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In late October, 1991, Luigi Ballerini organized a gala festival of contemporary Italian poets at New York University's Casa Italian Zerilli-Marimo. A dozen poets from all over Italy were flown to New York for the event. After each set of readings, several American participants responded to -what they had heard. Among the Italians reading were Edoardo Cacciatore, Elio Pagliarani, Marcello Frixione, Biagio Cepollaro, Amelia Rosselli, Giancarlo Majorino, and Alfredo Giuliani. (Unfortunately, several other poets canceled at the last minute.) The Americans included Marjorie Perloff, Douglas Messerli, Bruce Andrews, Jerome Rothenberg, Lyn Hejinian, Jackson Mac Low, P. Adams Sitney, Leonard Schwartz, Jonas Mekas, Rebecca West, Barbara Guest, Ed Foster, and Angus Fletcher.
The main text for the festival was a 650-page issue of Forum Italicum, edited by Ballerini and entitled Shearsmen of Sorts: Italian Poetry 19751993- The anthology, just published, includes translations of 19 poets, plus informative essays and reviews and useful bio-bibliographic notes. This publication served as an essential introduction to the context and concerns of the Italian poets, most of whom seemed uninterested in presenting or discussing their poetics at the conference. For the most part, the poets at "The Disappearing Pheasant" identified themselves in relation to the avantgarde. Indeed, a major subject in the Shearsmen anthology is the legacy of I Novissimi, the now-older generation of "neo-avant-garde" Italian poets that included, in addition to Giuliani and Pagliarani, Nanni Balestrini, Antonio Porta, and Edoardo Sanguineti. (Sun & Moon Press plans to issue the first English translation of the 196l / Novissimi anthology.) In this context, Mac Low read a beautifully considered essay on -why he doesn't like the term avant-garde. Given the reluctance of most of the Italians to engage in public dialogue, it -was perhaps not so surprising that the only person to pick up on his comments was Barbara Guest, -who averred that she rather liked the term, despite its problems.
In one of the breaks, Allen Mandelbaum remarked that Italians go to events like this symposium the way Catholics go to mass - with reverence. In contrast, many of the Americans seemed more interested in raising questions and giving their initial reactions, based on their own poetry contexts, to works and theories about which they were often quite unfamiliar. The difference...