When we met recently by chance on the streets of Rome, a prominent Italo-American critic exclaimed, "you're in exile!" "No," I responded, "I'm in my milieu."

Let us forget the difficulty of publishing original poetry out of the American mainstream. Or the stigma still incumbent when you submit a manuscript there with a signature ending in a vowel. The main problem I have incurred even after having two books of poetry in print (in Italian as well as in English) is more political than aesthetic or ethnic.

Pablo Neruda, upon receiving the Nobel for literature in 1971, quipped: "poets believe in miracles." He was referring, of course, to the irony of his award: a bourgeois prize for a "brazenly" communist writer.

With all due respect for Don Pablo, I do not believe in miracles...

But I want to eschew the issues of literary awards, so often based on questionable politics: those of cultural mafias, ethnic enclaves, and trendy self-aggrandizements. In opposition to them as symptoms of an epoch's diseases, I propose poetically, instead, an anarchist vision of a saner world where prizes might never exist ever again. Where only qualities of aesthetic/ethical values prevail for the "general good" - as some of us used to say.

I do so accepting all the risks of being stigmatized as propagandistic, subversive, utopian. So be it. Poets are often misunderstood.

Beyond but within my anarchistic poetics, I see my work as political in the Aristotelian sense of humanity as inseparable from a polis - the community of the citizens of the world in my case. And via the Horatian view of poetry as a form of social art to delectare et prodesse. My poems, first and foremost, are my attempts to transform the "language of the tribe" (T.S. Eliot) via a refinement of vernaculars. An invention/intervention of new ways to speak and re-envision Horace's age-old idea of dulcis et utile. And, beyond Horace, perhaps something new.

But useful - and (bitter) sweet to what ends? Perhaps to embody the dissonances of these times and imaginative ways to liberate them from their globally suicidal insanities? Or as artistic means to "rage against the dying of the light" (Dylan Thomas) of conscience/ consciousness that plagues this new century, as genocidal as the last one...

Risking a descent into banality, I would insist that my poetic vision is about solidarity with the Wretched of the Earth (see Franz Fanon) and about love for simply human and social justice.

It is here in Italy that my meaning(s) in form and content can be still received and perceived as more than subversive, exotic or incomprehensible. Here, the facts that my grandfather was an anarchist supporting Sacco and Vanzetti and that I am an anarchist still struggling for nonviolent ideals are negotiable, historically possible to grasp as real phenomena - and as truly a part of a global movement.

One final note: these poems have been written at ties first in Italian and at other moments first in English. Thereafter, I have transposed them freely from one language to the other, never translating in a literal sense. Thus, they are done as I think poems should be and mean in their respective idioms. If they make aesthetic/ ethical sense per sé as works of art, that is all I can ask my readers to appreciate.

Justin Vitiello Rome, Italy