Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

EROS ALESI (1951-1971) is the author of a brief and fragmented diary which at first glance some readers might be inclined to dismiss as nothing more than one young man’s confession; but growing up in and around European cities in the Sixties were thousands of young people who had come to a starkly simple conclusion: if life (or ‘tae choose life’ as Irvine Welsh would put it) means nothing but drudgery and crushed expectations, then death is preferable. In its raw immediacy, Alesi’s account of his shipwrecked search for a new, adult identity paints a much more accurate portrait of life in metropolitan Italy than most would suspect, and shows the beginnings of an awareness of poetic form.

   Alesi belonged to the generation that was introduced to the concept of derangement as a pathway to self-knowledge and spirituality by the works of what we have reductively come to know as the Beat writers. Allen Ginsberg’s Hydrogen Jukebox, translated into Italian by Fernanda Pivano and published in 1965, had jump-started a revolution in poetic language that seemed connected through huge feedback loops to changes in the perception of the self.

   I think a close look at Alesi’s Fragments will show how deep that influence was: on the existential level, it took the form of an involvement with Oriental philosophies and the positing of communes as an alternative to the nuclear family; on the structural level, it is interesting to note the echoing of stanzas in the first section of Howl, introduced by the relative pronoun ‘who’, with paragraphs in the Fragments separated by the conjunction ‘that’ (the Italian for both words is che).

   Similarities are also found in imagery (‘the destructo-creative machine of the universe’, ‘thriceshivers’, ‘the goddess and ungoddess death’), and in the addressing of the poem directly to the author’s late parent, reminiscent, it seems to me, of the poignancy of Ginsberg’s Kaddish.

   Paradoxically, it is precisely this limit that lifts Alesi’s work above the mere jottings of a strung-out boy: conscious imitation of an extant poetic form as an attempt to code one's destruction and so transcend it.

   Poetry exists because the heart rebels against the suppression of its inner life. Whether Alesi, had he survived addiction and crime, would have gone on to strengthen his own voice and to articulate rebelliousness in a more complex form is for the reader to decide; but I think few can fail to recognize in his work the courage to follow the introspective journey without which writing is doomed to irrelevance.