At the heart of Mancinelli’s work is an exploration of the complexities of human experience, as well as a profound engagement with the natural world. Her poems are suffused with a sense of wonder and reverence for the beauty and mystery of the world around us, while also delving into the more troubling aspects of existence, such as loss, grief, and the transience of life. Through her finely wrought lines and carefully chosen words, Mancinelli invites readers to contemplate the profound questions that lie at the heart of our existence, while also reveling in the sheer beauty of the language she employs. Her poetry is a testament to the power of language to move, inspire, and illuminate, and stands as a testament to the enduring vitality and relevance of the poetic form.
Her poems are marked by a profound lyricism and an ability to create vivid, evocative images that linger long in the mind. Whether exploring the natural world, the mysteries of the human psyche, or the shifting currents of the heart, Mancinelli’s poems are suffused with a sense of wonder and reverence for the world around us, as well as a deep engagement with the fundamental questions of existence. Through her masterful control of language and her unflinching gaze at the world, she offers readers a glimpse into the transcendent beauty and complexity of life, reminding us of the power of poetry to move us, challenge us, and help us make sense of the world we inhabit.
A recent conversation we had with Mancinelli for the project Non solo muse that we curated offers valuable insights into the creative processes and thematic concerns that inform her poetry. In this interview, Mancinelli reflects on the ways in which language can be used to create meaning and capture the essence of human experience, as well as on her own personal journey as a writer. Understanding the context in which her poetry is created and the themes that drive her work can provide readers with a deeper appreciation of her poetic vision and the rich complexity of her language.
Moreover, Mancinelli’s interview can also shed light on the translation of her work into English by John Taylor. As a poet who is deeply invested in the nuances and subtleties of language, Mancinelli’s poetry presents a particular challenge for translators. Reading her reflections on the creative process and the ways in which language shapes our understanding of the world can help readers to appreciate the skill and sensitivity required to translate her work effectively. Ultimately, exploring Mancinelli’s poetry in both the original Italian and in English translation, with the added context provided by her recent interview, is a valuable and rewarding experience that offers insights into the power of language and the complexities of the human experience.
—Adele Bardazzi and Roberto Binetti
We would like to begin this interview with one of your sequences of short prose texts, “A Line Is a Lap and Other Notes on Poetry,” which is particularly dear to us and which can be found in both Italian and English in The Butterfly Cemetery. “A Line Is a Lap” can be read as a declaration of poetics and, at the same time, as a very short, very dense manual of poetry. I am expressing myself in this sense because I find in this sequence a singular truth that takes off from experience and arrives at a more ample discourse on poetic form. The texts seek, as it were, to be a gift to everyone, to become universal matter in the way that great poetry knows how to do. Here is an excerpt, in John Taylor’s translation:
I think that one comes to the end of a line as if it were a lap, while moving inside a measure. A series of movements is repeated until a kind of equilibrium is reached through which one seems not to pass, but rather to be carried. Whoever breaks the movement rules and flounders beyond the established form wears down the body and, in the long run, makes it ache. The splashing sounds out of tune, unneeded. He or she errs out of inability or ignorance. I see several of them on their backs, kicking their legs with bent knees, or constantly running into the line buoys. Actually, all the movements are already written. One’s unique thought is to comply, to eliminate any intention that swerves off course.
Beginning with this metaphorical chain, which reveals an important element in your writing practice, let’s talk about the concepts of measure and breath in poetry. How central are they, if at all, in your poetic practice?
I like to think of poetry as “breath” or “breathing” (“fiato” in Italian), rather than “respiration” (“respiro”), because the word “breathing” is closer to the body’s practical experience, to the energy that allows us to reach the end of a pool, or the top of a mountain, as well as the end of a line of verse. Measure in poetry is given by breathing, by the air that we exhale, that we give back after inhaling, after the “inspiration.” The deeper the “inspiration,” the more oxygen reserve inhaled, the more breathing will allow us to complete a movement of our body in space, a shelter in which meaning can be cared for on the blank page. Within this intrinsic relationship between breath and measure, writing is safe from many risks because it responds first to the body, instead of the ego, obeying forces that go beyond individual identity. With the weakening and exhaustion of breath, writing stops. It leaves room for silence, waiting to regenerate new oxygen reserves, new supplies of meaning.
Many lines and images of my poetry have reached me while I was swimming or walking. Both swimming and walking open out into meditation, allowing us to inhabit a few repeated movements and to adhere to this repetition, until we find ourselves in a larger space where our ego, with its dross, seems to dissolve. When swimming and walking, as well as when writing, we are free but within a measure inscribed in our body, within its boundaries, within its possibilities and limits. The breath that gives us energy sustains us and, at the same time, connects us to the rhythm that governs us like every element of the universe. For this reason, in writing, as well as in swimming and walking, there is a form of obedience to a law greater than ourselves, a law to which we try to adhere with our whole being. It is within this obedience that one becomes rituality, that one can enter that particular state of narcosis to which, more than moving ourselves and accomplishing acts, we are carried. This state created by our endorphins heals us, gives us a form of goodness and joy, a sense of belonging to and reunion with life. It is a form of secular bliss, a possibility of feeling oneself to be part of a plural body, of the community of the living. There is a poem in Mother Dough, my second book, in which the same image of swimming in the pool that you have read at the beginning is translated into verse and opens out into other meanings that transform the pool into a sacred space:
again I dive into the good
blue body of a Sunday
morning, am kind to others who are hairless, eyeless, mute
as on work days in the corridors
with other shadows alongside.
But in this brightness of saliva
chlorine and semen, all of us leaving behind
our shells, stroke after stroke, under the sign
of water, we children enter the church.
My second question also concerns the concept of measure. When you evoke the space of the page through the space of the line of verse and connect this immaterial spatialization to a physical effort, I am reminded of Charles Olson’s notion of “projective verse” and John Cage’s musical theories about silence and speech. With respect to this spatialization of the writing of verse, what value does metre and the use of closed forms have in your poetry? How does your poetry relate to the Italian metric tradition? Are there any models of particular importance to you?
Olson and Cage were not references in my education, but their theories have a profound resonance for me. The facts of thinking, with Olson, of poetry as a “field of action,” and of acknowledging, with Cage, that silence bears meaning as much as words do, are at the origin of my experience of poetry and of the way in which I seek to translate it onto the page. The intensity and authenticity with which poetry can continue to speak to us, and to reach our lives, which are increasingly compromised with virtual reality and marketplace algorithms, depends on the ability of poetry to draw from a primal or “originary” dimension in which it was the ritual expression of the body following a rhythm in order to restore a destroyed or threatened harmony. When this vibration emanating from a body still resonates on the page, then I can trust the words, believe in the images, in the world that they open up. Whether I have written them or am reading them, it’s the same. The page becomes the space of an encounter, of an experience that passes from one body to another one. The rest is a need for individual expression: literature grows like a parasitic plant.
More than metre, rhythm—which is what gives life to the structures and laws of poetry—is fundamental for me. Poetry has a transformative and healing power precisely because it reconnects the human species to the rhythm of the cosmos. Detached from this connection, as often happens to us in our lives, we are weakened, inert, incapable of creative action. Our own bodies, with their sound boxes and bone arches, are instruments that can be tuned by means of poetry. Each line of verse is an attempt to reunite with the harmony that presides over the universe, with that original sound—the “Word” for the Christian tradition, “Om” for the Hindu one—from which everything has been generated and continues to be generated.
Metre in the Italian tradition is certainly present in my ear, through my education and reading, but it does not represent a model or a conscious reference. But I remember how, in the obsessive uncertainty that accompanied the writing of the texts of Mala Kruna, my first book, I found a form of support by resorting to a sort of instinctive, very rudimentary metric: among different possible variants, I entrusted my final decision to calculating syllables by moving my fingers in the air or tapping them on the table. Generally, if I found a hendecasyllable or a septenarius, I relied on that line of verse as if it had in itself a guarantee of solidity amid the constant threat of a landslide that I felt looming over my words, just like the landslides, as I later discovered, in the landscapes that are the most familiar to me, those of the high hills of the Mount San Bartolo area, which collapse into the Adriatic Sea, and of the hills near my hometown of Fano. In these places, sandstone emerges. It is a stone of only apparent solidity, which easily crumbles into sand. I feel that I am made of a similar material, and that my language is as well. This is why I think of the metric that accompanied me, especially in my first book, as the kind of thin metal mesh that covers cliffs and slopes to limit the action of landslides.
Yours is a deeply lyrical style of writing that plays with both poetry and prose: what value does the hybridization of these two forms have in your practice of writing? Is there a hierarchical, even thematic, relationship between these two approaches?
I don’t think there is a hierarchical or thematic relationship between poetry and prose. I write by translating images that I have carried inside me even for as long as several years. At times the images crop up in prose and then are translated into verse; at times the opposite happens: they are born as images in verse and migrate into prose. For example, one image which is very dear to me, that of the imprisoned insect, first generated a prose text consisting of a reflection on poetry; written after the publication of Mala Kruna, this text became a part of the sequence A Line Is a Lap and Other Notes on Poetry. And the same image later resurfaced within a poem in Mother Dough. Working with John Taylor on my collection The Butterfly Cemetery, I realized how this image returns as well, briefly, in another prose piece, “Inside a Horizon of Hills.” In that text, along with the landscape that is dear to me, I recall a period of my adolescence in which an inner distress made me feel a prisoner of my body and my own home. Let me read these three passages:
Lines in a poem are flights of an imprisoned insect. One doesn’t know what has brought the insect through the crack (an unnatural instinct perhaps, a broken compass). Once in the house, it soon realizes that this is not its place.
A line is born when the insect seeks its way out, heading where it sees more light. The end of a line is the insect’s beating against the invisible glass wall. Flights and lines are repeated at an increasingly obsessive pace as the awareness grows that life goes on outside, where one has come from. Flights and lines are failures.
Most insects wear themselves out inside the house: at the end they collapse, giving up, landing dazed from the continuous impacts.
*
like stubborn insects
we keep flying back against this
light that will not open, that smashes us
how much longer will we beat
on the windowpane separating
oxygen from the heart?
*
. . . In those years, without being aware of it, I had slipped inside trousers that I had to tighten, turning back the waistline several times, while my angular shoulders and countable ribs seemed to protect me from any outside attack, as if they were my hardest and most indestructible part, the armor that was granted to me. In the pangs of an obscure pain I would bash between the rooms like an insect that has no escape . . .
Up to and including Mother Dough, my poetry books were written in verse, whereas prose generated reflections on poetics, meditations on places and landscapes, and short autobiographical memories. These are texts that I would like to gather into a book also in Italy, following upon the tracks opened by The Butterfly Cemetery, or waiting for another form of a book to ripen.
After Mother Dough and its high-density language, which had inhabited me, I felt the need to try to allow myself a larger measure, even as, after a contracture, you try to stretch a muscle. But the poetic tongue is an involuntary muscle. I therefore found myself, after a profound initial period of disorientation in which I seemed to be in a halfway zone between poetry and unfinished narration, able to recognize the short prose texts of The Little Book of Passage as poems that have no line breaks and that are gathered into a sussultatory narrative structure punctuated by blank pages, on a circular path, between one sleep and another sleep.
It is only in my recent book, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, that prose and verse alternate, in accordance with the prevailing vision or an attempt at narration. They are mostly prose pieces that are close to a form of poetry which has no line breaks, in which the blankness at the end of the line is replaced by punctuation, and in which the writing obeys a rhythm, an image, or a sequence of guiding images. The prose texts of the first part of the final section, Diary of Passage, are different, more linear and closer to a sort of poetic travel diary. Then there is also fragmentary prose, which has always accompanied me; it is made up of notes and remarks that I place in my notebook, as if in a sack of seeds. This is perhaps where the hybridization between prose and poetry, which has germinated in All the Eyes that I Have Opened, comes from.
Hybridization is a phenomenon that is not limited to the mixture of literary genres, but also affects a practice of writing, a passage from one state to another which the subject (but also the reader) of your poems must undergo: metamorphosis. I am especially thinking of one text in The Little Book of Passage:
There is a small fault line in your chest. When I hug your chest or place my head on it there is this puff of air. It has a woodsy moistness and an earthy smell to it. The nearby mountains with their frozen torrents. Ever since I have heard it, I cannot help but recognize it. Even when high-soaring birds fly one after the other through your voice, marking out a route in the clear sky.
The fault line is inside you, it is widening. A chilly gust of wind blows through your ribs and is decomposing you. You no longer have an ear. Your neck has vanished. Between one shoulder and the other one opens a darkness peopled with shivers, with voices calling out from branch to branch, on a sheer slope uncrossed by human steps.
What is the function of metamorphosis in your poetry and how is it developed in your work?
Answering the question would require the detachment and clarity of someone else’s outside view. Mine is inside writing, where this process of metamorphosis is not finished. I can answer by seeking to adopt the broader gaze that the practice of writing induces over time, opening other eyes inside ours, rather like what happens inside tree trunks, with the passing of the seasons, and on a surface of water shattered by a stone.
When we experience the matter of language, we are in contact with a plurality of meanings that go beyond our consciousness. At the very moment when we try to preserve, with words, a sequence of our experiences or one of our perceptions, other connections, which go beyond our awareness, run through us. These meanings are the depository of other existences which have preceded us over the centuries and which, through their experience and practice of attention, have kept the language alive. For this reason, the principle of metamorphosis is already in the language itself; it is what allows language to continue to speak to a plurality of lives, drawing on multiple meanings which emerge, from time to time, depending on the individual and the quality of his or her ability to listen. I therefore believe that metamorphosis and writing have been deeply connected right from the beginning of my journey, from the very first texts in which I recognized a language that was coming to save me, an ancient cord that I found between my body and a source of originary love.
This is why I think of poetry as a mother tongue that gives us the possibility of being born and reborn, beyond the deaths that we go through in existence. Metamorphosis is this possibility of remaining in the rhythm of life, without letting ourselves be petrified by the Medusa who shows up on our path. This risk of paralysis that the experience of trauma produces is linked to the force that the past exerts on our existence, preventing it from flowing: we turn around and lose Eurydice, our love, or we turn around and become a statue of salt, like Lot’s wife.
At the opposite pole of this statue-like fixedness in which pain imprisons us, there is metamorphosis; its principle is connected to the regeneration of life, to flowing from one form to another, from one state to another, obeying a law of matter that leads us back into a cyclical movement, in the depths of the cosmos. In a poem in the Gleams sequence, I try to translate this threshold state in which everything can be generated, can form a confluence, and become possible again. In fact, this sequence comes after “All the Eyes that I Have Opened”—the title section of the book—through which runs a traumatic emotional relationship.
I’m running. And standing at the crossroads
where it slows down, falls
is transformed by a law of joy.
I don’t believe in partition walls.
I close my eyes, and go through the image.
Within this vision, which comes from closed eyes, from going across the image that we have in front of us, the principle of metamorphosis—of the passage between different forms and states of life—has informed this book. But your question was about my work in general. I believe that the presence of metamorphosis, which is so strong and constant in my writing, is linked to perceiving a form of salvation outside the confines of my body or, even better, linked to the possibility of letting life flow across those confines, and in particular the animal and vegetable forms to which I look, especially in moments of crisis and fragmentation, as depositories of an ancient wisdom, of an instinct to seek light that will allow us to move forward, while recognizing the beginning that is in every end, and the end that is necessary for every beginning. “Men die because they do not know how to unite the beginning with the end,” writes Alcmaeon of Crotone.
Metamorphosis has a function of resistance, of salvation, as happens when the experience of pain is so absolute that it opens paths of transformation, doors that were previously confused with a wall. There is a metamorphic component in pain, as well as in any strong emotion that runs through us. In my books, this component begins with Mala Kruna, becomes more radical in Mother Dough, and then is expressed in a state of suspension and passage, in a desire to belong to an open presence, in The Little Book of Passage. In that book, at the end, I yield words to leaves. Subsequently, in All the Eyes that I Have Opened, the metamorphosis is exploded into the different subjects who speak, as an expression of a single plural subject, similar to a flock of migrating birds.
What are the different changes of state in this process of becoming? I am referring above all to the frequent metamorphoses in the plant world which run through your work.
They are probably open, never fully completed metamorphoses. In Mother Dough, the animal element—especially insects—is perhaps more present, whereas in the The Little Book of Passage and All the Eyes that I Have Opened, the plant-life element is more prevalent. In fact, The Little Book of Passage ends with a sort of partial metamorphosis into a tree, and a tree is also present in one of the two initial epigraphs, this time in its ancient image of an overturned tree, while All the Eyes that I Have Opened contains an entire section in which I look to trees as existential guides and references, sometimes directly giving voice to them, as in the title poem:
from here ways parted
breathing I was growing
in the collapse, something sweet
a hollow of time
all the eyes that I have opened
are the branches that I have lost.
Ever since my adolescence, trees have been for me a protective, reassuring presence: the form of a higher existence than ours, more ancient, more faithful to its function as an antenna, as a conductor between the earth and the sky. This is why I call them “master trees”, because they exemplify the posture that we humans must keep. We are, as Plato writes in Timaeus, “not terrestrial but celestial plants,” rooted in the sky and inhabiting the earth only through this deep connection. Trees teach us that every loss, every wound, is a possibility of vision, an eye that opens in our body, guiding us to grow towards our space of light. They are, literally, the masts of our terrestrial ship, and it is thanks to them that it continues to sail, even if this is often forgotten. In storms, in times of danger, they are strong points to cling to.
I believe that until now, this process of metamorphosis has led me from the human form—more present in Mala Kruna, where the directly autobiographical content is also stronger—to animal and, finally, plant-life forms. But this simplification is not entirely accurate: my recent book, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, is also the one in which the wound experienced by human beings is perhaps the most open and evident. In any case, if these changes of state have a direction, it is one of getting through pain and becoming able to sprout, to be reborn.
What kind of subject originates from this continuous process of change and evolution?
At times the subject adheres to the body in which it lives and, at other times, instinctively frees itself from its body in order to seek a wider presence inhabiting what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “inter-being”: an existence that is given in connection with others, with other living forms, in the fabric of the cosmos. My book All the Eyes that I Have Opened is the one that most seeks to adhere to this universal weaving. The subject who writes is plural and in constant transformation, like a flock of migrating birds that “cannot scatter itself / puts itself back together at every turn.” This is the image which, beginning with the epigraph, guides through the eight sections of the book, in which the same wound, the same question, reverberates through different subjects and states of being. The violence which a migrant woman undergoes, in a woods on the border between Serbia and Croatia, passes through the “master trees” and their wounded eyes, as well as a “love-error relationship” (which returns to the “dark room”), and finally speaks, in the last sequence, through the liminal, suspended condition experienced by a woman in her solitary, rarefied daily life. The gaze enters this wound, moves away from it, observes it through dream images, in other spaces and subjects, sees how it can heal itself and how it can open up again.
In the subjects which speak in this book, my biographical identity is present at times in a more direct way; at other times, it is more filtered: for example, a fragment of my experience can come in and encounter another element of reality with which it is in syntony, and inhabit it, giving voice to it. They are different forms of the same presence which, at times, remains centered on its own existential vicissitudes and, at other times, transcends them, experiencing them as irradiating in other elements of the universe.
As I was sitting on the floor and searching for the structure of this book, I realized how even sequences which I thought were more remote, because they resulted from specific writing projects, were in fact traversed by the same vibration. Such is the case of the fragments dedicated to Saint Lucia, in which the topic of violence experienced in the body returns alongside the main theme of the book: seeing. This is also true of the fragments devoted to ancient votive statuettes, where the theme of belonging to a place, of taking root—the opposite pole of the migrating and transmigrating that runs through the book—again resurfaces. Probably, from Mala Kruna to All the Eyes that I Have Opened, the subject has gone from a greater adhesion to biographical identity to a progressive detachment in which emerges a plural and open presence that is transformed according to the cosmic currents.
In Western literature, metamorphosis has often been a condition experienced, usually by a female character, as an act of violence (as, for example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). In this regard, can we connect the theme of metamorphosis to a possible link between biological gender and the writing of poetry? Does this type of tension exist within your writing? Can we spot some stylistic features that can be reconnected to the label of “women’s writing” or should this link be rejected?
I had never stopped paying attention to this aspect of metamorphosis. It is true that in Ovid it is a way of salvation, the only remaining possibility for a female subject to survive the (physical or psychic) violence exerted by a man or a god as an expression of desire (I am thinking, for example, of Daphne), or of the denial of desire, as in the myth of Echo. But it is also often the male subject, usually a god, the great Jupiter, who takes on other appearances to seduce and conquer one of his passing loves. In any event, I feel my own experience resonating over the centuries in those ancient female figures who transform themselves to continue living, or who are subjected to the metamorphosis of the Other as an instrument of deception and possession. The close connection that I experience between writing and metamorphosis probably comes from the need to face up to a wound that inhabits the body and that asks for a transformation, an amplified form of existence, freed from its own confines.
A voice to which has fallen the lot of being given a woman’s body: I think in these terms of the link between biological gender and writing. My body, which is marked by the experiences of a contemporary Italian woman (and we could continue with other characteristics of my autobiographical experience), cares for a voice, tries not to disperse it, not to silence it in the face of the difficulties and limits of everyday life and of this historical climate. From this stance, inhabiting my body, I inherit the silence of the women who have preceded me over the centuries, whose voices could not emerge, overwhelmed as they were by material tasks, by the impossibility of being listened to and acknowledged.
For centuries the experience of womanhood has been confronted with the negation, the absence, the cancellation of oneself, with the silence and the sacrifice of one’s voice in order to give birth to life with one’s body and to support life concretely—through the daily work required by life. If we try to think of a kind of writing that faces up to this baggage of experience—which has continued more or less unchanged over the centuries—can we recognize some common elements, some common aspects? Perhaps indeed, but in a terrain that must be redefined each time, starting with the irreducible singularity of each voice, with its relationship to the body that houses it and with the female and male energy that belongs to the human species.
In any case, from this vantage point, I can recognize some central features in my writing: the fundamental role of silence (in the blank pages that punctuate my books, in my fragmentary texts, and in my desire to cut back to the essence when I am writing), the importance of everyday gestures (for me, poetry is just one of those simple, essential gestures that keep us alive), the presence of a subject who tends to sacrifice her own individuality, to disappear to make room for the Other. However, it would of course be stretching things to read these aspects only through the lens of the “feminine.”
Sometimes I have inadvertently used the masculine gender, as if from a dimension that naturally emerged, claiming its fragment of space, of voice. This happened in Mother Dough, in only one text, where the suffix of one word, “nudo” (“naked”), which qualifies the subject of the text, is masculine. Thanks to an attentive reader, I noticed this after the book had been published.
mother and father fallen
fruits that couldn’t rot
attached to me
while naked I learned
to hold up the sky
like a bird with its back, letting
fields and houses go under.
The blue returns
to cover the earth. I keep
the memory in my beak,
the seed they have been.
I believe that the experience of artistic creation takes us to a liminal state in which female and male traits, human and animal features, emerge in us at the same time; it is an ancient and sacred condition, portrayed by Hindus in their divinities in all its complexity and richness. In such moments, it is as if we had more arms, more hands holding different objects, as if were suddenly present, together with the gesture that we are making, also that which gave birth to it, that which could have been done and did not happen, that which our ancestors would have wanted for us; all this is present in the air at the same instant. Poetic language condenses this multidimensionality and plurality of lives, of possible openings, like passages that lead to other passages.
