Bluestocking Oxford

By Silvia Cercarelli

Patrizia Cavalli (1947-2022), one of the most potent poetic voices of Italian contemporary literature, perfectly embodies the ennui of post-war twentieth-century Europe as much as the peculiar disillusion of ‘zillennials’, the generation that bridges Millennials and Gen Z. ‘Sono obbligata spesso in umiltà / a piegarmi all amia noia / alla sua semplicità’, (‘I am often compelled out of humility / to bend over to my boredom / its simplicity’ trans. mine). Born and raised in Todi, Umbria, Cavalli moved to Rome in her early twenties to major in Philosophy and lived there ever since, taken on by an international community of cat-loving poets, artists, and intellectuals. If Cavalli’s poems were paintings, their background would be a patchwork of Roman cafés, food markets, slow mornings, aimless bike rides, but also everyday domestic settings, languid cats and lazy awakenings, stray thoughts and unleashed melancholy.

Far from celebrating the timeless charm of Fellini’s Rome, Cavalli provides snippets of a routinous, almost wearying existence, in which sparkles of excitement, paradoxically, only seem to emerge out of missed opportunities, faded enthusiasms and lost encounters – ‘Volevo soltanto la certezza / […] dell’occasione persa’ (‘I only longed for the certainty / […] of a missed opportunity’, trans. mine). The spaces and places in which Cavalli’s verses unfold, become perfect metaphors for the disenchantment that animates the situations evoked. Even when the setting is a public environment, the ordinary “dullness” of private life seems to penetrate and colonize the potentially extraordinary nature of the public scene, like in the poem Very Simple Love: ‘io non ti tocco, no, neanche ti sfioro / ma nel tuo corpo mi sembra di nuotare, / e il divano di quel bar salotto / quando ci alziamo sembra un letto sfatto’ (‘I don’t reach for you, no, not even the softest touch / but in your body I feel I am swimming, / and the couch in the bar’s lounge / when we get up looks like an unmade bed’: translated by by J. D. McClatchy).

Indeed, Cavalli’s poetics could be defined as a hymn to ‘unmade beds’ and to the bittersweet nostalgia and disillusion that dishevelled beds and crumpled sheets evoke, being, as they are, the only witnesses of the romantic encounter narrated and of the departure, often final and irreversible, of the lover. One of the most common assumptions around Cavalli’s productions is that her writing celebrates love. Having always been open about her homosexuality in a time and socio-cultural context in which lesbian existence found no representation, Cavalli’s status as a lesbian woman writer might have induced literary criticism to relegate her work to the tiny box of ‘love poetry’, that pink limbo of ‘romance material’ that is culturally designated as feminine and anathema to the traditions of serious, so-called ‘masculine’ poetry. But this reading is misleading and strips Cavalli’s verse of its complexities.

Undoubtedly, Cavalli’s writing has extensively explored the realm of romantic relationships.  Yet more than paying homage to the jouissance of love, Cavalli’s verses seem to indulge in a subtle celebration of ‘disaffection’. It is the falling out of love, more than love per se, that catches the poet’s attention and fuels her writing. An almost masochistic feeling of lack, absence, and privation that follows the fading of an encounter is what really characterises her poetic sensibility. The recollection of faded loves is a comfortable, safe space that fuels creativity and enables writing. The manifestation of fresh love that violently breaks into the comfort zone of disenchantment, on the other hand, destabilizes and almost annihilates the writer: ‘Ero in pace ed eccomi dannata / al sospetto che forse sono amata.’ (‘I was at peace and now I’m doomed / because I suspect that love has bloomed.’  Trans. by Moira Egan and Damiano Abeni).
 

But disenchantment doesn’t just concern the sphere of private affections: it is rather a method, a modus operandi, that affects and shapes the poet’s way of understanding reality, as suggested by the iconic line ‘le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo’ (‘my poems won’t change the world’, trans. by Gini Alhadeff). This tendency towards resignation is invested in the poet’s attitude to writing itself, in which the act of producing poems is soon dismissed as useless, or at least as lacking the potential to make a meaningful difference in the world. As one of the most underrated, misunderstood, and understudied contemporary Italian authors, as someone whose work doesn’t make it into school anthologies and whose name doesn’t resonate within the walls of national academia, Cavalli transfers onto her writing an acute awareness and quiet pride in being perceived as a marginal subject.

After all, when the dominant narratives that monopolize mainstream culture elect men as the intellectuals solely worthy of public attention and relegate women to the stifling compartment of “pink literature”, reclaiming one’s marginality becomes a way to express dissent towards the sexist power structures that shape and govern our society. In this sense, by taking pride in the ‘uselessness’ of her poetry, Cavalli sides with those who have no voice and, in so doing, gracefully mocks and critiques the hegemonic power structures that perpetrate the silencing and effacement of the subaltern. This ability not to take her work too seriously is mirrored in the poet’s more private, inward-looking verses, by her tendency to indulge in a celebration of the bittersweet taste of nothingness, in which the cloud of meaningfulness and uselessness invests both the writing subject and the subject addressed – ‘Alla felice colpa di esser quel che sono, / il mio felice niente’ (‘To the happy guilt of being what I am / my happy nothingness’, trans. mine) but also ‘Ti avrò sempre presente, / avrò il pensiero pieno del tuo niente’ (‘You will be always on my mind / my thoughts full of your nothingness’ trans. mine).

 What could be defined as Cavalli’s ‘erotics of absence’, which mostly takes the form of disenchantment towards romance and power, also loves playing with the notion of the grotesque in relation to the female body, thereby mocking traditional (and stereotyped) representations of women who have historically been portrayed by men as ethereal, angel-like muses. Lazy, fat, old, ill, almost decaying: these are the attributes that Cavalli most often associates with the female body (hers and those of her muses). Desexualised and deprived of the unrealistic allure of ethereal aspirational models, women are finally portrayed as real; they are flesh and bones, unpleasant, fragile, and unapologetically fallible beings. Cavalli’s odes to the grotesque body thus destroy the Italian tradition of Dolce Stil Novo – a style of poetry marked by its paeans to an idealised female beauty – to make room for an antiheroic and yet truthful representation of womanhood. Cavalli’s ‘female gaze’ thus rescues the female body from the virgin-whore dichotomy as it empowers it with the right to ‘just be’. No longer an object to be fetishised or venerated, the female body becomes a living thing in its own right and, in its irreverent unpleasantness, it reclaims the right to exist above and beyond the cage of gender roles and stereotypes. In doing so, the poet constructs a verse, a manifesto, that might quietly change how we perceive the world: ‘Guardare la bellezza e mai farla propria’ (‘Contemplating beauty and never appropriating it’. trans. mine).
 

References

Antici, Ilena. Tra dolore, delusione e ironia: le figure femminili nella poesia di Patrizia Cavalli. Écritures, 2021, La “mus(e)ificazione” entre écriture de soi et littérature contemporaine,12, p.109-127.

Cavalli, Patrizia. My Poems Won’t Change the World. Bilingual edition ed. by Gini Alhadeff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Rodini, Robert J. ‘…Avaro seme di donna’: Patrizia Cavalli’s Transgressive Discourse. The Romanic Review, Volume 89, Number 2, The Trustees of Columbia University.