I have a sonnet in the current issue of Bad Lilies, a journal I love and one of those whose whole issues are worth reading. (It’s a Petrarchan, or Italian sonnet for those keeping score.) It’s also a persona poem– a form I don’t use too often – written from the point of view of the apartment which has been put up for sale.
What may not be apparent is that this is an intensely personal poem for me, as the apartment in question belonged to my family for nearly eighty years. It was where my father was born and grew up, and where I myself lived and spent a lot of my time in Rome with my aunts, uncle and other family members who have mostly passed away. It had been the epicenter of our family for my entire life, then suddenly it was on the market in search of a buyer. I drafted this poem the final night I spent there; I hope it preserves some of the magicthat permeated those walls.
I won’t go into the complexities of what happens when family members die and properties get redistributed bureaucratically to the heirs – suffice to say it’s generally not enjoyable, and often leads to disarray or outright feuds. In our case, it went fairly well. And – as we poets rationalize misfortune – I got a poem out of it.
For a few days now I’ve felt the current plagiarism scandallike a proverbial thorn in my side. Which is funny, because it has nothing to do with me directly. I haven’t been accused of plagiarism, my work has not (that I know of) been plagiarized, and I am not the editor of a journal or a contest judge put in a difficult position because a plagiarist has asked me to consider their ‘work’. Yet, perhaps like many in the poetry community (I use the term loosely to mean anyone actively writing, reading, submitting and editing poetry – we are all part of this superorganism) I take this as a personal affront. How dare you! I blurt, like an English matron clutching at her pearls. Is this an overreaction?
I don’t think so. Plagiarism strikes a blow at the very heart of what we hold sacred: that the words we write are ours, that when we sign our name to a piece of work and send it off into the world, we are acting as honest brokers. An editor or reader shouldn’t be tasked with feeding each line or image of our poems into a search engine in a neverending game of cat-and-mouse. What has happened here is even more diabolical, because the plagiarist changed just enough of the originals to elude easy detection. This is the work of a person who knows exactly what they are doing, and that it is wrong, and who doesn’t – or, perhaps, does – want to get caught. Compare the plagiarized work with the original, and see for yourself. Now, if this had happened only once, we might be able to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it has happened over and over, as editors who have been alerted to these shenanigans have spent much unremunerated time and energy rooting out this person’s dirty work. Did I mention that that poem won a $1000 prize?
Compare: a couple dozen magazine editors spend a week’s worth of time and energy on this person’s work in an attempt to rectify the wrongs perpetrated against them and their readers, and the plagiarist strolls to the bank, cash in hand. This is what I mean when I say that plagiarism is bad for everyone. Of course, the plagiarist’s name is now mud, and they will likely never – nor should they ever, unless serious and meaningful attempts at reparation are made – be taken seriously in our community again. But that’s a lot of damage done along the way, a lot of broken glass. And now these same editors will likely begin screening new work for signs of plagiarism, as if they didn’t already shovel hard enough in the slush, adding a completely unnecessary layer of busywork to their noble labor.
Poetry offers few rewards in any material sense. There is practically no money in it (unless you win that $1000 prize!), and even recognition comes slowly and haphazardly if at all. Most published books don’t sell enough to make anything on royalties. The great majority of us are in it for the poetry, for the sense of satisfaction at having puzzled together some disparate piece of the universe which bursts suddenly into existence the moment we click the right word into place. Our afternoons are passed in contemplation of a comma, a preposition, a tough call between two equally potent synonyms. Yeats wrote, ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ It’s something our non-poet families, partners and friends look on with bemusement, as if to say, You poets are crazy.
Maybe we are. I can’t rule that out just yet. But poetry also keeps us sane, I’d argue. In any case, we have a right to practice it. We have a right to want to write it and read it and publish it in peace and not be hounded by those wishing to impinge on our hard-won place in this marginal world by stealing the only thing we actually own – our intellectual property. We have a right to write bad work, and get better over time, and read and learn from our peers and from our peers of the past, and let that learning simmer and boil and bubble up over time into something original, something we can rightly call our own. And not have someone who refuses to put in the work come along and steal our words and slap their own name on them and stroll to the bank with our money. Or appear alongside us in a journal or an anthology with stolen gems, perhaps our gems, on their fingers and wrists and around their neck, smiling the great fake smile of fraudulent beauty.
Today I’m posting a poem which was published in One Art back in December. It was written on a bus trip from Maine to Boston, and the initial inspiration came from an actual sign along the road not far from Boston. The sign – as I recall – read Victor’s, and I immediately began to sense the faded glamour of the place. These were the kinds of places my parents went with their friends, adult places (they were in their thirties!), exotic and forbidden. I tried to capture that feeling.
I have three new translationsof poems by Mario dell’Arco in the current issue of Voices in Italian Americana. These poems are not included in Day Lasts Forever. Dell’Arco has so many poems I could probably spend the rest of my life translating them, and may well do so – a few at a time. Here is “Hide and Seek”:
Day Lasts Forever can be purchased directly from World Poetry Books, or wherever fine books are sold.
Our mother passed away in 2019, so I won’t be able to call her for Mother’s Day this year or any other year. It’s natural, though; people don’t live forever, and as an old Zen parable has it, happiness is dying before your children do. So, as my mom would say, it’s kosher. Actually, she didn’t really speak like that outside of some of the poems I’ve written in which she has morphed into a second version of herself, perhaps even a third or fourth. She was a Gemini, and liked to boast of having a split personality. She said if you looked at the left side of her face, you saw one person; the right side, another. Or maybe she saw Sybil when she was young, and liked the idea of having multiple personalities. I’ll never know.
But as such, she is now ‘my mother’, a recurring character in my poems. My first book was largely about her, and she keeps visiting me in the guise of a poetic muse. Below are some of the poems she’s inspired, which may be the only way of getting to know her at this point – or keeping in touch, in my case. Happy Mother’s Day, mom!
Democrats Abroad protesting in Piazza S.S. Apostoli, Rome – May 3, 2025
On May 3 we protested the rising tide of American fascism in Rome, right near Piazza Venezia. The sign I’m holding reads: “Accept nothing from fascism. Non accettare nulla dal fascismo.” It’s a quote from Italian poet, scholar and anti-fascist Lauro De Bosis, whose final act of resistance against Mussolini’s regime was to fly a small plane over Piazza Venezia and central Rome, disseminating hundreds of thousands of anti-fascist pamphlets overhead. He was never heard from again. His body was never found.
I wrote about Lauro some years ago, recounting my discovery of him at the Gotham Book Mart and subsequent obsession with his life and work. I even attempted a verse translation of Icaro, his 1927 verse drama about the myth of Icarus, which eerily foreshadows his own demise. I realized it was beyond my powers of translation at the time, but I may one day come back to it if I ever take up residence on the Isle of Innisfree.
There is a lot to say about Lauro De Bosis, and to this day I am stupefied by the fact that almost no one I talk to has ever heard of him. In any case, his memory was alive and well last Saturday among a scrappy gathering of Americans abroad protesting the excesses and obscenities of one of Mussolini’s most shameless admirers, one who at present occupies – somehow – the Oval Office. We will keep resisting until this sham administration crumbles under the weight of its own corruption and incompetence. They all do, eventually.
Below is a photo of Piazza Lauro De Bosis, in Rome. There must have been a bureaucrat with a sense of humor at some point.
Bust of De Bosis on the Ganicolo in Rome. There is no bust of Mussolini.
My poem “Wildfire” went live at Sheila-Na-Gig last week, a poem I wrote when I learned my uncle Osvaldo had been diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer. A couple of months later – if that long – he was gone. It was the beginning of a rough year of losses in our family, which then turned into the pandemic, etc…it feels like we’ve been on this rollercoaster for quite a while now, and I just learned the Pope died this morning as well. I’m an atheist, and was always rather skeptical of Pope Francis – as I am of all popes, and the institution they head – but he was always a better man than his predecessor. I hope his successor is better still, but I’m not holding my breath.
In any case, my uncle was a good man of conflicted religious nature who came to philosophy late in his life. We had a great many conversations on our walks in the woods together, just the two of us, and that is how I will always remember him. The last time we saw him, in the hospital, he was all smiles. May his memory be a blessing.
April is National Poetry Month and there is no better way to celebrate it than by sharing a poem by my daughter. She wrote this short metaphysical poem when she was eight, and hasn’t written another one since. But what a poem! From the Rattle Young Poets Anthology 2021.
Senator Cory Booker got into some good trouble in the Senate yesterday, holding the floor for 25 hours and 5 minutes, breaking the record for the longest floor speech in Senate history. God bless him – and I say that as an atheist!
Chuck Berry recorded his song “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” in 1957, the same year ardent segregationist Strom Thurmond set the previous record, which Booker broke today.
What I enjoy most as a translator is bringing poetry or poets to the English language for the first time. I have enormous esteem for the many translators of Dante, Belli, Montale and other Italian poets who have benefited from the efforts of a multitude of translators. Each new translation offers up a slightly – or drastically – different take on the same poem or author. Taken together, they create a composite portrait of the original work, not unlike reading multiple biographies of the same person written from different perspectives and points in history. But there are so many important voices still lurking in the shadows of literary history, stalking the margins, and that’s where I like to spend most of my time.
Much of my translation work has dealt with the poetry of Mario dell’Arco, a poet almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world a quarter century after his death. He is not much better known in his native Italy, or even in Rome, his birthplace. This despite the fact that he had a six-decade long career, published dozens of collections of original verse as well as versions of classical Roman poets like Martial and Catullus, and wrote books of prose including biographies of his Romanesco predecessors Belli and Trilussa. The point being, I noticed a gaping hole in the literature and made a conscious effort to fill it. My hope is that others may take up the gauntlet and try their hand at Dell’Arco, adding something to the portrait I’ve begun to sketch into English of this great poet’s work.
What has any of this to do with Crescenzo Del Monte, you ask? Well, Del Monte is another poet who has gone the way of the dodo, to put it bluntly. Yet he is arguably one of the five major Romanesco poets: Belli, Pascarella, Del Monte, Trilussa and Dell’Arco, in order of birth. Del Monte differed from the others in that he was Jewish, and wrote in Giudaico-Romanesco, the dialect of Roman Jews. He was a versatile writer who wrote in Romanesco and Italian as well, and did many translations of others’ work into Giudaico-Romanesco, such as a version of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno.
Like Belli, Del Monte can be forbidding because of his meticulous renderings of his characters’ actual speech patterns, as can be seen in “O’ ‘nvitato a pranzo” (below), and the surfeit of Hebrew words which are often half-masked through transliteration (chalomme is the Hebrew word for ‘dream’, חלום, pronounced chalom). Also like Belli, he offered up copious notes to his poems; practically every one has a glossary of terms to help the reader along. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but he was preserving a world in his work, a world that now exists encoded in the poetry he wrote between the destruction of the Roman ghetto and the Fascist racial laws. (To hear a reading of Del Monte’s “La Cena de Purimme” – “Purim Dinner” – which bears a close resemblance in both theme and language to “The Lunch Guest”, including the same rhyme of chalomme/makomme, click here.)
I was lucky enough to have been able to study Hebrew in at the Jewish Cultural Center in Trastevere as well as in the ghetto, where for a time classes were being held in the local bookshop, Menorah. I’m by no means fluent, but I have enough of a grasp on the language and its historical-cultural milieu that I can find my way through the jungle with a candle and a machete.
As far as I know, there have been no other translations of Del Monte’s work into English. If I’m wrong, please reach out and let me know! Sgrùulla!
*an alternate ending to the above poem – one more faithful to the original – might read: A cup of coffee and then nighty-night/tomorrow it’ll end up in the toilet.
Published in THINK
*line 8 of the above poem should read “with your long beak…”
Marc Di Martino 