Maurizio Cucchi’s poetry is fragmented. Reading his work is like looking at a collage work that is both fascinating at the level of piece and whole. The new translations by Michael Palma, from Chelsea Editions $20, gathers his best work from 1965-2009 in No Part to Play. Palma’s introduction makes a case that Cucchi is like T.S. Eliot, or Pound, relying on images and fragmented poetics to best illustrate the human condition. In his work you are likely to find narrative, lyric, philosophy, poetic dialogues with Beckett, fellow Italian poets, as well as references to soccer, computers, and the cosmos. Like the modernist before him, Cucchi takes in a world and chews it up and spits it back out in his verse.
Cucchi’s own biographical history is woven into the poems throughout the work, and while this is true for most writers--on some level-- it is interesting in Cucchi’s case because his father disappeared. Vanished into thin air, a mystery to the young Cucchi for years until he learned from his mother that his father had taken his own life due to financial failures. Cucchi himself declares that this fact is “overstated” in his work, but for the uninitiated reader of his oeuvre, the disappearance gives the reader an emotional window. Readers like a frame. Frame shapes the content and allows for an initial glimpse inside.
Regardless of how you take your criticism, Cucchi’s biography hangs upon the first section, “The Missing” from 1976. The poem “The House, the Outsiders, the Near Relations” shape and identify, clarify and classify the evidence of the missing loved one. “It was Thursday, after school, around noon...He died of a heart attack (or an accident on the road, or an illness, or because of a stone)...Let’s look at the TOPOGRAPHY OF THE HOUSE:..the meat mallet forgotten/on top of the refrigerator, or the apple/half-peeled and sliced that had turned black.” The speaker here attempts to make sense of his upside down emotional world. And the reader is along for the ride looking for clues and wondering what has happened. Poems from The Missing may be Cucchi’s most intriguing early work because of the mystery, because even after the reader has journeyed through that emotional landscape, and the gathering of evidence it still haunts later poems in the section. In “Court of Miracles” the subject is not necessarily the missing father, but rather the truth and folly of those who give their lives to the church. But the poem ends with the threatening image “The stealing from the poor boxes, the pistol/wrapped in newspaper, the bullet in the barrel...” We can’t help but leap back to the mystery of his father. Was he rubbed out by a mobster? A loan shark? The danger and pain remain. It’s there, it communicates to us through the associations. It’s partly what makes the early poems, and later poems, so powerful. It echoes back to the source.
Cucchi, like any writer, cannot be pinned down. He refuses to. The language of place is important in his works. Place names alone carry romantic resonance and poetry. “Goree,” from 1996’s Poetry of the Source, encapsulates a region’s violent history in a pastorale sequence, “The House of Slaves/open to the ocean through a hole,/the greenery low and dusty as at Mozia/and the cannon at the summit./ The ordinary little red hotel/for a beer...the boys/lying stretched out in the December sun...mild/and delicate, Africa.” Cucchi’s lines remain short and tense, yet the image is peaceful, but haunted. The cannon a reminder of the past, the music of the Os and the sharp Ts, the delicate way the reader must sound out the place name “Mozia.” Later in that section, the poem “Poetry from the Source” offers up a wonderful moment where the speaker is the muse, of sorts, seeking it’s own beginning, “a source that is mine alone...Maybe...a broken question, a figure/that covers another figure.” Later the speaker “knocks on the poet’s little house...He’s rejecting me, I thought,/for not having loved him enough.”
The modernist bent towards fragmentation is best felt and experienced in Cucchi’s juxtaposition of broken narratives and images in the poems from 1999’s Glenn’s Last Journey. These are poems that once again return to the father’s disappearance as a source. Long stanzas are separated from short stanzas with asterisks, each one a separate moment. To use a theater word, they are separated by a beat, where Cucchi changes tone and focuses on a sometimes contrasting image or emotion. This kind of juxtaposition was used by Pound in the Cantos, and Eliot in the Wasteland, and even later by Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Williams in their jazz and blues poems and Patterson, respectively. It is the kind of juxtaposition one finds in visual collages, or in internet memes. Cucchi uses them to bounce back and forth temporally and emotionally; each poem, and each section create their own rules on how the fragments work and give the poems density.
In Cucchi’s work there is a desire to made whole again. To be reborn, to set what was wrong right. This is not done to be didactic, or to preach, but rather with marvel, and wonder. Perhaps it is better to say there is a desire to live, period. In the 2003 poem “Malone Doesn’t Die” Cucchi writes “I’ve always thought that the end/is more important than the beginning/but if the end flows into the beginning/I come out remade.” This is the mystic, the poet as seer, if you will, a motif throughout the later poems that has Cucchi seeking awareness, seeking consciousness. To be present. To be alive. It is essential “to suck upon this one root of the earth/anxiously, to skim over this sludge stain./If not we lose life, present and awareness.” Cucchi’s voice is one that seeks unification. How wonderful to find that he does so through pieces.
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