Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

's poetry offers a further approach to an understanding of the lyric as it is reconfigured in contemporary practice. In contrast to Charles Bernstein's 'ideolectical' construction of the lyric and its revision as a polyphonic score, Palmer's ambition is to create a composition that has 'nothing at its center.' 1 Palmer's poetry and poetics gesture to the lyric as 'nobody's voice' and this apparent evacuation is a direct antithesis to Bernstein's multiplicity of ideolects. But 'nobody's voice' is not just the voice of no one; Palmer's explanation posits one directly within a context of European lyricism and a tradition he identifies as 'the analytic lyric'. Paul Celan becomes a key figure in Palmer's consideration of the lyric self in language: His response to the discourse of totalitarianism is to create out of the German Expressionist tradition a body of intensely concentrated lyric poetry which addresses the reconstruction of human speech. I was very much moved by the sense of the dispersal of the subject, but also the reaffirmation, the fact that it was nobody's voice and yet it was, also, somethingagain and again and again. 2

Quale rapporto si è instaurato, fin dagli anni Cinquanta del Novecento, fra un genere letterario millenario e i mezzi di comunicazione di cui ci siamo circondati? Possono i nuovi media mettere davvero a repentaglio la nostra idea di poesia, magari anche solo separando il suo destino da quello del libro cartaceo? Attraverso i quattordici saggi che lo compongono, il presente volume prende in considerazione le potenzialità e gli esiti dell’incontro della poesia con internet e il mondo digitale, ma anche – facendo un passo indietro – con il cinema e la televisione. Si delinea così un quadro articolato, in cui la scrittura poetica affronta ambiti tematici prima inesplorati e nuovi universi di riferimento. I componimenti si aprono a supporti materiali diversi e a nuove soluzioni tecniche, oppure – viceversa – testimoniano una strenua resistenza del codice. I testi trovano ulteriori modalità di produzione, diffusione e ricezione. Con uno sguardo rivolto a esperienze letterarie italiane e internazionali, e collegando le tracce di un percorso diacronico, "Poesia e nuovi media" riflette su alcune questioni centrali per il discorso poetico e non solo, come la relazione fra autore e testo, le forme della soggettività e la costruzione dell’io lirico, i fondamenti su cui si basa il patto con il lettore.


Il volume raccoglie Interventi di Damiano Frasca, Christine Ott, Caroline Lüderssen, Paolo Zublena, Gian Luca Picconi, Paolo Giovannetti, Alessandro Scarsella, Lena Schönwälder, Emanuele La Rosa, Elisa Unkroth, Bettina Thiers, Katarina Rempe, Katiuscia Darici e Martina Daraio. Il saggio introduttivo è di Francesco Giusti.

The shaman’s song is reflected in epical literature in the theme of the Otherworldly Journey. As recorded by ethnologists, the shaman’s song, a record of as well as engagement with such a journey, summons up a bizarre dreamscape populated by fantastic beings, and engages with a specialized poetics employing linguistic paradox, trance-inducing rhythms, and nonsense words—these last considered by shamans to be a “secret language.” Alice Notley’s contemporary descent myth The Descent of Alette has strong ties to the ancient Sumerian Descent of Inanna as well as to the Gnostic myth of Sophia’s descent into matter to affect the redemption of humankind. I show Inanna’s connection to shamanic praxis and Gnostic mythology, and read Alette’s journey as a crisis vision, in order to argue for the existence of a shamanic poetics, a special way of using language as a healing medium and vehicle of myth. Notley’s post-modern epic placed alongside the extremely ancient Inanna myth-cycle reveals the shaman’s perennial theme of the Otherworldly Journey ever reconfigured according to the artist/healer’s relationship to a specific culture, and that culture’s relationship to the shamanic paradigm.