Next thing I knew though, Isaac was a full-blown badass, managing the whole site, emceeing the Monthly Rumpus gigs at the Make-Out Room, hosting book club discussions, and editing long interviews and essays with the care one rarely finds on the internet. This last February, I pulled out the recorder, told him to sit still, and peppered him with questions.

***

The Rumpus: So, you got laid every hour or so at this year’s Associated Writing Programs conference, in D.C.?

Isaac Fitzgerald: Ha. That was a lie.

Rumpus: Really? That’s the rumor that inspired this interview.

Fitzgerald: I’m sorry to disappoint. I got zero action at AWP.

Rumpus: I was expecting sordid tales of Bukowski-like living in the throbbing core of careerist writer-dom. But really, we’re here to set the record straight. You read Steve’s daily emails? He wrote that you got picked up more than anyone else there.

Fitzgerald: I read the Daily Rumpus. And it was a beautiful thing for him to write. I won’t lie, that one hit me really hard. I have it saved somewhere.

Rumpus: I print them out sometimes. He’s mastered the art of the email.

Isaac and Steve, Valentines Day 2011

Fitzgerald: I agree. That one meant a lot to me, even though it wasn’t true. It’s just that I worked really hard at AWP, and people took notice. That’s what he was getting at.

Rumpus: The Rumpus got a lot of attention?

Fitzgerald: We sold out of everything we brought to AWP. Books. Mugs. I don’t think anybody else did that. Of course, I didn’t get to go to any of the things.

Rumpus: What things?

Fitzgerald: The panels, the readings—I was busy selling. But I did see a lot of friends. Like this beautiful girl I moved out to San Francisco for, who’s getting her MFA now, she was there—

Rumpus: —I thought you said you didn’t get any!

Fitzgerald: I didn’t! I’m just saying I heard from friends like her that The Rumpus kept coming up in conversation, in panel discussions—people kept saying that we’re doing good work, that we’re kind of ahead of the curve. Writers and folks who I would never even think knew about The Rumpus were saying nice things about it in public. And—I should say now—none of this would have happened without our legion of wonderful volunteer editors, writers, and artists. Seriously. All of The Rumpus’s success is because of everyone who works so hard on the site. I love The Rumpus family.

Rumpus: Speaking of family, can you give me the history of yours in five lines or less?

Fitzgerald: Immigrants. Like everybody else.

Rumpus: From?

Fitzgerald: Ireland. Some Scotland. My grandparents on my dad’s side were mill-workers. My mom’s were farmers.

Rumpus: That’s six lines. How’d you get to San Francisco?

Fitzgerald: Born and raised in Boston. Then north-central Massachusetts. Both my parents were teachers, and we were poor, but they were very big into education, and things like the Catholic Worker. After getting into some trouble as a kid I got a full scholarship to boarding school, and later a full scholarship to college where I studied philosophy and political science and worked at a bar. After college I got a job in Philadelphia working for a politician, realized a little too late that I hated politics, dropped the job, and followed the aforementioned beautiful girl to San Francisco.

Rumpus: How did you meet Stephen Elliott?

Fitzgerald: I moved here five years ago for the city, which is gorgeous, and the girl, but other than that I had nothing else going for me out west. I got a job at Buca di Beppo, which is like the Olive Garden but worse. There are service industry jobs, which can rock, and then there are corporate service industry jobs, which are always horrible. I hated it. But the money was decent and I had extra time on my hands so I started volunteering at 826 Valencia. I had heard that there was a storytelling workshop, and I didn’t realize it was for kids at all—I didn’t know what McSweeney’s was at the time, I didn’t know about any of that. But I love books and writing, and kids can be fun, so once I figured it all out I really liked it. Somebody at 826 knew I’d worked in politics back east and was like, “There’s this guy, Stephen Elliott, he runs a monthly event called the Progressive Reading Series where all the money goes to progressive candidates. He’s looking for volunteers. I think you’d really like him.” And so I walked up to him, all eager beaver, and was like, “Hey! I’d like to help with the Progressive Reading Series.” And that’s how it started.

Rumpus: When did you first visit www.therumpus.net?

Fitzgerald: It was in those early days right after Steve was like, “I want to start a website,” and I was like, “Don’t,” but he did anyway. It was just a WordPress blog at that point. “Rumpus Beta.” December 2008, maybe?

Rumpus: Why is The Rumpus in San Francisco and not New York?

Fitzgerald: In New York—hell, anywhere on the eastern seaboard—my job would be a hundred times easier. I wake up around six or seven out here, and my laptop—this is terribly sad—my laptop’s usually in my bed.

Rumpus: You sleep with your laptop.

Fitzgerald: I do. And that’s because when I wake up at six or seven, it’s nine or ten on the east coast. People are already at work. They’re already getting their thing going. So I try to schedule posts that will go up early, but you never know what’s happening. So would my job be easier out there? For sure.

Rumpus: The Rumpus would be better off in New York?

Fitzgerald: Absolutely not. What I’m trying to say is that San Francisco is integral to The Rumpus, even though most of this country’s literary centers are on the other coast. Even though my job would be easier in New York. The Rumpus was started by Stephen Elliott. And Stephen Elliott, in my humble and horribly biased opinion, has truly helped build the contemporary literary scene in this city. Of course San Francisco has a literary past that goes way back, but in this generation he’s helped make it happen. A big part of that is the spectacular events he hosts. They’re very special to us. They’re these beautiful moments once a month when all these people get together. It’s not just a reading, it’s a movement, it’s a good time. For a while, we only made money by way of the events. That’s all I got paid. Whatever we took at the door, that’s what I would make for the month.

Rumpus: Was it enough to live on? Did you live in the park?

Fitzgerald: I had incredibly cheap rent because I lived in a rattrap of a building where dudes would shit on my stoop, and we didn’t have heat.

Rumpus: But what about The Rumpus’ aesthetic—is it particular to San Francisco?

Fitzgerald: Well, we’re very sex-friendly. I’m friends with people who work at Kink.com. Steve is friends with everybody in the kink community. There are a lot of people involved with The Rumpus who are sex workers. I’m not sure New York would be as embracing of a website like ours. Don’t get me wrong, there are more than enough sex-friendly people in New York, and The Rumpus has a very good relationship with that town, but San Francisco fits us best. I personally love this city. Rumpus aside, I just think there’s something really amazing happening in San Francisco, particularly in the Mission. It’s just starting to be recognized by outsiders. The New York Times article that came out a few months ago…

Rumpus: About bookstores and readings here?

Fitzgerald: Yeah, that was great, but this scene has been building for years. Literary-minded people are attracted to this city. People are drawn here by the history, by the combination of openness and discipline, by McSweeney’s, by City Lights. You have this great group of talented individuals who aren’t concerned with what’s happening in New York. A group doing their own thing. To get out now would be stupid. I don’t mean to knock New York. It’s the best city in the world. They’ll have a reading and of course hundreds of people will come out and it’s awesome, but there’s a particular flavor to the fervor out here. I like it.

Rumpus: Literary fervor.

Fitzgerald: Yes. And also New York’s just bigger. There’s so much going on. The literary scene is one of thousands and thousands of scenes. San Francisco has a lot going on, too, but it’s easier to make an impact as an individual. I don’t think my story would have happened in New York. To have been washing dishes in a bar, then write one article for a guy who runs a media website who likes it so much he hires me, then a year later have an author friend who I met at random ask me to work on his new website project with him—that kind of thing happens in New York, I’m sure. But it’s harder. There are a million people with grad degrees, family connections, this and that and the other thing. In New York, your chances of jumping from washing dishes to what I do now would be much slimmer.

Rumpus: The Rumpus is run by two dudes, but it seems like a place where writers of all genders feel really comfortable.

Fitzgerald: A lot of credit there goes to volunteer editors like Julie Greicius and Elissa Bassist. Many of our most popular contributors are women—Sugar and Antonia Crane, to name only a couple on a long list. The openness at the Rumpus helps it to be a very welcoming place for all sorts of writers, or at least I hope it does. It’s important in publishing, I think, to always be striving to represent more voices. More stories. More backgrounds. Sexuality. Gender. Race. I mean, we’re always working to be better in terms of that, but I’m proud of what we’ve managed to do thus far.

Rumpus: Is the Rumpus getting in bed with AOL anytime soon?

Fitzgerald: Not likely. But I guess if AOL wants to offer us enough money, sure. Then I could start paying my volunteers.

Rumpus: How often do you check email?

Fitzgerald: Constantly. It’s making me anxious that I’m not checking it right now. Steve encourages me to take time off email, which is awesome, but I rarely do.

Rumpus: Does he take time away from email?

Fitzgerald: I don’t know. Probably not so much anymore. He gets up really early. I think he takes care of it very early so he can have a constructive day. Email is part of the job. I’m constantly putting out a hundred little fires. There will be days, or I’ll go on a trip, when I’ll say to myself, “I’m not going to check my email,” and I become so anxious that it’s a huge relief when I do check. It’s terrible. But to finally check just makes everything in my world so much better. I’m addicted.

Blood In, Blood Out. The Rumpus Tattoo

Rumpus: You have a Rumpus tattoo now, right?

Fitzgerald: Yeah. By Ian Huebert, who also designed all of The Rumpus logos—past, present, and future. People think the tattoo is the near-equivalent of getting a girlfriend’s name done, but I tell them when I get fired I’ll just put “fuck” above it. Steve has the same tattoo. Contrary to popular belief we’re not afraid of commitment.

Rumpus: Did you do a lot of internet work before the Rumpus?

Fitzgerald: I wouldn’t say “a lot.” I worked as the blog editor at a progressive media website for a year. It was a burnout job.

Rumpus: How so?

Fitzgerald: I was constantly working. There was no backup. Steve is very good at arranging volunteers, making sure somebody is looking at The Rumpus on Saturday or Sunday, so even though I am kind of always working, at least I have some assistance. But the media site, at the time, didn’t have a “Breaking News” section—so it fell to the blog to cover news as it happened. I had to constantly be on top of the news. Nights. Weekends. Holidays. All the time. I always felt like I was behind. But “breaking news” for The Rumpus? Don’t get me wrong, there are times when we’re like, “Shit, we need to get something up right away,” but for the most part, it’s more relaxed. That being said, I learned a lot about online publishing at the media site. There’s no way I would have been ready to manage The Rumpus without that experience.

Rumpus: What takes up most of your time on the job now?

Baby as Metaphor for The Rumpus (Baby provided by Ben Peterson and Wendy McKennon)

Fitzgerald: Well, it’s an always-growing thing. It’s a living, breathing thing. Always evolving, but always demanding attention, too. Like a baby. At first it was just learning the tone. One of the things I love is that we’re not sensationalists. Like, this interview will be called “The Rumpus Interview with Rumpus Managing Editor Isaac Fitzgerald.” It will not be called, like, “Drunk Boy Makes Good” or “Sheep Farmer’s Grandchild Does Right.”

Rumpus: “Right” with an R?

Fitzgerald: With a W. Parenthesis: “Barely.” Anyway, at the beginning it was learning what not to do. How not to be sensationalist. It was editing pieces: I was coming from a blog-editor’s perspective—very short pieces, very easy. I wasn’t used to reading these longer narratives and personal essays that The Rumpus was doing. It was learning what Steve was looking for. In our little “About Us,” it says “We won’t do anything cutesy with Legos.” That’s because I kept trying to put up Lego videos.

Rumpus: Why?

Fitzgerald: It’s probably a childhood thing. My half-brother who didn’t live with us gave me his Lego collection. I loved those things. Who doesn’t want to watch a fun Indiana Jones Legos video?

Rumpus: What does Steve do when things don’t go well?

Fitzgerald: Steve’s never raised his voice to me. He’s probably the only person in my life who’s never raised his voice to me. And that’s not to say he does a creepy quiet angry thing either. He’s a very good boss. Don’t tell him I said that.

Rumpus: Not a word. When was the last time you wrecked on your skateboard?

Fitzgerald: Last night! Did someone tell you to ask that? I don’t know if you can see this, but if this makes the cut for the interview, you can link to a picture of this mess. This morning I woke up and was trying to get some writing done and I immediately thought I had carpal tunnel. My wrist killed. I’ve been a waiter, a bouncer, a barback, a bartender—what I hadn’t had to do in my life until recently was spend massive amounts of time at a computer. June will be two years at The Rumpus. Plus a year at the media site before that. Three years of being a laptop jockey. So I woke up this morning and was like, “Oh crap! I finally got the carpal tunnel!” And then I remembered that I’d just bailed on my skateboard. It wasn’t carpal tunnel, just stupidity.

Rumpus: Do you have a favorite Shakespeare?

Fitzgerald: Got to temper that skateboard talk with some dorkiness, huh? I’m going to be totally cliché, but it’s because I acted in it—

Rumpus: There’s no wrong answer.

Fitzgerald: Right, right, there is no wrong answer. I’m just thinking about how I’m letting go of the secret that is my acting career…

Rumpus: It’ll be fun to try to capture this in the transcript.

Fitzgerald: The silence? The face-touching? The redness?

Rumpus: Lots of emdashes.

Fitzgerald: Right—okay, well, I’ve always liked the crazy people. Richard III, I think, is fantastic: “Now is the winter of my discontent.” The hunchback ready to fuck shit up. But, well, this is terrible, but my favorite is really Romeo and Juliet. I played Mercutio.

Rumpus: “We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.” Do you read actual books?

Fitzgerald: Of course. Some of my most cherished time is when I get to close the laptop and just pick up words printed on paper. I love books. And I’m not against ebooks. I’m not against the iPad. Good for them: anything that gets people to read. That’s how I feel about Harry Potter, that’s how I feel about Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson. Because I think that’s how it all starts. I think if you start reading anywhere, eventually you do stumble across something like The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake or The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh my God, I have a boner for good writing.”

Rumpus: Tell me about your own writing.

Fitzgerald: I’m just like any young writer who doesn’t have it together yet. I’ve written a bunch of personal essays. That’s what I’ve been paid to write. The dream is to write eight short stories. And I have about two and a half. I go over them with friends, and it means the world to me. There’s so much reliance on friends, on the talents of others, the insight of others. Being able to take what’s good and what’s bad from what’s thrown at you. Steve taught me that. The short stories are about childhood or young adulthood in rural areas. I’m working on one about the time I spent smuggling medical supplies into Burma (a tale which I won’t get into here). Mainly I write stories out of a desire to show my personal life, but with a veil. I love what Steve does, I love memoirs, but I don’t think I have it in me. I don’t think I have the courage.

Rumpus: You’re drawn to fiction.

Fitzgerald: I’m Irish-American. I write like I tell stories: with a lot of bullshit. That’s what my father raised me on. Even before he was giving me books he used to tell me all kinds of stories.

Photo by Bonnie Chan, Flavorpill SF

Rumpus: What books did he give you?

Fitzgerald: He gave me On the Road when I was eleven. He gave me Bukowski. Kesey—you know, the classics for making sure your kid turns into an upstanding citizen. I just started looking up to whoever he looked up to. He introduced me to Shakespeare. One way we knew each other was through books.

Rumpus: Are you a hard guy to get to know?

Fitzgerald: Not at all. I mean, I was as emo as the next teenager. I put the shell on. Tried out the tough guy act. But one day I woke up, some time in college, and I was like, “You know, somebody asks about me, I’m just going to tell them. I’m not going to play hard to get.” Though I do spend a lot of time alone.

Rumpus: Do you think most people are basically good?

Fitzgerald: I do. I have a huge amount of faith in humanity. Many people I know don’t. I think it’s why people play mysterious or hard to get, especially editors and writers and artists. That’s familiar to me, for sure. It’s the feeling of, “What are you going to do with that information? How are you going to hurt me?” My approach is, I’ll put it out there for you. For the most part, I do not think there are many people out there who want to hurt me, as ridiculous as that sounds. Because I know the world’s a shitty place. I was a news editor for a fucking year! All I did was read shitty headlines that made me depressed. But at the same time I think, “You know, I’m going to be open.” This way, if somebody likes me and wants to be a pal, that’s awesome. I love friends. And if somebody doesn’t like what they see, that’s fine and they get to move on. I watch Steve. He doesn’t hide much. I admire that.

Rumpus: Are you a simple man?

Fitzgerald: Yes. I love books. I love kissing. I love beer. That would be my list.

Rumpus: That sounds pretty good.

Fitzgerald: Well I think I have it pretty good. I’m poor, but it’s fine. You have to understand, when Steve asked me if I wanted this position, he was asking if I wanted to leave a job that had health benefits and good pay. It was the first time in my life that I had had a job that didn’t make my parents feel like they’d screwed up. I was twenty-five. I actually told Steve, “No, thanks” at first. But I woke up the next morning and I had the worst feeling in my gut. I called him and I was like, “Hey, is that offer still on the table?” And he was like, “Yeah, of course.”

Rumpus: Was he relieved you took the job?

Fitzgerald: Actually, it would be months later that Steve would tell me that he went to bed the night I said no and he slept like a baby, because he was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I was going to be responsible for Isaac? Bringing him onto this? That’s insane!” And the next morning, when I called, is when he got the bad feeling in the gut, but he felt like he couldn’t take the offer off the table. At that point, The Rumpus had been around for six months. I was leaving this place that had existed for thirteen years to go to work on my friend’s literary blog. When Steve asked if I wanted the job he said, “If you want to come do this, it could be great, but it could also not exist in three months.” And that’s how Steve does everything. That was one of our original slogans: “What could possibly go wrong?” That’s how he lives. What could possibly go wrong? Try it. You fuck up. You fail all the time. But when you succeed a little, it’s great.

***

Special thanks to Ben Shattuck for transcribing this interview.

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J.X. Williams directed 54 feature films, wrote 78 screenplays, and compiled an FBI file 6,000 pages long.

Noel Lawrence has poured his life into the maintenance and curation of the J.X. Williams Archive, a vast and unsettling collection of photos, documents, and ephemera that tell in fragments the story of Williams’ life. A retired director and a full-time grouch, Williams is today holed up somewhere in Switzerland. He’s a man some have crowned the most talented filmmaker you’ve never heard of, a man others have denounced as a smut dealer who passes pornography off as art, and a man still others claim doesn’t even exist. In any case, I plopped down on a magazine-strewn couch at Lawrence’s place in the Haight neighborhood of San Francisco shortly before he moved himself and the archive to Los Angeles. We talked for an hour, continued our conversation a few months later over orange juice and crosswords, and finished this thing up by email and phone.

The Rumpus: Have you ever seen J.X. Williams? Spoken to him?

Noel Lawrence: Yup, I’ve “experienced” J.X. all right. The first time was when he found out I was going to release “Psych-Burn” and a few other of his films on DVD. He called me late at night with death threats. He kept calling but after awhile, I don’t think he was calling because he was worried about someone releasing his films on DVD. I think he was just lonely and wanted someone to scream at. Our relationship has had its ups and downs over the years. He’s keeping a very low profile. He has always been very secretive but I don’t even have a phone number for him right now. He just sort of materializes out of the ether now and then. This is frustrating because I’m trying to get started on a documentary about him but I can’t get him for an interview. So, um, J.X if you’re reading this, please get in touch.

Rumpus: So who the hell is this guy, really?

Lawrence: J.X. Williams was a cult filmmaker of the 1960s and 70s with a very colorful past. I like to think of him as sort of an evil mirror image of Forrest Gump. Whereas Tom Hanks’ character made a postage-stamp tour across the lighter side of mid-century American history, J.X. crossed paths with every tragedy along its seamy underbelly. When I started researching his life, I always spotted him on the periphery of events like the JFK assassination, the Manson murders, HUAC, the Chicago mob, and a lot of other notorious stuff. He wasn’t responsible or even involved directly in most of those things but the guy kept showing up on the margins. I knew about his films already but I found his life even more fascinating. I’m not an investigative journalist, I don’t get into that kind of thing, but I took it upon myself to start researching who this guy was and maybe try to connect the dots, and gather up every shred of information and artifact of his life I could.

Rumpus: What sort of films did he make?

Lawrence: Williams’ filmography is all over the map. All his work, though, shares one common element: J.X. only worked in B-Pictures. In the 1940s, he wrote film noir scripts at RKO. In the 1950s, he shot stag films. In the 1960s, he did sexploitation. And when his career ended in 1979, he was cranking out slasher pics. But in all of that time, he never was able to break into the studio system and make the big Spielberg-type pictures. Like the historical events, you only found him on the margins of Hollywood. That’s why I call the documentary I’m making about him The Big Footnote. Of course, today we are beginning to realize that these so-called B-Movies have a great deal more critical importance than the critical establishment originally assumed. For example, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, a 40s no-budget noir from a Poverty Row studio is now part of the National Film Registry alongside Ben Hur and whatnot. Williams’ films have either been ignored or insulted for decades.

Rumpus: What do you mean?

Lawrence: I can’t remember if it was Siskel or Ebert but one of them said that Williams’ filmography made a good case for the incorporation of “negative stars” into their rating scale. Even though a lot of his work is flawed because of poor acting and miniscule budgets, the material has an edge to it that transcends the limitations of the genre material he directed. Perhaps my generation gets it a bit more than Williams’ contemporaries. A handful of my friends grew up having the living shit scared out of them at slumber parties where someone played one of those rare J.X. Williams bootleg horror videos. It was like Faces of Death. The films were singularly unpleasant to watch but the images stick like chewing gum to the sole of your unconscious forever.

Rumpus: Did he get mixed up in the mob? Did he make porn films?

Lawrence: Absolutely to both questions. It began almost as a chance encounter. After J.X. Williams was blacklisted, he took a job at Eagle-Lion studios under a false name. They hired him as a production assistant, which was the lowest rung on the film production totem pole. For one of the films, Canon City, his entire job was to keep an eye on one star (DeForrest Kelley, the guy who later appeared as Bones McCoy in Star Trek) and make sure he didn’t drink on the job. Apparently someone was slipping Kelley booze during his lunch breaks and Kelley was messing up his lines. Another interesting fact about Canon City is that Johnny Roselli had a producer credit on the film.

Rumpus: Wait, who’s Johnny Roselli?

Lawrence: Right. Well, to answer your original question, Roselli was not your typical film producer. He was a gangster who had just gotten out of jail when the production started. He was friends with the owner of Eagle-Lion, Brian Foy, who probably set him up with the producer gig as a front to keep the parole officer off his back. To keep up appearances, Roselli had to visit the set once in awhile. On the day of his first visit, a big shipment of Canadian Whiskey had just arrived in Los Angeles. This was after prohibition but the mob still smuggled alcohol into the country to avoid taxation. So Roselli decided to take a few bottles as a gift for the stars he would meet that day. Roselli might have been a gangster but he was very courteous.

Rumpus: What happened?

Lawrence: So here’s the scene. Roselli has never been on the set before so he is wandering around with a whiskey bottle in either hand. He’s asking random people if they know where he can find DeForrest Kelley. Meanwhile, J.X. logically fingers Roselli as the culprit who was supplying booze to Kelley. So this 17-year old kid yells at the big bad gangster to get the fuck off the set. Williams had no idea who Roselli was but the rest of the crew was horrified. Roselli then goes to Crane Wilbur, the director, and tells him “I want to have a talk with that kid… in that empty soundstage over there.” By this point, J.X. has realized that he really fucked up. At best, he’s going to get fired but, more likely, he’s going to end up as target practice for Roselli. Actually, Johnny took it pretty well.  He thought the whole incident was pretty damn funny. Roselli then checked with his buddy Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures and found out Williams was on the blacklist. “Not even I could get you a job at a studio,” he tells Williams. Instead, he gave him the address of some friends who were shooting an “art film” and said Williams could make better money with those guys. Of course that “art film” was a porn flick and J.X. started directing them at 19. The rest is history.

Rumpus: Let’s back pedal for a second. Who are you? Where do you fit into all this?

Lawrence: I’m a fellow who directs, curates, distributes, and writes about film. If you want to be involved in the movies, you do a little bit of everything to survive.

Rumpus: What were you doing before you got involved with the J.X. Williams archive?

Lawrence: This’n’that. I came to California in the mid-90s to do a PhD in Russian Literature at Stanford. Quit that. I tried to make my fortune on a dot.com IPO. Didn’t happen. I’ve spearheaded various film ventures and made a general nuisance of myself in the popular culture.

Rumpus: Did you found the archive?

Lawrence: Yeah, I guess you could say that. Basically, I wanted to establish an organization to promote and preserve the films of J.X. Williams. If I hadn’t intervened, these films were tagged for a one-way flight into the ashcan of history and that would have been a shame.

Rumpus: What’s your connection to J.X. Williams? How did you come across him?

"Psych-Burn" (1968)

Lawrence: As a film curator, I make it my business to find the weirdest, most obscure films in the universe. J.X. turned up during a Sunday evening browse of the 16mm films section on eBay. One of his films was going for a couple thousand bucks and it was only a short. So I asked the seller (he had some cheesy handle like Sell-U-Lloyd) what the deal was. It turns out there was this small group of film collectors who were obsessed with finding films by J.X. Williams. His work is almost impossible to find on video so the films are really valued among collectors. I finally managed to obtain one of his films on video (“Psych-Burn”) and was hooked immediately.

Rumpus: Why do you keep pursuing him? Why don’t you give up?

Lawrence: Sometimes I ask myself the same thing. This project is like digging yourself into a hole. Before you know it, five years have gone by and you’re still not any further than when you began. Do you just walk away at that point and forget about it? Of course not. You keep digging yourself into that hole until you reach China. You can’t keep score when you’re groping in the dark. All I know is that I’ve got to see this through. A few people have the chance to do a lot of great things in their lifetime. Some of us only get a chance to do one thing. I guess this is my thing.

Rumpus: Why does J.X. Williams matter?

Lawrence: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the famed German director, once said the reason he made so many movies – more than 40 films in only 13 years, he then died of a drug overdose in 1982 – was because the more he worked in and around film, the more his life almost became a movie. I’m fascinated with those larger-than-life figures that truly lived cinematically. They become the ultimate manifestation of the postmodern condition as their lives begin to imitate their art. In everything he said and did, J.X. lived a life that a lot of people have only dreamt of. But there are consequences to that dreaming and he paid dearly for it. That kind of life is not something for me, either, but it’s beautiful to watch. Sort of like a meteor flaming out…

Rumpus: An American story?

Lawrence: Completely. Though the historical impact of his life may be minor, it’s a perfect allegory of the American dream gone sour.

Rumpus: How so?

Lawrence: Unfortunately there are many things I cannot speak about at this time. Certain people have trusted me with information and I have been sworn to secrecy. If and when I can give the details, I believe Williams may turn out to be one of the last big skeletons left in Hollywood’s closet.

Rumpus: Where is he now?

Lawrence: Outside of Zurich, Switzerland, I think.

Rumpus: When was he last seen?

Lawrence: I saw him a few years ago when he visited Los Angeles for the first time in two decades. Most of the people that exiled him to Switzerland have passed on so he felt safe in returning for a brief vacation in the U.S. Stupidly, I didn’t bother to film his visit to L.A. but I later attempted to recreate the tour I got from him that day in a documentary featurette called “J.X. Williams’ L.A.” Coincidentally, I’m just about to premiere that at the Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles in a couple weeks.

Rumpus: Do you yourself think he’s actually in danger anymore, from the mob or anyone else he pissed off?

FBI Surveillance photo of J.X. Williams circa late 1970s

Lawrence: No. He’s like one of those Japanese soldiers still hiding in the bush a decade after the war ended. A lot of his behavior comes from habits acquired forty years ago.  When the FBI is sifting through your garbage every week or you need to buy a remote control to start your ignition because you’re worried about car bombs, that stuff shapes you. Like when I first met him, I never could understand why he always spoke with a hand over his mouth. I found out later from a mob expert that a lot of guys in “The Life” did that to keep from being spied upon. The FBI hired lip readers so they had to cover their mouths.

Rumpus: Where is the archive housed?

Lawrence: Actually, it’s a real mess. I have some films in my closet that constitute “the archive” but J.X. probably has a lot more stuff that he’s not sharing. Where is he stowing it? I wish I knew. It’s almost impossible to see most of his films. A lot of them are almost more rumor than anything. Fans reminisce about seeing one of his films the way other people write about UFO’s sightings.

Rumpus: Did you ever see one in a theater yourself?

Lawrence: I was too young to have had the pleasure of seeing any J.X. films at the local drive-in or grindhouse. However, my friend Josh Olson (screenwriter and regular contributor to Trailers from Hell has a great story about how he played hooky to see the matinee of You Axed For It! in Philly twenty-five years ago. Somehow the school found out where he was and his parents yanked him right out of his seat at the movie theatre! Kids today don’t know how easy they have it with the Internet. All this horror and smut is just a few mouse clicks away on The Pirate Bay. Back in those days you really had to go out of your way for a cheap thrill.

Rumpus: You recently moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles… Why?

Lawrence: My research on J.X. brought me down here. Of course, as a child of the cinema, I naturally gravitated down here. I live one block North of Hollywood Boulevard near Grauman’s Chinese. This was Ed Wood’s old neighborhood. It’s a completely bizarre, surreal place to live with the Academy Awards happening across the street and helicopters zooming over your apartment every day. I love it.

Rumpus: Some people say you made up J.X. Williams, that it’s all a hoax. How do you respond?

Lawrence: There are conspiracy theorists all over the Internet that claim that J.X. Williams doesn’t exist. Some even say I made him up. I only wish I was that clever! It’s a neat idea, but the logistics would be impossible. It would involve a multi-year effort by dozens of people not just to fabricate his films but a vast array of historical documents as well. And what about all of those cheap paperbacks by J.X. Williams? Did this supposed conspiracy also plant all of that stuff in used bookstores for the last thirty years? But, hell, if there’re people out there who claim the moon landing was a hoax, I guess they can say anything. I once told J.X. about this problem and he laughed. “I just wished the IRS thought I didn’t exist,” is what he told me. Actually there may be a grain of truth to his answer. I know a very well-connected journalist who surmised that the “J.X. hoax” was devised by the man himself to keep his enemies from coming after him. It’s a lot harder to find someone who a lot of people don’t even believe in.

Rumpus: So Williams also wrote books?

Lawrence: Yes, though his literary output is something of an enigma as well. According to Williams, he wrote a few cheap smut novels to pay the rent back in the early 1960s. He then went back to shooting stag films, but his books sold so well that publishers started releasing books under his name that he had nothing to do with. A lot of well-known writers wrote under the J.X. Williams pseudonym including another cult director by the name of Ed Wood. To further complicate matters, the name J.X. Williams is a pseudonym itself. That’s not the name that appears on his birth certificate.

Rumpus: What’s his real name?

Lawrence: Not even I know. J.X. gave me one clue, though: It ain’t Rumpelstiltskin.

Rumpus: Do you travel all over the world telling people about J.X. Williams?

Lawrence: I’ve been at film festivals, museums, and cinematheques in the U.S. and Europe to lecture and present the films of J.X. Williams. I’ll be back in Berlin and Paris this fall.

Rumpus: When you talk about Williams’ life, what’s the reception?

Lawrence: Pretty good. You go to a lot of different kinds of places. One night, I’ll be screening in an unheated squat. The next day I’ll be giving a presentation at a museum that puts me up in a 5-Star hotel.  It’s all over the map. The biggest problem with reception is getting it in the first place. The amount of screenings with single-digit audiences can be discouraging. What makes up for it is that those four or five people are as obsessed about J.X. as you are. At least you’re not alone.

Rumpus: How do I go about seeing a J.X. Williams film?

Lawrence: Aside from a couple scraps on some DVD compilations like the Experiments in Terror series, the only way you can see his work is through bootlegs and the handful of public screenings I make. I will be in Paris, Berlin, and the Lausanne Underground Film Festival in October.  Check our official website for regular updates on those screenings.  I also should make mention that The J.X. Williams Archive is collaborating with the psychedelic soundtrack band Spindrift on a couple projects. As a start, we lent them some clips from some rare J.X. Williams films to use as visuals on their upcoming tour. We cut out the dialogue sequences and just left in all of the psychedelic freak-out scenes. I haven’t seen it yet but I hear it’s amazing. Also they may be helping us with soundtrack work on some J.X.’s old movies. One of the major problems The Archive has had with re-releasing Williams’ filmography involves music clearances. As you might suspect, J.X. was pretty sketchy with signing contracts and licensing agreements with the rock groups that scored his films. Thirty years later, a lot of these now-legendary bands have demanded as much as $50K to use thirty seconds of their music in a Williams picture. J.X. was livid when I told him about this: “Those junkies want how much money?” Fortunately, a few members of Spindrift are big Williams fans and offered to re-score some of the films.  At first, I wasn’t sure if J.X. would be amenable to that. But I told him “Listen, I know this band in L.A. who wants to redo some of your music. They’re great. Quentin Tarantino even used some of their music in a film he produced.” Surprisingly, he went for it. “Quentin Tarantino?” gushed Williams. “That’s great. I just loved The Crying Game.” I don’t think he watches a lot of movies anymore.

Rumpus: What’s the story with Goldstone, Arizona?

"The Virgin Sacrifice" (1970)

Lawrence: Goldstone is a ghost town in Arizona where J.X. shot The Virgin Sacrifice. It lies along a trail known as the Camino del Diablo which was one of the most dangerous routes for prospectors to travel in the frontier days. It’s extremely hot and there are very few sources of drinking water. Back in olden times, there were skeletons of dead animals and humans along every mile of the trail. Goldstone has a checkered history and there is a lot of strange dark folklore about the place. The town was named for a guy who fell down a mineshaft. So guess where J.X. chose to shoot The Virgin Sacrifice? Granted the production probably would have been a disaster anyway but the desert didn’t help. Most of the cast and crew were used to working on soundstages in Los Angeles and had no idea what they were getting into. If you ever saw the documentary Hearts of Darkness, you might get an idea of the craziness on the set. Basically, it was Apocalypse Now in the desert, mixed in with Hell’s Angels, harder drugs, and the mob.

Rumpus: Is there going to be a book about J.X. Williams’s life soon?

Lawrence: Yessir. The Archive is going to publish a first volume of relevant documents from Williams’ professional and personal life. It’s juicy. Strangely, as much as his story is an American one, I think the book will get published in France before you Yanks get to see it. Sometimes the Europeans seem to understand America better than the Americans do.

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I’m far from the elegance of Rome, but there’s a structural grace to the building I’m approaching as I pass a scruffy windrow of cedars, my boots sinking into the wet ground. In a few steps I will be looking at the barn—red and silver, boxy, and huge as the unbridled agricultural fantasies of the settlers who settled Kansas. It is elegant in its functionality, alien in its imposing quadrangles of tin. Inside, a dank smell hangs, and cobwebs garnish doorframes, and these remind me of a prose poem by Sinisgalli: “The industrious artificer carries his raw materials in his stomach. To build his webs he always begins at the beginning, always spitting out equal angles and parallel segments.” Sinisgalli’s use of geometric language here is not surprising. He was trained as an engineer but he gave it up in his early twenties to write poetry. Though the pictures in his head were from the rural south of Italy where he grew up, poetic form (friends called him “the engineer poet”) is what preoccupied him.

Sinisgalli is defined by this preoccupation — obsession, even — with form. The poet turned 28 in 1936, the year Benito Mussolini assumed the title “His Excellency, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire.” Sinisgalli passed 30 and then 35 as World War II bled Italy barren. He was in mid-career and 37 when Il Duce hung from a lamppost. It is remarkable that Sinisgalli, who died in 1981 at 73, never directly converted any of his country’s tribulations into subject matter. Meanwhile, he criticized critics for missing the point, for paying too much attention to what a poet says instead of how he’s saying it. “The critic,” Sinisgalli writes in a prose poem called “Presuppositions,” “is often a kind of small animal that can crawl all over the surface of a sphere but never know how to reach its center because he’s not familiar with its formula, its form.” For Sinisgalli, form grew content. Via form, he thought—via the alchemical combination of sentence structure, linguistic device, words matched and bonded—language leads us to its implications. The contents of a barn, if you will, mattered less to Sinisgalli than how it was built. Questions of subject matter became subservient to questions of form. Which is why Sinisgalli, though he lived in Italy through the catastrophe of two world wars, never wrote about any of it.

W.S. Di Piero years ago gathered and brought into English a selection of Sinisgalli’s poems called The Ellipse, published in 1982 by Princeton.[i] It covers poetry written from 1927 to 1979, and outside scattered surfacings in anthologies, Di Piero’s translations are among the only versions of Sinisgalli’s poems in English.[ii] In “Lucania,” Sinisgalli probes the reunion of one self with another, adulthood with childhood, filling the poem’s final stanza with confidence and lamentation:

I’ll come back, alive, under your red rain,
I’ll come back, guiltless, to beat the drum,
to tie my mule to the gate,
to catch snails in the garden.
Will I see the smoking stubble, the brushwood,
the ditches? Will I hear the blackbird singing
under the beds, and the cat
singing on the graves?

I’m reading The Ellipse in the loft of my parents’ barn, which they had converted into a game room with overstuffed chairs, and foosball, and a cheap pool table, and an adjustable basketball goal for shooting hoops. The loft is a cavernous room with a slanting ceiling and rafters. Reading Sinisgalli reminds me that stanza is a word that’s come to English-speakers from Italian, and in Italian it means room. And Sinisgalli’s sense of the stanza is so purified, so contained, so room-like, and this reminds me that he studied math, that he was practiced in precision. He knew how to build rooms, and from rooms, buildings. Each stanza he pens presents itself as a well-crafted shell, a container that’s singular, a container whose function nullifies any need of decoration, or whose decoration is functional. The edges of his stanzas—defined by where he breaks lines, places periods, or how he makes phrases—are like the spare, essential lines in an architect’s drawings, lines that give structure to whatever he’s trying to preserve the way walls give structure to a room.[iii]

Consider this, the second-to-last stanza of “Lucania” (which, my apologies, we are now reading backwards):

In volcanic tinderbox air
the trees weirdly throb and breathe,
oak trunks fatten with the essence of heaven.
Heaps of rubble lie untouched for centuries:
nobody dares turn over a stone, afraid of the horror.
I know hell’s navel lies under every stone.
Only a boy can lean over the edge
of the abyss and scoop nectar
from shoot-clusters swarming with mosquitos
and tarantulas.

Sinisgalli turns the key on his stanzas with periods at the end, locking them. That is, he rarely breaks lines across stanzas. For Sinisgalli, the stanza is one thought, and a pause is required before the next. Within them, there’s a plodding rhythm made by a mind that seems to know and love the walls that define it. This is true even when the line pushes at those walls. “Only the boy can lean over the edge,” and then the line itself—it does the same in Italian (“Solo un ragazzo può sporgersi agli orli,” orli can mean “edges,” or “hems,” as in sewing)—enacts this, takes us to that edge, hurls us into blank space, into the abyss of a well-timed enjambment. Sinisgalli is fond of enjambment, and good at it, but there are few frayed edges in his poetry. He shares with William Carlos Williams an obsession with antieloquent language[iv] (they were alive at the same time) but Sinisgalli’s poems have none of Williams’s jitteryness. Rather, the poet houses the roughshod subject matter of country living in elegant forms.

Robert Hass has written about how to define form, I think instructively: “We speak of the sonnet as ‘a form,’ when no two sonnets, however similar their structures, have the same form,” he says in Twentieth Century Pleasures. Form, he suggests, dwells at once everywhere and at the center of the poem, in the unity of the poem’s music and its vision. He goes on: “Form is not the number or kind of restrictions, conscious or unconscious, many or few, with which a piece of writing begins. A sonnet imposes one set of restrictions and a poem by Robert Creeley with relatively short lines and three- or four-line stanzas imposes another. There are always restrictions…” Hass quotes Creeley quoting Pound: “Verse consists of a constant and a variant.” It’s more than restrictions, but still, what is a form? In 1957 painter Ben Shahn wrote “The Shape of Content,” an essay that’s as valuable now as the day it was published. “Form,” said Shahn, “is the abolishing of excessive materials, whatever material is extraneous to inner harmony, to the order of shapes now established. Form is thus a discipline, an ordering, according to the needs of content.”[v] It’s more than a structure, a lens, a rhyme scheme, or a number of lines.[vi] Form is all these in concert. But form most of all is shape: imaginative, emotional, metrical, typographical, and musical shape. And a poem’s shape is born in the echo chamber of the self in which an artist makes mechanical decisions, one after another, while constantly negotiating the repercussions of those decisions.

In my apartment in San Francisco I have a drawing the size of an unfolded city map of a fleshy nude woman lounging, half looking away. It was made by filmmaker Jean Negulesco in 1960, black ink on now yellowing paper. It’s done with one line and the line never breaks, all the curves and bulges and smooth edges of the woman rendered, it appears, in one breathless stroke. The impact of the drawing is immense; its starkness levels. The line tells me how to look. It creates a boundary. It creates in light a set of parameters. The eye cannot argue. The impact of the drawing is even more immense because of the affect of the line’s lineness. That is, the line may have taken hours to draw, but its smooth, unshakeable motion suggests it happened in a flash. It is illusion masquerading as epitome, and it is the genius of form. In this case, a woman sitting on a wall takes the form of a single line.

I am going to translate this further. Say there is a lovely woman sleeping in a nearby room at this moment. Her physicality, her shape, the way her body was ordered is marvelously pleasing to my eye. Say the beauty of the container is matched by the beauty of what is contained, by the beauty of who is contained. Say that when she wakes, she’ll drift in with puffy, slight-smiling lips and speak wondrous strings of words only she can speak, in cadences only she knows. These are the forms of her mind made manifest in the beats of language.

I’m going to say she is an utterly elegant lady because I want to think, while I’m fumbling with the definitions of words, about elegant, which I have used to describe the results of Sinisgalli’s formal decisions. Elegant originated in the 1400s, it came from Latin, and it can mean according to OED, “graceful in form or movement” or “tastefully fine; luxurious in dress, style, and design.” I’m interested more in grace than luxury, and I’m even more interested in the Latin root—ēlegāre—which is a variant of an older word, ēligere, meaning to select or elect or choose. And there’s a whiff of geometry buried in the lineage of elegant: think of good, functional design. A shaker rocking chair.[vii]

Seemingly related, but in the case of Sinisgalli crucially distinct, is the word eloquent. Sinisgalli was not interested in eloquence. To be eloquent is “to have the power of fluent, forceful, and appropriate speech,” and the word arose into English the same time elegant did, coming also from Latin. Eloquēns, the Latin root, means “to speak out.” Rhetoric is in the DNA of this family of words. Smooth speechifying is absent from—if not opposite—Sinisgalli’s project.

Sinisgalli’s poetry is elegant but rarely eloquent, and only then in spite of itself, and the further into Sinisgalli I read, the more important this distinction becomes. If elegance, personified, is the quiet choosy type, eloquence is the famous toastmaster. Sinisgalli is a choosy poet. His congress is with elegance. The forms his words take are honed and polished, images and enjambments alike selected in the service of precision. Consider the fourth, third, and second stanzas[viii] of “Lucania,” the molten core of the poem, and a path straight through the poet’s sensibility:

Land of huge mamas, of fathers dark
and radiant as skeletons, overrun by roosters
and dogs, woods and limestone, lean
land where the grain toils miserably
(wheat, corn, semolina)
and the wine is dark and chewy (mint
from the Agri, basil from the Basento!)
and olives taste of oblivion,
flavor of sorrow.

The translation captures well the quiet power of the repeated preposition in the first line: “Terra di mamme grasse, di padri scuri.” The stanza has a stately, incantatory ring, like names being read off a roll call at a nightmarish graduation. And this coming before it:

The sun slanting on laurel, the good
bighorned sun, tongue of sweet light,
sun greedy for children, here in the piazzas!
It trudges like an ox, and on the grass
and stones it leaves enormous stains
swarming with ghosts.

…preceded by Sinisgalli’s insistence in the second stanza that the spirit of silence—the spirit that inhabits corners and shadows (which is to Sinisgalli the spirit of the poet)—springs from things most primal:

The spirit of silence is everywhere
in my grieving province. From Elea to Metaponto,
sophistical and golden, baffling and sly,
it drinks the holy oil in churches, goes hooded
in houses, dresses as a monk in caves, grows
with the grass on the outskirts of old crumbling villages.

Lower Order is no insult to Sinisgalli. It is the position, he says, from which the modern poet works. Sinisgalli writes: “And the scorpion and toad? They and the Poet are of the same race; the Poet belongs to the lower orders.”[ix] And this is where elegant versus eloquent becomes most directly relevant. For Sinisgalli there is room in the lower orders for elegance, but not eloquence: “What are Eulogies, Hymns, Orations? Nothing but magnificent Rhetoric,” he complains in the same essay.

Which returns me to Kansas in April, to the stagnant pools of water that form in the weedy grass around the barn after a torrential rain. In a few weeks it will be May, and warmer. The ditches filled with water, the mini-lakes on the fields, all now filling with mosquito larvae, will soon be steamy breeding pits for hordes. They will be infested, unpleasant places to be. But at the same time undeniably fertile. When I read “with the grass on the outskirts of old crumbling villages” I think of these stagnant pools, and I think of Czeslaw Milosz writing that “man constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins.” Milosz and Sinisgalli—one in Poland, one in Italy—lived through and well beyond World War II. Ruin and rot are places of breaking down, of returning to parts. Old becomes fodder for new. What seems inert spawns. And I should note, too, that the structure of Sinisgalli’s stanzas is what leads my eye to this line and its “crumbling villages.” It is the final line before the stanza ends, it is itself on the outskirts, the last thing I think about before I pause. It’s what hits my brain in the silence. And it’s where the poet lives, at the edge, amid decay. The poet, to Sinisgalli, is the boy who might “scoop nectar / from shoot-clusters swarming with mosquitos.” The spirit that “dresses as a monk in caves, grows / with the grass on the outskirts of old crumbling villages.”

There is no place in Sinisgalli for overblown rhetoric, for eloquence for its own sake. He was philosophically liberal—he would “sooner live backstairs than in a sumptuous tower” and, he believed, the poet “confides not in princes but in janitors, mailmen, pensioners.” Still, Sinisgalli did not spend his poems lambasting Mussolini or his regime as they clogged the land. He did not make war-torn Italy his material. Rather, he attacked fascism by not attacking it, at least not head-on. His poems stood against the forms of fascism by countering its use of language and therefore its thinking. Language was the front, form the weapon. Putting it this way, I suppose, makes it sound more intentional and polemical than it probably was on Sinisgalli’s part. We’re talking about a process inside the man, one that operated below the fleeting fashions of conscious decision-making. This is to say, I don’t mean to canonize Sinisgalli, or conjure up motivations in the man that weren’t there. Sinisgalli wrote the way he wrote not to make a point or start a revolution. He wrote the way he wrote because it was the way he liked to write.

By the time he was born, Italian poetry was already in revolt against a marvelous but formally conservative (Petrarch) and powerful (Dante) literary tradition.[x] The tradition had hit a classic (but not golden) age[xi], a period filled with imitators, and a poetry stuffed with flowery subject matter, shackled in iron-firm metric restrictions (the hendecasyllable was the great engine of Italian poetry, like the iambic pentameter in English) and gliding on rhetoric and fluffy narrative.[xii] Gabriele D’Annunzio was an orating[xiii] fiction-writing[xiv] politician[xv] journalist[xvi] showman[xvii] poet, and a fascist before fascism. He was the rooster of Italian literature for a time, and like a weathervane draws lightning, D’Annunzio drew readers. He wrote bestselling books of verse, was called “the Genius of the Race” in the press, and when he was old he campaigned with Mussolini. His often rhetorically-bloated, nationalistic verse (“I search with open mouth and burning breath / A little coolness on the shadowed sward, / Beyond, the Adriatic, still as death, / Shows dreadful dazzlings like an unsheathed sword”) epitomized the stagnation permeating Italian letters. In 1920 D’Annunzio wrote the Charter of Carnaro—a pre-fascist manifesto with lines like “Fiume is warden of the Italian marches, the furthest stronghold of Italian culture, the most distant land that bears the imprint of Dante.” A year later, perhaps not even noticed by D’Annunzio, a young poet called Eugenio Montale launched a volley at literary and intellectual pomposity (to him the source of stagnation) in Italy, writing, “But I love streets that spill into grass / ditches, where kids scramble after skinny eels / in half-baked puddles.”

Volley is too strong a word until you drop these lines into the early twentieth-century milieu of Italian writing. To shift the focus to the fringes, to tone down the rhetoric in favor of descriptive precision, was groundbreaking. These lines from Montale sound a little like Sinisgalli (really, it’s the other way around) with their orientation toward the periphery of things, but Sinisgalli, whose poems first appeared in the late 1920s, found even Montale and his contemporaries (Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti[xviii]) overblown and bedizened.[xix] Think of Sinisgalli’s straightforward, nearly adjective-less take on the sun: “It trudges like an ox, and on the grass / and stones it leaves enormous stains.” Sinisgalli made his frames precise and his boxes plain, zeroing in on the small rather than the grandiose, the elegant rather than the eloquent, the must of hay-filled stalls rather than the majesty of swards. “The significance of subject matter (and of the poet’s relation to it) has been calibrated according to a different measure,” writes Di Piero with a sniff in the introduction to The Ellipse. Di Piero is absolutely right. An ellipse is a geometric form, and this title is an apt one for a poet—”the engineer poet”—whose subject matter was calibrated primarily in terms of form. And so we come to an answer to the question of how it was that Sinisgalli lived through World War II and never seemed to write about it. Sinisgalli responded to his times not by putting energy into describing how bad things were, but by putting energy into making sound formal decisions[xx] when all around him the structures (forms) of civil society were disintegrating.

I keep saying phrases like “formal decisions” so I had better say what his decisions were. Sinisgalli distinguished himself in engineering, math, and physics, but he refused a spot at the Istituto di Fisica in 1929, saying later, “Although I could have joined the young men who were ushering in the atomic age, I preferred to follow the painters and poets. ” Romantic, yes, but with “Cartesian precision” (Di Piero’s words), Sinisgalli waged his own assault on empty rhetoric in the privacy of his study. He decried poetry by “Rhetoricians and Sophists.” He strips down his poems to clean, exact stanzas that are at first blush devoid of emotion; the speaker of these poems sometimes seems dead as a camera. His forms reveal an obsession with both precision and accuracy, simplicity and mystery. Whether or not Sinisgalli conceived of his work in polemical terms—my guess is he did not—the poet’s choices within his poems stand in opposition to the rhetorically swollen, euphemistic language of fascism. Here’s Mussolini speaking to thousands in Rome, 1941 (Sinisgalli was living there at the time):

The hardships, suffering and sacrifices that are faced with exemplary courage and dignity by the Italian people will have their day of compensation when all the enemy forces are crushed on the battlefields by the heroism of our soldiers and a triple, immense cry will cross the mountains and oceans like lightning and light new hopes and give new certainties to the spirits of multitudes.

Mussolini’s literary corollary is his friend D’Annunzio. Both sought to unleash the same formal gush of stadium-sized speech every time they spoke or wrote. Both sought to convince, to quicken pulses in the service of national pride. Historian Robert Paxton has described fascism as “more nakedly dependent on charisma” than any other kind of rule. “Fascism’s main attraction,” agrees R.J.B. Bosworth in his book Mussolini’s Italy, “was the intensity of its message.” I would extrapolate further: the intensity of its forms—massive gatherings of chanting people, speeches shouted from stages by gesticulating strongmen, proclamations, decrees—is foundational to the “intensity of its message.” Sinisgalli’s insistence on making accurate, truthfully-observed, un-grandiose poems seems radical.[xxi] Here at last is the first stanza of “Lucania”:

To the pilgrim crossing its frontiers,
moving down through the Alburni pass
or following the sheep-track on the slopes of the Serra,
to the kite snapping the horizon line
with a snake in its claws, to the emigrant, to the soldier,
whoever comes back from refuge or exile, whoever sleeps
in sheep pens, to the shepherd, sharecropper, and salesman
Lucania opens its barren plains,
its valleys where rivers crawl
like rivers of dust.

One shouldn’t mistake Sinisgalli’s astonishing embrace of broken-down returners here with grandiosity. This stanza ends in dust. Sinisgalli, writing in war’s wake in “On The Figure of the Poet,” unpacks what it means to write antieloquence[xxii]:

The Poet… has had to draw from the wells of instinct, from his animal tenderness. He has had to trust in his sense of smell more than in his learning, in his native dialect more than in official culture. Let us not accuse him of giving us tubers instead of jewels.

Sinisgalli is proud of his “tubers,” his elegant un-jewels.[xxiii] In Germany, fascism lit a pastoralist fire and rural men and women could be counted on for patriotism. In Italy, however, fascism caught on slowly in the villages of the south; it competed for power with the mafioso, winning much earlier the urban centers of the north.[xxiv] In any case, in images of the countryside, Sinisgalli found something uninflated, something that didn’t pretend or posture. There is starkness to the grind and repetition—the chores, the demands of crop and livestock, season and weather—of rural life. While Mussolini was shouting “Victory Italy!” in the great metropolis of Western civilization, Sinisgalli was writing poems made from a childhood lived in that land’s barren south-country, poems like “Lucania,” or, later, poems like this one from the early 1950s—so hard and tight and sure of itself I want to compare it to a weather-beaten pebble; it’s as if Sinisgalli designed the poem based on some corresponding physical object[xxv]—called “The Wind Has Stopped Blowing”:

The wind has stopped blowing through the valley,
the dogs are gone,
children fly past
with swallows in their hands.
A mole pokes its head
from a hole, an insect
rolls bits of dung,
the ant gathers grain,
winter isn’t far.

Conscious or unconscious, it’s a formal decision to let that first line billow out (“Nella valle non passa più il vento”—it’s the longest in the poem in Italian as well), or to revert immediately afterwards to short, three- and four-syllable lines, or to end on terse, prickly terms: “winter isn’t far” (“l’inverno non è lontano”). Sinisgalli knew personally—his day job for a while was with Olivetti as an advertising director[xxvi]—what Marshall McLuhan would articulate decades later: “The medium is the message.” The shell is the content. When I read Sinisgalli’s verse I think of William Carlos Williams writing in The Wedge (1944) that, “it isn’t what [the poet] says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes.”[xxvii]

George Orwell’s ominous communiqué in Nineteen Eighty-Four (first edition, 1949) was, in part, that honest language is the first casualty in a fascist state. Listen to Montale’s 1945 description of the writer’s allowance under Mussolini’s regime: “Basically one could put into prose or verse one’s nostalgia for adolescence or for grandfather’s carpet slippers, or could reel off a tale in a nineteenth century style.” Literary historian Joseph Cary confirms this. “What the regime wanted of writers,” he says, “was what it felt to be a healthy constructivity, happy hortatory songs about fecund mothers, beaming babies, teeming fields; positive thinking, in other words.” Frankly, this didn’t interest Sinisgalli. Take the last stanza of his elegy “September 16, 1943″:

Early in the morning my father
sits on the hearthstone.
People come and go with bottles
wrapped in shawls, asking for vinegar
to cure thrush.
The women talk to one another
about pigs, pigs clean as dogs,
living under their beds.
Epidemics among cows, sheep, chickens.
Signs that the end is near?
The women list them one by one
while they squat on bundled twigs
around the fire, remembering my mother.

It’s September, 1943 (in the title he’s explicitly called our attention to that), all of Europe is on fire, and in thirteen lines, Sinisgalli offers only a couplet of (vague) reference to worldly catastrophe (“Signs that the end is near? / The women list them one by one”). We have mainly Sinisgalli’s poems and the occasional essay to guide us, and he seems to have kept his public profile low during the war years, but I do not think Sinisgalli was a coward for his indirect modes of confrontation. In the face of manipulative use of language, he crafted sharp-edged poems that were as earnest as they were honest, poems that refused any official style or subject matter. This was his reply to his times.[xxviii]

Decades later and a continent away, Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan engaged in a furious debate about whether to explicitly write the Vietnam War (not to mention the Civil Rights and feminist movements) into their poems or not. Levertov thoughts poets could and should zero in on the images of, say, war and bring that content directly into poems. She was changed deeply by the Adolf Eichmann trial, and in response she penned her first overly political poem in 1961, later explaining that the poet’s job is to be a “proxy witness” to the events, terrible or otherwise, of his or her historical moment. In “Enquiry,” Levertov attacks the American war machine in verse: “You who go out on schedule / to kill, do you know / there are eyes that watch you, / eyes whose lids you burned off…” Duncan, on the other hand, thought poets ought to focus on constructing great art—even when that excluded writing about what, because of one’s political or moral positions, one thought one should be writing about. Both were great poets; the disagreement shattered the friendship. In one letter Duncan called Levertov’s work “moralizing.” In response she called his poems “sentimental.” Duncan wrote Levertov in 1971 that, “I am not talking about prisoners, blacks, children, and angry women in revolt—I am talking about those with work to do deserting their work. And our work is surely to get the words right…”

Unlike Czesław Miłosz, Sinisgalli seems to feel no guilt about having lived through Europe’s second great war. In “Dedication,” Miłosz addresses the dead of the Warsaw uprising: “You whom I could not save / Listen to me. / Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.”[xxix] Miłosz, to be sure, saw more carnage than Sinisgalli, and so perhaps the war entering his poems was unstoppable. It’s hard to say what Sinisgalli would have written had he endured more direct hardship. But even Milosz, who was able (I would say) to directly write about his war torn homeland, even he became convinced a poet’s developed sense of form was more important than whatever the poet was talking about. “The reality of the war years,” he writes in “Ruins and Poetry,” “is a great subject, but a great subject is not enough and it even makes inadequacies in workmanship all the more visible.”

It’s too extreme to say subject matter is irrelevant. Of course what you’re writing matters. But what’s most interesting about content is this: What formal moves does it trigger of you? Does the fact that you’re taking us into hell require a certain form? Dante said, yes, it requires a particular rhyme scheme—eventually called terza rima (ABA BCB CDC and so on), three lines per stanza, a pattern that theoretically never ends—to create a feeling of descent into oblivion in the reader. Does the fact that you’re trying to give us the stream of a man’s mind over the course of a single day require a certain form? Joyce said, yes, it requires a tome rich with nodes of personal dialect and brimming with sentences as endless as thought itself. This is why it’s such a relief for a poet when a poem finds its form, when a poet sees a shape in the block of granite. What’s more, I think Sinisgalli would say that subject matter is a given; it is all around all of us. To be alive is to be immersed in subject matter. Which is why artists must go in search of forms.

If anything, war and passage through fascism deepened Sinisgalli’s belief in a poet’s taking responsibility for his or her forms. The world had come undone. Official, inherited modes had become suspect. In “On The Figure of the Poet” (the word figure in this title is noteworthy: it’s a word that has to do with shape, and it’s another sign of where Sinisgalli’s priorities lie) he writes:

The extraordinary stability of ancient forms (comparable only to the stability of the pyramids and colossi, of columns and cupolas) has surrendered the field to less abstract structures that are more free and easy, more articulate, certainly more short-lived. The equippage of metaphoric language—the burden of symbols, figures of speech, ornaments, and emblems—does not incite the Poet to take risks [emphasis in the original].

What does incite the poet to take risks? Sinisgalli’s beef is with baggage, with weighty, muddling language. He wants forms conducive to the boiling down of things. “The Poet’s only standard or ambition,” he writes, “may finally be to document the possibility of his own existence.” Sinisgalli believes, if nothing else, in evidence, in proofs. He is a mumbling mechanic diagnosing reality. He is a fierce quiet scientist experimenting on time. He is a farmhand laboring in the chicken coop of literature.

So how consciously was Sinisgalli really pushing against fascism? I’ve circled this question throughout the essay, and I want to answer it with the old truth, ‘trust the art, not the artist.’ True, Leonardo Sinisgalli did not participate in the resistance. He did not protest or get arrested or throw tomatoes at government offices. He did not even state that his poems were an open challenge to Mussolini’s regime. But he wrote them, and so to me they are the main event.

And I’ll make one explicit comment on subject matter in Sinisgalli. The poet straddled two worlds in his lifetime. He lived in the city but it’s as if he felt in exile: his verse constantly recalls his home province. Why does he go to the city and then write so much village life into his poems? I think it’s because distance clarifies and sharpens vision. I left farms and dirt roads for a metropolis of towering buildings and crowded pavement. Living in San Francisco allows me to write honestly about Kansas. I see it better. It’s not so much that the grass is greener when you’re looking from afar. It’s that the grass is clearer. Clarity can be painful. But clarity, for Sinisgalli, is a precursor to precision. And my note on subject matter comes back around—I know, I know, the jig is up—to form. The mechanics of Sinisgalli’s poems—the contained, well-defined stanzas, for instance—spring from the same imperative within him that determined Sinisgalli’s choice of what to write about: the need to be utterly (coldly, even) precise. To be precise, he had to see clearly. To see clearly, he had to leave. Once I left Kansas I saw how well I could see it. It has become, paradoxically, what is right in front of my face—and what I have to write about—only when it’s two thousand miles and a cultural canyon away.[xxx]

Sinisgalli’s poems are not the cries of an evangelizer or syrup from a propaganda dealer. They are brief transmissions from an inward-turned journey. At my parents’ farm, there is a swing I love. It hangs from a Honey locust across the sewage pond from the barn. I am sitting there the day before I pole vault back across the Rockies to California when I read “Via Velasca,” written by Sinisgalli sometime in the 1950s. A long shiver begins in my heel and surfaces on the top of my skull. In Di Piero’s English translation, there are no words not necessary, no lazy lines:

It’s less likely than ever
that someone will clutch at you
and beg pity for his suffering.
The windows of the Verzee
are stuffed with rags.
Among the shops and signs
you look for a memory, odor,
stone, landmark
in the blasted street.
Your pockets are filled with life.
Filthy with smoke, outcast, you slowly
bend over to tie your shoes.
Your pockets are filled with wind.

This is a crisp sound, a cessation of the static for a second. Unfurl the butterfly nets of memory and image and music, says Sinisgalli. Catch wind. Fill your pockets with it.

[ii] A note on translation: It is exceedingly difficult to get a sense of a poet, to truly understand the poet’s place in the culture and idiom he springs from, when reading his work in a language other than that in which he wrote the poems. Nonetheless, Di Piero’s translations are excellent. He negotiates one of the roadblocks of moving from Italian to English, namely the problem of converting Italian, with its small pool of sounds, into English, a much vaster pool of sonic options. Where it’s easy for Italian to end-rhyme line after line, English strains to attempt the same feat in the same poem. Robert Pinksy, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s Inferno, notes the challenge to the translator presented by the “great sprawling matrix of sounds” that is English. Di Piero, throughout The Ellipse, is vigilant about approximating as close as possible the sonic qualities of the original when bundling a given poem across the borders of Italian into English.

[iii] Architecture presents a vivid metaphor because pieces of art, if they succeed, become fixed points in memory. They become buildings on the skyline of the past. A brilliant few weather all the storms of forgetting.

[iv] Actually, the history of Italian poetry is a march toward antieloquence. Sinisgalli would have distanced himself from Dante’s poetry, with its veering toward grandiosity. But in his day, Dante waged his own war on eloquence and the linguistic expectations of the day. He chose to write The Divine Comedy in Italian, which is to say, not in Latin. Which is why he never saw the epic poem published in his lifetime. His investment in Italian seemed a step toward permanent obscurity, except that—and it’s a testament to the strength of his poetry—it got noticed a couple hundred years after he wrote it by a group of Italian intellectuals who’d gotten together to handpick a common language. It’s a funny thing about Italian. Spanish, French, English, and most other languages became the dominant language in a particular region through a combination of inertia and war—that is, the economic and cultural power of Paris, for instance, made Parisian French basically the French spoken to this day all over France. Italian, on the other hand, was chosen by writers and thinkers and philosophers from Napoli and Roma and Milano who got together because they were tired of having no official common language. They picked one. The vernacular they picked was Dante’s, and they picked it primarily because it was so beautiful. Dante is to Italian what Shakespeare is to English. And over time, and in a way that never happened for Shakespearean English, Dante’s Italian became the new Latin (i.e. an institution), and Italian poetry grew stagnant. Eventually, as these things go, a new breed of antieloquent writers sprung up. One of them was Leonardo Sinisgalli.

[v] Ben Shahn’s thought in full: “For form is not just the intention of content; it is the embodiment of content. Form is based, first, upon a supposition, a theme. Form is, second, a marshaling of materials, the inert matter in which the theme is to be cast. Form is, third, a setting of boundaries, of limits, the whole extent of idea, but no more, an outer shape of idea. Form is, next, the relating of inner shapes to the outer limits, the initial establishing of harmonies. Form is, further, the abolishing of excessive content, of content that falls outside the true limits of the theme. It is the abolishing of excessive materials, whatever material is extraneous to inner harmony, to the order of shapes now established. Form is thus a discipline, an ordering, according to the needs of content.”

[vi] I would caution as well, for what it’s worth, against confusing a poet’s “style” with a poet’s “forms.” The forms are a product of, among other things, the poet’s style. Style has, in my mind, more to do with the tone, voice, and register that a poet strikes, rather than the mechanics and structures of the poem. It gets slippery. The concepts are interlarded but, to me, formal calculations—form—should be thought of as one specific (and disproportionately important) component of a poet’s style.

[vii] A shaker rocker!

[viii] The fact that we can read this poem backwards stanza by stanza and have it make a kind of sense is another proof of Sinisgalli’s ability to make little rooms within poems. Each stanza is almost a separate and individual poem. Each stanza is contained, pebble-like. This invites playful rearranging.

[ix] More from Sinisgalli on this subject (from “On The Figure of the Poet,” 1948): “Given the nature of his feelings—a heart disappointed, tender, frightened—he stands accused of aloofness, indifference, and egoism. Feeling hurt and betrayed, dissatisfied by the love and friendship of those close to him, and reluctant to hug a horse or rotting carcass, he seeks the friendship of cats and birds, then descends even lower, looking for compassion, anxious to believe he actually has something to offer—he’s so delicate! In the end he appeals to flies, snails, scorpions, toads.”

[x] Italian Modernism surely begins with Giacomo Leopardi. In an 1817 letter to a friend Leopardi attacked even the great Petrarch for his fluffiness: “I have always despised any suggestion of sentimentality, …nor do I find pleasure in reading love stories for… the emotions of other—even when described with sincerity—turn my stomach. I can’t even take Petrarch, who—I thought—would surely describe feelings very like mine.” Leopardi, however, had a conservative streak in him. Joseph Cary writes that “Leopardi’s notebooks were crammed with lists of ‘un-Italian’ words (recent coinages, barbarous compounds, gallicisms, words unsanctified by use in the superb past).” Leopardi harbored suspicions about the viability of new (at that time) Italian poetry. In 1820 he wrote, “The best generations are not those before us but those behind us; and it’s hardly likely that the world will change and go back instead of forward. And going forward obviously it can only get worse.” Yikes.

[xi] The poet Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, writing in 1911, judged Italian poetry at that moment to be “poesia crepuscolare”—poetry of the twilight. In Italy, the past casts a long, intimidating shadow. Borgese was born in 1882. To Borgese and his contemporaries (the generation just before Sinisgalli), writing poems meant shouldering the sad mantle of being, in Joseph Cary’s words, “poets of the dusk, a lume spento, the inheritors of aftermath.” The World Wars proved this sentiment premature. But these concerns were not limited to Italian letters. In 1908, the year Sinisgalli was born, Ezra Pound published “Revolt: Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry.” In it he writes: “I would shake off the lethargy of this our time, and give / For shadows—shapes of power, / For dreams—men…”

[xii] In the early part of the twentieth century the flashiest exceptions to this flowery poetry in Italian literature were the writings of the Futurists. The Futurists worshiped speed, technology, progress, and violence. They would have orgasmed over the internet. Whether they created lasting literature remains a question for further study. In any case, the polemics of the Futurists—down with the Uffizi! down with the Pope! down with the hendecasyllable!—did not pique Sinisgalli’s curiosity or imagination. The Futurists’ open embrace of chaos did not appeal to this orderly man. In 1948, albeit years after the Futurists’ brief flaring, Sinisgalli lamented in “On The Figure of the Poet,” that “Poets… seem now totally ruled by the demon du hasard, pure Chance.”

[xiii] He spent 1921 and 1922 giving political speeches with a fascist bent. In October 1922 the Genius of the Race was pushed out of a window. He never fully recovered from the fall. A doddering figurehead of a man, worshiped with nationalist fervor, he died of a stroke in 1938.

[xiv] The Child of Pleasure, Giovanni Episcopo, and The Intruder, for instance.

[xv] In 1897, by way of example, D’Annunzio was elected to the Chamber of Deputies.

[xvi] For years, he was on the staff of the Tribuna (Rome), writing under the pseudonym Duca Minimo.

[xvii] He was the commander of the 87^th fighter squadron for a time, and on August 9, 1918 he led nine planes in a legendary propaganda drop on Vienna called “The Flight Over Vienna.” The leaflets that bombarded the city were courteously worded invitations to surrender.

[xviii] As it turns out, Ungaretti (who embraced Futurism briefly) eventually joined the National Fascist Party. He signed the pro-fascist Manifesto of the Italian Writers in 1925. Mussolini wrote a preface to Ungaretti’s The Buried Port in 1923.

[xix] Not only that, W.S. Di Piero told me in an email that by the 1970s the fact of Montale’s status as a national monument irked Sinisgalli, a recluse who preferred poets stay on the fringes. Montale’s fame must have added to Sinisgalli’s perception that Montale, a 1975 Nobel Laureate, wrote airy and overly finished verse. Too eloquent, in other words.

[xx] If the phrase “formal decisions” is confusing, let me clarify: I mean decisions about what forms his poems should take, not decisions dressed in tuxedos.

[xxi] This wasn’t a conversation limited to Italy. “One of the ways by which contemporary verse has tried to escape the rhetorical, the abstract, the moralizing, to recover (for that is its purpose) the accents of direct speech, is to concentrate its attention on trivial or accidental or commonplace objects.” This is T.S. Eliot writing on Georgian poets for The Egoist in 1917. He would publish The Waste Land five years later.

[xxii] And what would he have been reading? Sinisgalli was well versed in Rimbaud, Verlaine, Valéry, Descartes, Rousseau, Schopenhauer and the plain-spoken 19^th century Italian poet Guido Gozzano. Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi, Foscolo, and Tasso would have been drilled into his and every other Italian student of his generation’s head.

[xxiii] A poet who shared Sinisgalli’s distaste for Montale, as well as his desire for small elegant poems, was Sandro Penna, born two years before Sinisgalli in 1906. Penna was also the first queer Italian poet to write openly and directly about his sexuality (from George Scrivani’s 1988 translation of Confused Dream: “Always boys in my poems! / Well, I don’t know / about anything else.”) His short, bursting, erotic lyrics made him less than iconic in the eyes of the fascists. Luckily for him, he too was a recluse. W.S. Di Piero, translator of Sinisgalli, is also one of Penna’s conduits into English. In 1982, in addition to Sinisgalli’s book The Ellipse, Di Piero published This Strange Joy, which includes the following four-line, untitled, sentence-long poem: “Maybe plain and easy poetry happens / unthinking as a traveler’s hand / inside an airless crowded train / falling on a boy’s shoulder.” Alda Merini, on the other hand, was “found” by Montale, but still, she’s a good example of the antieloquence that came after Sinisgalli and Penna (she was born in 1931). Her favorite is the aphorism, which she turns into a brutal barb. Examples: “Death is a perfect boundary” or “Superficiality / disturbs me / but profundity / murders me.” Montale endorsed and recommended her work widely. Susan Stewart and Carla Billitteri each have published solid approximations of Merini’s verse in English. Stewart’s was published by Princeton (2009) and is called Love Lessons. Billitteri’s chapbook of Merini poetry is called I am a furious little bee and it was published by Hooke Press (2008). The two aphorisms cited just now were from the Billitteri chapbook.

[xxiv] Christopher Duggan, on page 458 of The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796, describes the case of Sicily, explaining that through the 1930s “the peasantry in western and central Sicily continued to place more trust in mafiosi than in the representatives of the Italian state,” i.e. than in Mussolini’s regime.

[xxv] Good poetry exhibits a mastery of time. I’m occasionally envious of artists whose mediums—paint, canvass, clay, metal, video, photography, etc.—have a physical aspect that’s unavoidable, a tangibility that’s comforting. You can feel paint. You can knead clay. You can develop film. There’s nothing like that in writing, really, aside from a sheet of paper—and that’s only if you write by hand. In writing, time itself is the medium. Still, I appreciate that Sinisgalli pushes me to think of verse in physical terms by the sheer objectness of his poems.

[xxvi] Sinisgalli founded Civiltà delle Macchine, one of Italy’s most influential design magazines. Like many other Italian writers in the twentieth century, Sinisgalli had no university training in literature or writing.

[xxvii] Stephen Burt believes the pendulum in American poetry has swung again toward Williams’s sentiment. He points to a growing body of work by American poets who cast their music in the cardinal directions of precision, elegance, intelligence, and object obsession. As an example, he nods to Graham Foust (As In Every Deafness, 2003). Here’s “Managed Care”: “Flowers in a blue / glass, capable / as doors. / The sun erases / all the grass. / The yard is done for.” I read Burt’s piece while working on this essay and I couldn’t help but think of lines from Sinisgalli like “olives taste of oblivion, / flavor of sorrow” and “the ant gathers grain, / winter isn’t far.”

[xxviii] Even before fascism took hold in Italy, there were poets straining for the honesty Sinisgalli achieved in his airtight, descriptive poems. In 1911, Umberto Saba wrote “What Remains for Poets to Do,” an essay he submitted to a magazine called La Voce. The article was rejected. It sat in a box of Saba’s papers until the poet’s death in 1957. It influenced no one. But it’s noteworthy for its sensibility, a sensibility I think Sinisgalli—who was three when it was written—would come to share, though of course I don’t know if he ever had a conversation about it with Saba. Saba says: “Whoever does not write verse out of a sincere need to support the expression of his passion with rhythm, whoever has commercial or otherwise ambitious intentions—he for whom the publication of a book is like winning a medal or opening a shop—such a one cannot begin to imagine what stubborn force of intellect, what disinterested grandeur of soul, is needed to resist all the seduction and to keep oneself pure and honest in front of oneself.” These are stirring words and there’s a clear echo of this sentiment, an ocean and a century apart as they are, in Donald Hall’s call for writers in the United States to stare hard into themselves, to resist the urge to look elsewhere or to blink. Hall’s challenge remains radical decades later. Let no one claim poets living in the United States have nothing to write about. Subject matter is all around us. We walk inside it as in a fog. It’s what we do formally with this material that matters.

[xxix] Milosz, like Sinisgalli, craves simplicity and directness as a matter of function.

[xxx] Italy was a collection of city-states until it became a nation in 1861. The entrenched view, under the surface to this day, is that residents of the northern half (there are more cities in the north) are typically more urbane and sophisticated while residents of the rural south are more muscle than brain. This raises the stakes for Sinisgalli living in Rome and yet writing about the countryside. Di Piero said in an email that Sinisgalli “contained two cultures” in that he was “born in Lucania, pagan, Southern, of small means” but “lived his adult life in Milan and Rome, founded the most famous design magazine of its time, worked for Olivetti, etc.” Sinisgalli spent summers in his home village of Montemurro most of his life. In other words, he maintained an active connection to what he’d exiled himself from. This is why his poems don’t feel nostalgic; the past was animated by a regular stream of updates. In his poems, the past is golden and remembered but, when filtered through the present, filled with decay and decline. One more thing about “containing” multiple cultures (something that’s always been at the core of the American idea). Zadie  Smith argued for a consciousness capable of containing many voices in a speech in December 2008 called “Speaking in Tongues” about Barack Obama and his half-white, half-black heritage. “Being many-voiced may be a complicated gift for a president,” she said, “but in poets it is a pure delight in need of neither defense nor explanation.” She quotes Frank O’Hara: “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” O’Hara is light-hearted but Smith sees deeper, more urgent reasons to cultivate the many-voiced-ness one finds in a Sinisgalli or an Obama: “It’s my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of natural laws, suitable for general application.”

***

Original art for the rumpus by Ilyse Iris Magy

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Artists are fickle, except when they’re not, and then their lovers are. Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova was born in Tatarstan, Russia to a family of intellectuals — as a kid she hung out with future poet Marina Tsvetaeva. (Tsvetaeva would write in 1938 “I have no need of holes / for ears, nor prophetic eyes: / to your mad world there is / one answer: to refuse!” and three years later hang herself).

Diakonova was a schoolteacher and she married painter Paul Eluard in 1917. In 1929, Eluard, who hung out with Max Ernst and Andre Breton, took Diakonova — who was by then calling herself Gala — to meet a surrealist painter named Salvador Dali.

Gala and Salvador fell hotly in love and Gala broke it off with Eluard, though they remained friends. Salvador Dali painted his new bride over and over, and she doted on him and managed his career.

Salvador had a phobia for vaginas (he was a virgin, in all likelihood, when he met Gala) and so, though they stayed glued together all their lives, Gala satisfied her boisterous sexual appetitie elsewhere. She had affairs with anyone she wanted, and she wanted mostly young male artists. Salvador, who proclaimed Gala the source of his sanity and inspiration, encouraged her extramarital frolicking. When Gala Dali died in 1982, her husband buried her on the grounds of the castle he’d bought for her. Salvador said Gala would never die, and maybe he’s right: her myspace page says she’s 101 and living in Girona, Barcelona.

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“Fever Dreams at the Crystal Motel” is the name of Laurel Nakadate’s new show, opening this Thursday at Leslie Tonkonow in New York City. Nakadate’s work hurls us into discomfort and the awkwardness of lust—read about it in The Rumpus interview with Nakadate. “I’m not turned on by danger,” says Nakadate, “I’m turned on by the narrow escape.”

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In the last Nation, Michelle Orange picks apart A Life in Letters, a book of Graham Greene’s correspondence edited by Richard Greene (no relation, really, she checked). Orange decries RG’s tendency toward hagiography, an inclination she concludes is the result of an aging vendetta between Greene’s detractors and champions. That is, RG wants to restore Greene’s place in the canon while simultaneously downplaying the dirt literary detectives have dug up and heaped upon, in recent years, Greene’s character. Such is the trench warfare of human history. But, despite straying outside the narrow bounds of objectivity, says Orange, RG’s book manages “a steady, inviting flicker, punctuated by the occasional psychic bonfire.” The people that populate Greene’s stories are unfailingly failures–but primarily so on a personal level. They are people wedded to so-called selfless professions (a preacher, say) who have become mired in selfishness, or worse. They are people who swoon and swear love only to be overcome, mere months later, by tendrils of doubt before being swept willingly into full-blown betrayal. This is why it’s most compelling to ponder Greene’s own internal fracturing. While in a hospital, for instance, Greene witnessed a child die. He wrote this letter to a friend: “Are people who write entirely & absolutely selfish, darling? Even though in a way I hated it yesterday evening—one half of me was saying how lucky it was—added experience—& I kept on catching myself trying to memorise details—Sister’s face, the faces of the other men in the ward. And I felt quite excited aesthetically. It made one rather disgusted with oneself.”

Good writers avoid, or gloss over, their own contradictions. Great writers go toward them, into them, like Dante into Hell.

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