Amelia Rosselli’s The Dragonfly is a tour de force, a powerful composition of the Italian poet’s singular multilingualism, musicality, and vertiginous travels around language, in which she reaches the heights of ecstatic sensuality to speak of the deepest violences. This major work has recently been republished by the independent Entre Ríos Books via Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard’s mesmerizing translation, and in this following interview, Woodard divulges on Rosselli’s experimental style, the politics amidst the lyricism, and the extent to which the poet’s personal reality inhabited her work.
Eva Heisler (EH): What an experience reading The Dragonfly! The long poem meanders, sometimes circles, but never settles. In “Metrical Spaces,” an essay Rosselli wrote around the same time as this poem, she says: “I noted strange thickenings in the rhythmicity of my thought, strange arrests, strange coagulations and changes of tempo, strange intervals of rest or absence of action; new sonorous and ideal fusions in accordance with the changing of practical time, of graphic spaces and of the spaces surrounding me continually and materially.” This description is strikingly on par with my own experience of the poem as a voice on the move, passing through rooms and streets and texts. Can you say more about the relationship between these two texts?
Deborah Woodard (DW): “Metrical Spaces” is key to understanding what Rosselli is up to in this “poemetto,” or long poem. Both texts illustrate Rosselli’s experimental poetics—or rather, “Metrical Spaces” is the theory, while The Dragonfly serves as the theory’s exhibit A. Rosselli was searching for a poetics that would be less constraining than formal verse, which she calls neo-classicism, yet be more rigorous than free verse and the surrealism that evolved in the early twentieth century, and which she viewed as somewhat played out or “too easy.”
Basically, as the title “Metrical Spaces” indicates, allotment of space on the page serves as the poem’s (visual) metrics. As my co-translator, Roberta Antognini, has noted, The Dragonfly was originally published in an IBM font, which tended to make each word take up an equal amount of space—a crucial insight for understanding Rosselli’s spatial poetics. For Rosselli, the unit of composition is the word, and the first line of the poem determines the form, or the approximate length of subsequent lines.
Rosselli read Objectivist poet and theorist Charles Olson in her mid-twenties, a few years before writing the first draft of The Dragonfly in 1958, and she appears to have embraced Olson’s theory of projective verse and composition by field. Olson writes: “Then the poem itself must at all points be a high energy construct, and, at all points, an energy discharge. So how is the poet to accomplish same energy. . . what is the process by which the poet gets in at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place. . . ?” Olson goes on to say: “I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.”
For Rosselli, as for Olson, it is the typewriter that makes possible composition by field, enabling spacial precision via layout and allotment of white space, and serving as key to the author’s ear and breath. Rosselli describes working on the typewriter in terms that make it sound akin to a musical instrument, referring at the close of “Metrical Spaces” to timbres and tempos, and “writing faster than light.” Rosselli was a serious student of music, and around this time she was making the choice to give up music, in part due to financial constraints but also in response to her growing sense that she’d be able to find publishers and make her way as a poet. Not long afterwards, she sold her musical instruments, making a clean, if difficult, break and transferring her musical acumen to her verse. The Dragonfly is the most propulsive of Rosselli’s works; its narrative unfurls at quite a clip, and one can imagine the poem “scrolling off” the typewriter platen as she typed.
From start to finish, Rosselli explores the terrain of the page in blistering fashion, incorporating bits and pieces of vivid yet often enigmatic scenes in something akin to an oneiric film montage. We feel, or at least I do, the power of these sampled locations, whether geographical or literary (she riffs on her literary influences—notably Campana, Montale, Scipione, and Rimbaud).
EH: The subtitle of The Dragonfly is “Panegyric to Liberty.” Is there a political subtext to the poem? How do you understand her claim that the poem is a “panegyric”?
DW: In an interview with Gabriella Caramore, Rosselli explains that “panegyric” is a pun on passing the bread at dinners with her friends. “Pane” is bread and “gyric” is pass. Caramore responded with something along the lines of “Hmm, I missed that one.” And thus we’re treated to Rosselli’s sense of humor, which was considerable. At the same time, bread is sustenance, and breaking bread with others may resonate with the cast of writers with whom she shares lyric refrains. The poem itself may be the table.
EH: How do you understand Rosselli’s use of the term “liberty”? I think of political liberty, but also creative liberty—and perhaps the two are related. These lines had the feel of an ars poetica: “so what new liberty / do you search for among weary words?”
DW: The word for dragonfly in Italian is “libellula,” and “libellula” contains the words for both libel (Rosselli taking liberties with her source authors) and for little book (which is what the poemetto is). These liberties comprise the lynchpin of the work. In effect, she’s praising her own act of libel.
The Dragonfly is concerned with political liberty, as well. In the Rosselli family, intellectual pursuits and political commitment weren’t viewed as incompatible. In exile, Rosselli’s father and uncle—the Rosselli brothers, Carlo and Nello—discussed what they were reading and asked their mother, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, to send them more books.
Additionally, Rosselli may libeling—lambasting—the insipid work of the poets of her generation, work she likely finds inadequate politically, as well:
. . .not even a cautious inquiry
lets us hide our most earthy flaws,
as for instance raving in slipshod
rhymes, or weeping on the crooked walls of our
ambitions. . .
EH: Throughout the poem, there’s a perpetual opening to, or attention to, both literary spaces—the spaces of other texts—as well as physical spaces. The opening sentence ends with the decision to “take / the leap toward a more difficult farewell.” I am tempted to read the entire poem as this difficult farewell, a taking leave of something, an ongoing process of leave-taking. What do you make of beginning the poem with “farewell”? (The end of the poem, its penultimate sentence, refers to the summit “behind / the tent of farewells.” So, we circle back to “good-byes.” I love the image of a farewell as a tent, a temporary shelter.)
DW: A farewell is, indeed a temporary shelter. Farewell is central to the poem. The opening of the poem, the threshold, is worth examining in detail:
The holiness of the holy fathers was a product so
pied that I decided to sweep aside every doubt
from my mind too clearly clear and take
the leap to a more difficult farewell, And it was
then that the holy see took the trouble to take
the plunges, I don’t know how, but it left me dazed.
And it was then that our dead’s poor remains
rhymed wholly in a violent echoing,
oh I sing in the streets but only the holy father
knows where all of this will end. And you you’ll bring your
holy troubles on your knees to that confessor
of yours and he’ll give you that blessed benediction
that I wish were made of bread and oil. . .
Basically, we have farewells in the form of burials. The burial of Pope Pius XII took place in October of 1958, and the occasion may be commemorated in the opening imagery of The Dragonfly: “And all the tapers of the holy fathers were ablaze.” As this visual panorama is evoked, we’re also told: “And it was then that our dead’s poor remains / rhymed wholly in a violent echoing.” I can’t escape the sense that the church, and perhaps the patriarchal structures it represents (holiness is called a product in the opening line!) are somewhat ironically presented here. To this day, Pius XII remains a controversial figure who some argue failed to use the full power of the Papal bully pulpit to condemn the deportation of Jews to death camps during WWII. Whether or not Rosselli is referring to Pope Pius XII, what can be said with certainty is that she favors the music of “our poor dead’s remains” over the pageant-filled visual farewell.
The word Rosselli chooses for “remains” is “salme,” and, to my ear, “salme” resonates with the “psalm”; it wouldn’t surprise me if Rosselli were thinking in English at this point, something that the trilingual (Italian, English, French) poet often did. And Rosselli was certainly thinking of some very private remains. The Dragonfly starts with the “more difficult farewell” to her father Carlo Rosselli and her uncle Nello Rosselli who, while living in exile in France, were assassinated by order of Mussolini, their mutilated bodies later discovered in a ditch. When I talk to Italians about The Dragonfly, they almost invariably say that Rosselli is writing about her own father in the opening lines, not just the holy fathers.
Carlo and Nello’s bodies were eventually repatriated to Italy, though they were taken to Florence, not Rome. The reverberations, the groundswell of Rosselli’s elegiac song, aren’t, however, bound by geographical location. The long farewell which began with their deaths in 1937 when Amelia was seven years old is referenced here and is the wellspring from which this poem proceeds. Rosselli never fully recovered from this tragedy. Any shelter from grief, including the shelter of language, is transitory.
EH: Who would you say is being addressed in the poem? At any given point in the poem, there’s a clear sense that “you” is a specific addressee, but sometimes it feels like a lover, or another writer, a rival perhaps; other times it seems to be an authority figure, and other times it sounds like she’s addressing the abstract notion of liberty.
DW: All of the above, I’d say. Often Rosselli appears to be invoking an I-thou relationship, but she switches from a singular to plural “you” not infrequently, and all that can be said on this front is that she may be destabilizing the notion of a unified other, let alone a unified self. In translating the poem, I went from saying “You all” to the more sedate “All of you,” to trusting that the imperative would do the trick. As I revised “All of you must find Ortensia: her mechanics is ejaculatory / solitude” became simply “Find Ortensia. . .”
EH: What was Rosselli’s process for writing the poem?
DW: The poem was written at white heat and then meticulously augmented and condensed. After some years of moving from Roman neighborhood to neighborhood, Rosselli was able to purchase a small apartment in Trastevere, a beautiful district then and now, with money she had inherited following the death of her grandmother. In an interview with Guido Galeno, she says, “I had fifteen days of happiness, of inspiration. . .” She also refers to The Dragonfly as “a river of language, never to be repeated.”
The original text of The Dragonfly likely ran to a hundred pages. One excerpt from the original draft was published in verri, a literary journal, under the title The Dragonfly (fragment). It’s an earlier version of the “dissipate” passage, which takes as its spunto, or point of departure, a line from Montale’s “Mediterraneo”: Dissipate if you wish / this feeble, lamenting life.” In the final version, Rosselli condensed her riff on Montale from a hundred to fifty lines, breaking the passage into unnumbered segments. The white space thus introduced creates a jagged yet powerful effect. The passage we end up with is brilliant and scathing. It’s an open invitation to “dissipate,” however one might take that. The omitted material (in brackets below) feels somewhat more autobiographical, for instance with its reference to the mother—Rosselli’s mother, Marion Cave, died when Amelia was nineteen—and, though there’s nothing particularly off in terms of any one individual line, threatens to bog the reader down.
Just to give you a taste of how the text changed, here’s a segment from the passage, with the original lines italicized and in brackets:
dissipate the wind that brings back
the past, brings back the fresh breeze
that speaks of the mother and tells them not to fear;
dissipate fear and dissipate the cold, erase
hunger, erase the anger that keeps me enchained]
dissipate the horror, shift horror into goodness. Dissipate
if you wish this feeble, lamenting life, but I can’t find you,
and don’t dare to dissipate myself. Dissipate if you can,
if you know, if you have the time
and the desire, if it’s the case, if it’s possible, if
you don’t faintly lament, my unlamenting life…
At the release party for Roberta Antognini’s and my translation, Anthony Warnke, a poet and singer, sang this passage in the style of a jazz standard. His rendition was memorable, and my guess is that he wouldn’t have chosen to perform the original hundred lines. Jazz standards rely on getting to the pith of experience, after all.
EH: The very last line is an astounding set of imperatives to ruin house, bird, ink, archangels. How do you make sense of her use of the verb “to ruin”?
DW: The insistence on “ruin” speaks out again the poem as finished and priceless artifact, as though Rosselli were deliberately sweeping the poem off a coffee table onto the floor and reveling in its splintered condition. And yet, the poem was constructed from fragments and from memories of what was irretrievably broken: the deaths in her family. I find this repetition at the close to be curiously satisfying and cathartic. It simply feels right.
Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star, 2006), Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). Her chapbook, Hunter Mnemonics (hemel press, 2008), was illustrated by artist Heide Hinrichs. Her poetry has appeared in Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013) and in American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry (edited by Lillien Waller, Stockport Flats, 2011), Filter, Handsome, Gargoyle, Shake the Tree, Zoland Poetry, and elsewhere. With Roberta Antognini, she has translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli from the Italian in Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015), Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018), and The Dragonfly (Entre Rios Books, 2023). Deborah teaches at Hugo House, a literary center in Seattle and co-curates the reading series Margin Shift: Friends in Poetry.
Eva Heisler has published two books of poetry: Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press) and Drawing Water (Noctuary Press). Honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award and fellowships at MacDowell and Millay Arts. Poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Seneca Review. She was co-winner of the 2021 Poetry International Prize and, most recently, Smartish Pace awarded her the 2023 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She served as Asymptote’s visual arts editor from 2014-2022.
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