I Novissimi: Poetry for the Sixties - Softcover

Literary Nonfiction. "At the time this anthology was being conceived an explicit tendency towards a new poetics did not exist. A group of poets had not rallied around the project of a new style. Nor did I ever have the intention to put one together. I simply had identified the formative nucleus shared by certain authors, extremely different one from the other, who had arrived at their own programmatic ideas independent of each other. I called that nucleus: schizomorphic vision. This means: to intensify the expression of discontinuity in the imaginative process, to employ a ruptured syntax and weave dissonant propositions within a completely semanticized metric texture. It means: to give a rhythm to heterogeneous lexicons, to the short circuiting of events, to the perpetually disturbed nexuses of reality. Naturally, this was the critical invention that enabled me to put together five authors as disparate as we were; and that enabled me to write my best poems after the anthology appeared. The schizomorphic vision was not an expedient, was not a gimmick. It was the only serious way to tie method and madness into a single knot. The only psychological, psychiatric, philosophical, historical way possible. And poetically appropriate."—Alfredo Giuliani

Luigi Ballerini divides his life between Milano and New York. He has taught modern and contemporary Italian Literature at New York University, University of California (Los Angeles) and Yale. His essays range from medieval and contemporary poetry, Futurism, and contemporary Italian sculpture (see his Apollo, figlio di Apelle, Marsilio, 2017) to Renaissance conviviality. His collected poems have been published by Mondadori in 2016. His new translation of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology was also published by Mondadori in 2016. His anthology Those Who from afar Look like Flies (an anthology of Italian Poetry from Pasolini to the present, co-edited by Beppe Cavatorta) is forthcoming from The University of Toronto Press. He is the author of CEPHALONIA (Rail Editions, 2016) and co-editor of I NOVISSIMI. POETRY FOR THE SIXTIES (Agincourt Press, 2017).