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De Chirico's Threads

This collection encompasses literary “response poems,” broadening the field to include visual art. An opening series of sonnets, rhymed and metrical but not strictly formal, revises various Petrarchan figures, seeking to recover their intensity in terms of contemporary experience. The series, which includes a translation of Petrarch’s “Una Candida Cerva” (Rime 190), draws on my readings of the Canzoniere. However, my own sonnets are dramatic monologues, and all the speakers female.

Other writers important to the collection include Primo Levi, Jean Rhys, Hölderlin and Ovid. In “2084,” for example, I use the “Phaeton” narrative from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to dramatise a future generation’s encounter with the results of current global warming. In the poems of personal experience, I employ some mimetic formal experiments, as in “Diphthongs,” a poet about childbirth, in which the line itself is splayed and the syntactic structure subjected to disruption.

The concluding verse-play, “De Chirico’s Threads,” reflects my research into Surrealism, and uses biographical material about de Chirico, viewed from historical, aesthetic and psychoanalytical perspectives. The use of the Canzone in two of the longer speeches forms a connection to the Petrarchan material featured at the beginning of the collection. Learning to combine poetic emphases and colloquial dialogue was an interesting formal adventure. The play raises general questions about the concept of progress in art, and explores, through de Chirico’s endless self-reinvention, how the creative impulse may be sustained over an extended career.

The verse-play which supplies the collection’s title develops, historically and formally, the “response” technique, and represents a further innovation: contemporary dramatic writing for the page. While providing visual and aural markers, the work is designed primarily to engage a reading-listening imagination. The collection as a whole takes poetic structure and historical perspective in new directions.