Introducing PennSound Italiana

Curated by Jennifer Scappettone

The twenty-one poets represented on PennSound Italiana.

After many months of planning and labor, we are delighted to launch a new sector of PennSound: PennSound Italiana, devoted to contemporary Italian poetry. We seek over the course of this ongoing project to offer a broad sense of the field, filling in the substantive gaps in global access to Italian poetry (as both written and sonic text — even within Italian borders), and expanding awareness of its range of practitioners, with an emphasis on marginalized and experimental voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is an effort — a unique one, in our reckoning — to “liberate” the spectrum of Italian poetry for as broad a public as possible through audio and video recordings, given that the publishing industry and the translation market are endangered and/or blinkered enough to condemn a significant swath of both historical and contemporary innovation to oblivion. As such, this live archive extends the task of PennSound writ large.

Some highlights of the first edition, to whet the curiosity of listeners:

Five episodes of “Con l’ascia dietro le spalle: 10 anni senza Amelia Rosselli” (“With the hatchet at our backs: Ten years without Amelia Rosselli”), produced by Andrea Cortellessa, and containing rare interviews with Rosselli and with other poets and critics, including Antonella Anedda, Biancamaria Frabotta, Emmanuela Tandello, and Lucia Re;

Salnitro(Saltpeter), a historic 1976 sound poem produced in the studios of RAI by Milli Graffi, member of the Tam Tam group and current editor-in-chief of the experimental literary journal Il verri. Of this piece, Graffi writes, “I understood what my sound poem could be when I listened to Schwitters’ Ursonate recited by Giuliano Zosi: half an hour of uninterrupted pressurized vocalizations, strongly rhythmical, and exemplary. For me, it was the path of the first avant-garde, and one had to depart from there. An absurd tercet of hendecasyllables came to my mind in a flash, and I prepared a rigorous plan of fragmentation, defined on every page of the score with tempos and directions for vocal execution … Invited to take part in the Audiobox broadcast directed by Pinotto Fava, I realized the eighteen minutes of Saltpeter in the RAI studios of Rome in three days of rehearsal with the technologies of that time. From that point, using the cassette that RAI gave me, I composed Saltpeter by improvising with my live voice and redoubling the effect by overlaying it onto the voice recorded on cassette. With the lights out, I had an animated play of liquids that Giovanni Anceschi had given me, and which made for a good “saltpeter” effect, projected onto a screen at my back. I dressed all in white to become an integral part of the imaginary grotto.” 

Soundscapes by Tommaso Ottonieri and electronic musician Martux-M that were published with Le strade che portano al Fùcino, a 2007 collection of prose poetry charting the plains of Telespazio, a multinational satellite services company based outside of Rome that “covers the whole space market value chain,” in acts of code-twisting between globalized standard Italian and dialect;

Di colpo la parola smarrimento” (“Suddenly the word disorientation”), from Sicilian poet and historical novelist Maria Attanasio’s Amnesia del movimento delle nuvole (Amnesia of the Movement of Clouds), with “en-face” recordings from Carla Billitteri’s translation published by Litmus Press in 2014;

book,” a poem composed in English from Marco Giovenale’s Anachromisms, winner of the 2013 Ahsahta Press Chapbook Prize;

Sonata n. 2 per Graphemium, a video composition by Laura Cingolani, poet, musician, singer, performer, and gutsy heir of the neo-avant-garde (executed with the help of Daniele Salvati, electronic musician and sound researcher): Laura writes that “Each grapheme typed in on the keyboard of the PC is associated with a note: the text is literally played, and each execution can be carried out with a different sound, timbre and instrument”;

and

Lettere alla reinserzione culturale del disoccupato(with a pun on Letters toward and Letters to the cultural reinsertion of the unemployed), based on the 2013 book by Paris-based author/editor Andrea Inglese: “field recordings” made in various cities, and mixed by Stefano Delle Monache.

We hope that providing the sounds of these texts to a greater public — including a public that is not conversant in Italian — will enable an altered state of listening for what exceeds the contours of understanding defined by national languages — and seduce listeners into the concord (or discord) of tuning. Such states are made possible in a space between bodies that Antena founders Jen Hofer and John Pluecker ask us to inhabit critically and expansively in their “Manifesto for Ultratranslation”: “Moments of untranslatability lead directly to untranslation, undertranslation, overtranslation, an excess, extranslation, a lack, a limit, an excrescence, an impropriety, distranslation, retranslation, multitranslation, a mistake, a conflict, dystranslation. An understanding of the potential in not understanding.”

Subsequent editions of PennSound Italiana, already underway, will include historic recording sessions by Giulia Niccolai and Paul Vangelisti; work by contemporary poets Antonella Doria, Angela Passarello, Laura Pugno, Giovanna Frene, and Michele Zaffarano; and new unpublished poems by Milo De Angelis, with translations by Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli. Stay on the line for these and other exciting developments!