Gian Mario Villalta on ‘Rhythm’ and ‘The Voice of Poetry’

January 18, 2006 Rhythm

When we look at a poem, we skim over the words and when we are disappointed because no miracle has occurred (who knows what we expect anyway?) we conclude that it’s nothing much, that it doesn’t interest us.

And it’s logical that things are this way, given that in poetry it is precisely the profound movement of the language, which becomes voice, tone and emotion that makes up the sense of the text.In reading, the mental ‘registration’ of the text’s words comes before we immerse ourselves in the rhythm of the language, since the rhythm contributes something more that simple meaning.It is, in fact, the rhythm that brings to completion the comprehension of the words’ sense. By saying sense, I intend the literal meaning plus the sensation of being inside the live voice of the language, plus the force of persuasion of the language itself, plus emotion in which it involves us. It is necessary to savour the text in the language’s profound movement in order for it to reveal its efficacy.

Rhythm is not ‘metrics’, that is, the accents of a particular text, nor the articulation of the tonic pulses of singular words. The verse is a special field of tension. But even the phrase and the sentence in prose are fields of tension.

It is precisely this field of tension that gives birth to rhythm. This rhythm is not only the sonorous outline, but also the force that is incorporated in the language that is ongoing, which is voice, and thus an emotionally significant sonority.

The descriptive usefulness of schematisations is undeniable in the study of metrics and versification, but it cannot be confused with the live substance, which is also made up of the meaning and the ‘weight’ that every word acquires in the verse. It would be like confusing the huge manual that describes our favourite car down to the last screw with the car itself, and then to expect that the manual take us for a ride in the country.

The lack of knowledge of a poetic form’s terminology and descriptive rules does not at all preclude a correct perception and an exceptional sensitivity toward a poem. This is natural but perhaps it is necessary to state it.

It is also natural to say that he who is ignorant as far as terminology and descriptive rules are concerned must however have sufficient experience and sensitivity to recognise the movements in the rhythm of language, in any case.

Awkward attempts to describe versification generate more misunderstanding than comprehension. If the verse is a recognisable figure of sound, its reality, however, as was already stated, is a field of tension, marked by the opening words and the “new lines” but incorporated in every sonorous and semantic element of the sequence.


The voice of poetry

Satellite communication, information networks, exponential mobility of financial capital, of corporations, people and merchandise: does this linking together of systems and events, which we superficially call ‘globalisation’, weigh on our imagination, on our ways of communicating with the ‘other’ and on the awareness of our identity itself?

One can only answer yes.

And the speed with which these transformations are asserting themselves only accelerates the process of this crisis.

The first important consequence has already been presented: even the whole of narrations, of expressive forms and models of reference become globalised. The idea of a “mobile horizon” of reference erodes the space occupied by the concept of ‘tradition’. For poets born in the second half of the century, for example, formative readings were frequently of non-Italian poets. And they coexisted (not as acquisitions of the ‘foreign’ but as one’s ‘own’ experience) alongside a patrimony of sounds and images broadened beyond measure to places and ways of life that were distant in both time and space. At the same time, the need to give unity to this enormous range of impulses caused the actual sensation of “feeling that the earth has been pulled out from under our feet,” with the shattering of the tie of coherence between the time and place of one’s own existence. An example of this is a childhood that has been monopolised by the daily ritual of the American television series or the Japanese cartoon (yes, even poets watched cartoons as children).

Just as our outlook has multiplied over different realities, the bond of coherence between the place where we act and the imaginary has grown weaker.

The general backlash is that of an exasperation of a threatened identity, which brings one to stress the accent on the ‘localized’ particularity of one’s own existence.

The phenomenon of ‘localization’ is not at all conflicting with respect to ‘globalisation’. On the contrary, it is consistent with it on all levels, in the effort to counterbalance the difficulties in recognising oneself in a unitary configuration of the ‘here’ and the ‘elsewhere’, respect to the meaning and the efficacy of one’s own feeling and acting.

Few are amazed that in the era of globalisation it is so difficult to leave one’s home, as shown in late forms of pseudosymbolist intimism or pseudodialectical “culture of roots”. At the same time, no one is very much amazed that things that have already been done and heard are habitually reproposed, always in the same latitude, with no ties to the life and language of the writer. This is not easy irony, it is the irony of the era, which comprises and determines us.

The loss of this primary and founding sense of ‘place’, intended as that which delineates a unitary and coherent horizon of one’s own life, constitutes one of the fundamental themes of the major poets of the last century. This has already been happening ever since the profound trauma caused by World War I, which subsequent events deepened and made chronic. How did poetry respond?

With T.S. Eliot, or Ezra Pound, poetry countered the disintegration of Tradition (which we have already written with a capital T) with the attempt to reconstitute a new relationship with the individual and the community, by proposing a new pronunciation of the notion of ‘tradition’ founded on poetry itself and on the community of readers.

But Mandelstam and Celan did a very similar thing, in the extreme tragedy of a word that desperately refers to the language’s vocation of appeal in its poetic form. In yet a different way, Milosz and Brodski did a similar thing, and Zanzotto and Heaney are doing so right now.

Each of these poets has tried to give voice to his own present by conjuring up a constellation of voices around him, voices that are both far away and close in time and space, in which a plurality of recognisable references can still resound. Each of these poets has asked and asks that his own readers carry out an individual journey in feeling and comprehending.

In this perspective, in fact, the reader cannot just be the accomplice to a cultural discourse that takes place prior to and outside the text, and that makes the text an exemplary test-bed of general and easily consistent choices such as “I like this, this and this, and therefore this is the poetry for me.” An aesthete of the late 19th century or a neo-avant-gardist of the sixties could do such a thing, but not a man or woman of today.

Even less sensible would be a world of reader-consumers who turn to the cultural industry to find free time pleasures or to bovinely feel a part of a tendency that is celebrated in the headlines of newspaper supplements.

It seems that we are not given the chance to go to a bookstore, or to a teacher or a friend with a passion for literature in order to ask for the books by the best poets, to find out what is the poetry that talks of our present.

The bookseller, the teacher, the person with a passion for literature, can only suggest readings that are the beginning, just the beginning of an experience. Or they can share and compare their experience with ours.

It is an experience that is played between solitude and harmony, between distance and friendship.Reading has the ability to leave us alone, defenceless, and ignorant. At first it leaves us far from meaning, as rarely occurs on other occasions. But in this solitude, in this distance, one begins to distinguish one’s own voice from others, one measures the closeness.

If Kafka asked a book not to provide the pleasure of reading but “to break the icy sea that is inside of us,” yet again we must subvert the apparent order of common discourse. We listen to the voice of poetry on the limit of a dispute, not of harmony, because harmony is the result of taking and giving, of listening and of a pronunciation, inside our voice, of another’s voice.

In the voice of poetry there is also a profound friendship, an outlook on the world that involves our emotions, that becomes shared memory.


Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo