: guardafili

guardafili — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:52:08 +0000

I totally agree with you Serena. I would add that pop music is perhaps one of the least aknowledeged undercurrents when it comes to poetry..

By: lunatagliente

lunatagliente — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:34:49 +0000

We’ve been about this question of the ‘other’ language for a bit now, but one things sort of dawned on me as I was reading your last comment luca. Well, maybe it is not groundbreaking, but I’ll write it anyway: we are of a generation that, even if educated in a sort of ‘mother-tongue’ (say, Italian), have also lived caressed by English in tangential but maybe fundamental ways. Personal examples: first kiss (Another Day in Paradise, Phil Collins); first feminist awareness (Madonna, Express Yourself); endless nights clubbing…etc. In a way, then, I don’t think our experience can be superimposed on the one by poets who have written in languages other than their own ‘mother-tongues’ in the past centuries (although for other matters it can). English at this time is quite different from any other language in the world, for good or bad, considering the difference it harbours within itself – within the multifarious community of its speakers and random users.

By: guardafili

guardafili — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 10:02:34 +0000

welcome back mariangela, very sharp comment as usual..
@dom: writing in an other language is like adopting another body. at times one feels clumsy but it’s a unique experience. Besides, Conrad, Nabokov, Pavese, Rilke wrote in ANOTHER language. All i can advise you is to follow your demon(s).

By: lunatagliente

lunatagliente — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:29:31 +0000

Fedra, lovely to have you here! of course, the Void (I remember you similarly speaking about a V-shaped stanza in a poem of mine) may recall to mind the void to which every man (according to freud) longs to return to…and dom’s comment strikes this point quite well when he writes about the ‘finel destination’ who is also ’stronger than the subject’…a sort of archetypal mother with whom the (male) subject longs to conjoin…or have, Oedipically, intercourse…Freud would definetly have loved it! xs

By: fedra

fedra — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:22:19 +0000

The capitalized ‘Void’ is intriguing: the personification of a space, or lack of it, is rather uncommon; so VOID becomes backdrop of action , a proper agent as well as subjectb (object) of discourse. Remotely recalling the capitalization of nouns in German language, the ‘Void’ plays a crucial role in this lyric. I like it a lot actually.
I agree with Serena about its eroticism coming accross in an ancommon fashion. The first stanza is very powerful; it is pervaded with synestetic references (’sound’, ’shapes’, ‘breaths’) setting up a complex scenario for the rest of the narration to play.

By: Dom

Dom — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:21:12 +0000

Eventually I would have gotten at the image of a circle in which the subject is the object of its love, but this object blows away. So the melting of the images is an attempt to describe the whole soul, in a particular moment, in action, because the girl, although is a gleam and he is pretty stylised, is the aim of the experience and the mirror where the energy stores up, the final “destination and direction”, stronger than the subject… maybe the door.
I think that purity, as an unmixed substance, is not innocence because the former felt the experiences and then acted his drama. At the end there’s a kind of sadistic will.
I don’t know if Lady Range works well, because I can only image its sound because of my English.

By: lunatagliente

lunatagliente — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:17:13 +0000

“the mind is /A mild girl who consists of contempt /And ravished thoughts” reminds me more of a Medieval/fairytale imagery of ravished maids lost in woods (why should be maids always get ravished by the way? didn’t they enjoy sex every now and then? but this is another story). The poem also reminds me of Gavin’s (posted some time ago) as, although very different in style, it too deals with phantasms of women who are no(t)one, and melt into each other…just like words do in this text. The last image evokes to me (though, i suppose, unwillingly) of Cixous’ sleeping beauty, who ‘maybe came, once, in a dream’. Quite an erotic poem, now that I think about it, yet quite an uncommon one! xs

By: guardafili

guardafili — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:15:31 +0000

Domenico Iannaco is a young Italian poet who’s passionate about writing. Lady Range reads to me as a sort parody of Renaissance poems. Enjoy.