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JOURNEY TO THE END OF IDENTITY: NOTES ON JUSTIN VITIELLO'S "SUBWAY HOME" "To contextualize Vitiello's poetry, one cannot ignore his Anglo-American influences: Walt Whitman, and, above all, Dylan Thomas. Regarding the latter, I am thinking of the Welsh poet who breaks down traditional syntax to express and cast forth his emotions across the green pastures of his fragmented self (in "Fern Hill," for example) — not of the Thomas who transgresses all poetic logic and pre-established orders to descend to surrealistic automatic writing (e.g., "Over St. John's Hill). Vitiello's free association never plumbs the id's depths, but instead rise to the occasion that makes of fragmented syntax a refreshing and original modernist vision. The American poet's hallucinations are hosannahs to a lost Eden where a primeval harmony between self and world-soul existed in creative tension. And further, Vitiello recreates, in his own (Vanzettian?) way, the anarchical nature and nurturing experience of resistance to any status quo (linguistic, cultural, political, social) that might menace the poet's I in the search for a unique transgression of any conformism dictating how to speak, act, write. Trying to trace the rich literary history of Vitiello's antecedents in order to establish the originality of his voice, I would also refer to the Spanish symbolists — Machado, Lorca, Jiménez, Alberti the Hermeticists who congregated in Florence between the two world wars of this century (Ungaretti, Gatto, even Campana) and cultivated the spare use of adjectives to a tee the Italian neo-avantgarde of the 1960's in its rive toward anti-syntax; the Beat Generation and its most delightfully subversive descendants like Charles Bukowski. Achille Serrao. Paterson Literary Review, 1998. I say this without exaggeration: Subway Home is one of the best collections of poetry that I have ever had the honor to read. You approach the work of remembering with a sense of language that is almost ghostly in its capacity to capture rare and mysterious states. Your sense of line, typography, sound and diction is also always extremely precise yet unforced and unlabored. You are obviously a "painter" as well as a writer. From the first stream of poems to the appendix, the range of textures as the speaker evokes a beautiful and difficult home of the past is also startling. Italy and all of the places that you evoke have become something rare, complicated, and contested for me in ways that I did not know they could. February 17, 2005 Thank you for your Subway Home, it is a truly spellbinding book of verse. What a great, original elegy "March against death" is! Unforgettable is your Private Dominguez, clothed, so to speak, in lyricism (Was the sun meant/ to open dawn wounds?) July 1, 1994 |