The Italian postwar experimentalism proves recalcitrant to this assimilationist ideology in both form and theme. In its early phase, it was called the “neoavantgarde” for its return to modernist movements like Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism in order to develop a highly discontinuous poetic discourse that reflected on its cultural and social situation. In the preface to I novissimi, Giuliani outlined the experimental project as a leftwing cultural politics: language is fractured in a “schizomorphic vision” (“visione schizomorfa”) which simultaneously registers and resists the mental dislocations and illusory representations of consumer capitalism (Giuliani 1961:xviii). Edoardo Sanguineti’s poetry, to take one example, is a frenetic stream of episodes in the poet’s life, allusions to contemporary figures and events, excerpts and applications of his readings in philosophy, literature, psychology, and social theory, punctuated with found language and references to popular culture. The experimentalism in this initial phase circulated widely in magazines and anthologies, a book series with a large trade press (Feltrinelli), and several public meetings that received substantial media attention. And the experiments took varied forms, not only writing that was much more plurivocal and heterogeneous than anything produced by Montale, but also visual poetry and collage, computer-generated texts and performance.
Experimentalism encompasses diverse poetries, and my periodizations and cultural genealogies inevitably give too neat an account (which, moreover, is interested on this occasion, pitched to demonstrate a deviation from Montale). The common experimental thread is the use of formal discontinuity to address philosophical problems raised by language, representation, and subjectivity, resembling in this such contemporary French developments as the nouveau roman and the emergence of poststructuralist thinking, especially in politicized versions, with the Tel Quel group. Indeed, the immense importance of politics to the neoavantgarde has led Christopher Wagstaff to suggest that “when, in 1968, Italy seemed to offer significant opportunities for direct political action,” the movement “saw its raison d’être disappear,” as evidenced by the demise {283} of a central magazine, the increasing affiliations with established cultural and academic institutions, and, most tellingly, a theoretical and practical redirection (Wagstaff 1984:37).
The second experimentalist phase avoided explicit political engagement to develop more speculative projects with distinct philosophical roots (existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism), exploring the conditions of human consciousness and action in powerfully indeterminate texts. The renewed emphasis on textuality was sometimes given a political inflection in theoretical statements, particularly by members of the first experimentalist phase. In an anthology that surveys Italian poetry during the 1970s, Porta argued that “the reaffirmation of the linguistic force of the I resolves the problem of the interactions between poetry and society, between poetry and reality, because the poetic I is never merely ‘personal’ but, just like the author, is a linguistic-collective event” (Porta 1979:27). In general, however, the post-1968 experimentalism didn’t resort to the left-wing theorizations of the neoavantgarde, but rather pursued the “enamored word,” as the title of one important anthology indicates, turning it into a site of uncontrollable polysemy, exposing and destabilizing the multiple determinations of subjectivity—linguistic, cultural, social (Pontiggia and DiMauro 1978). In doing this, some poets returned to the formal and thematic innovations of hermeticism, its oblique means of signification, its penchant for climactic moments. This is clear in Milo De Angelis’s case: drawing not merely on hermeticism, but on such other European poets as René Char and Paul Celan, he pushes modernist fragmentation to an extreme that threatens intelligibility even while proliferating meaning.
Perhaps a poem by De Angelis, “Lettera da Vignole” (“Letter from Vignole”), can indicate how he at once resembles and differs from the early Montale. It too issues from a friendship between the poet and a woman engaged in literary activity, although not a Dantista. This is Marta Bertamini, who collaborated with De Angelis on the experimentalist magazine he founded, niebo (1977–1984), and on a translation from the Latin (Claudian, The Rape of Proserpine). Vignole is the Italian town near the Austrian border where she was born.
Knowing the allusion in the title doesn’t much help to fix the meaning of this poem. The pronouns support multiple subjectivities. A word like “inverno” (“winter”) sets up a fertile intertextual/ intersubjective chain: it suggests a key motif in several poets, notably Celan and Franco Fortini (1917–), an Italian writer of politically engaged cultural criticism and verse who early expressed his admiration of De Angelis. Although De Angelis frequently takes specific episodes in his own life as points of departure, his experimental poetics renders them both impersonal and interpersonal, thickening the representation with an intricate network of images and allusions that construct relations to {285} other poetic discourses, other poetic subjects, challenging any facile reduction of the text to autobiography (whether the poet’s or the reader’s).