Blogs as Creative Labs, Italian Examples

Most American poetry blogs are critical in nature. They tend to consist of mini-reviews and ruminations on literary topics, interspersed with diary entries. Poems are posted, but mostly to illuminate a critical point. Rarely do they take up an entire blog, as in K. Silem Mohammad's Squirrel in my Attic, and no one seems to treat the blog format as a laboratory to experiment with new works. Not so in Italy, where many poetry blogs are more or less playgrounds for poets to goof around, test new ideas. Gherardo Bortolotti maintains eight blogs in Italian and/or English, each organized around a concept. They are basically conceptual blogs. His low-level techniques, for example, is described as "me + google + babelfish = transnational literature," while his le avventure di bgmole is a series of banal vignettes from the life of an overworked and bored "bgmole." I translate three consecutive entries from March of 2007:


adventure n° 1011
March 25, 2007

bgmole caresses a friend's cat.

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adventure n° 2765
March 23, 2007

Falling asleep, bgmole cannot follow the sentences in the book he's reading. He continues to read the same phrase over and over, beginning: "if one of the two appears as a theorem."

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adventure n° 1230
March 20, 2007

While eating dinner, bgmole watches the television news. Raising his eyes from the plate, he sees images of some corpses, on a street in Baghdad.

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Gherardo Bortolotti is also involved with GAMMM, a literary journal that functions more like a group blog, since its contents, always first rate, in Italian and English, are updated often and irregularly by four editors. Nazione Indiana is another fine webzine disguised as a blog. Even more informal is The Flux I Share, initiated by Marco Giovenale, with many non-Italians among its "crew." I don't pretend to have more than a cursory view of this most exciting scene. I just want to point out an essential difference between American and Italian poetry blogs, with one emphasizing analysis, cheerleading and judgement; the other, creative play. To close, I translate four entries from Vanni Santoni's personaggi precari, his precarious characters:


Penelope

Penelope sleeps more and more. When she was small, she already slept nine or ten hours a night. During adolescence, it rose to thirteen hours then appeared to stabilize when she was nineteen-years-old.

Instead, now that she is twenty-nine and lives alone, maintaining herself on profit from some real estate, she has become accustomed, within a few months, to sleeping eighteen, nineteen or even twenty hours a day. When she wakes up, Penelope is always in a great mood.


Zippo

Zippo is a clown in the Mariposa circus. His real name is Guglielmo Diné. Gugliemo has killed his cousin and two other pieces of shit over money. Has raped his sister and caused a miscarriage with his kicks. When Guglielmo is Zippo—one hesitates to say—he’d feel an infinite tenderness at the sight of children laughing at his skits.


Galatea

Galatea is a normal girl. She’s five-feet-seven, a brunette, with brown eyes. Neither beautiful nor ugly. Neither brilliant nor an idiot. Neither good nor evil. She likes the singers Battiato and Carmen Consoli, the books of Milan Kundera, Hello Kitty accessories, decoupage. She studies physical therapy and plays volleyball.

Her father, one of the greatest literary figures of his epoch, cannot resign himself to the quiet normality of Galatea, and has begun to suspect that she is not his daughter.


Barozzo

Barozzo, baron of Montamaro, sent for three hundred Swiss mercenaries to defend his fiefdom from hostile neighbors. The Swiss arrived and saw that the fiefdom was vulnerable yet prosperous, so they promptly sacked it, raped whoever was rapable and laid siege to the castle. The castle’s weak defense was breached after three and a half hours, and the siege concluded with them drinking wine from cracked casks and sodomizing the baron amid loud laughter.