The New Avant-Garde in Italy: Theoretical Debate and Poetic Practices (review)

In the English-speaking world, the Italian New Avant-Garde has so far received attention in the form of analytical but isolated studies (anthologies, articles, collected essays). John Picchione has written an extremely useful, detailed yet encompassing view of the problematically variegated panorama that marks the New Avant-Garde experience in the lyric realm.

Picchione embarks upon an explanation of the New Avant-Garde's accomplishments and situates its members in their peculiar chronological and social context: the climate of the effervescent and often confused debate on social changes that characterized Italy and Western Europe between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1970s. Picchione does not do so with a uniform paint of solid color but appropriately marks the changes in the authors' oftentimes long artistic parabolas.

Picchione devotes his first chapter to the subversive role of the Novissimi (the poets at the core of the New Avant-Garde, so defined after the title of the anthology that marked their historical debut in 1961) and their role against the rest of the Italian lyric panorama. Moving adroitly back and forth in time, Picchione investigates connections with the historical avant-garde, and, more importantly, considers the New Avant-Garde's anticipation of issues found in the 1970s and 1980s literary studies in France and North America (i.e., the exploration of the role of the reader).

In the crucial second chapter Picchione discusses the dense theoretical debate that followed the publication of the Novissimi journal and the subsequent gathering in Palermo of the Gruppo '63, the name of the school that stemmed out of the Novissimi experience. He analyzes the positions of the Novissimi and of Angelo Guglielmi, Umberto Eco, Renato Curi, Renato Barilli, and Aldo Tagliaferri. He then devotes a chapter to each of the poets of the 1961 anthology: Alfredo Giuliani, Elio Pagliarani, Edoardo Sanguineti, Antonio Porta, and Nanni Balestrini. The penultimate chapter is devoted to Amelia Rosselli, Giuseppe Guglielmi, Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai, Patrizia Vicinelli, Giorgio Celli, Corrado Costa, and Edoardo Cacciatore: poets who moved more independently but within the orbit of Gruppo '63. The last chapter is devoted to Arrigo Lora Totino, Mirella Bentivoglio, Adriano Spatola, and the Gruppo '70: the visual poets.

In every avant-garde the theoretical moment surpasses the practical moment. In his book Picchione balances the presence of the theoretical moment—extensively analyzed in his second chapter—while maintaining a clear view of the practical one: the "poetic practices" (as mentioned in the title). Picchione strives to beautifully interpret excerpts of the authors' most arduous verses. It is important to note how successfully Picchione links the reader to other literary experiences (he recalls Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, Tel Quel, Group 47, pop art, and postmodernism).

At the end of the second chapter Picchione tackles the thorniest issue around the New Avant-Garde: the debate it sparked. Since its first public moments, the New Avant-Garde underwent fierce attacks. Picchione appropriately lists Fortini's, Pasolini's, and Moravia's harsh condemnations of the New Avant-Garde, and defends (perhaps too quickly) the New Avant-Garde's beliefs against its more famous detractors, overlooking the validity of some of the points in their critiques. Given recent evaluations of the experience of the New Avant-Garde, which, in hindsight, have acknowledged its limited impact outside of the academy (i.e., the political commitment shared by the majority of its members was lost on the general public), it is worth reconsidering at least Fortini's position. Fortini's critique deserves more attention, not to mitigate it, but to clarify its extent. In fact, according to Picchione's summary of Fortini's opinion, it would be easy to infer that the latter did not understand the complexity of the New Avant-Garde, while in fact Fortini did not criticize the New Avant-Garde in its entirety, but its theoretical grounds, and from Fortini's writings we understand he held a positive opinion toward its music...