Mario Fagiolo – later Mario dell’Arco – was an architect by profession in the 1930s. This week I was lucky enough to be able to visit his two main contributions to 20th century architecture, both done with his colleague Mario Ridolfi. (The two would have a falling out after the war. Fagiolo would subsequently abandon architecture for literature and change his name to Dell’Arco.)
The first, below, is the Fontana dello Zodiaco (Zodiac Fountain) in Terni, which is essentially a ‘space needle’ surrounded by mosaics of the zodiac. Terni isn’t a terrible enchanting city, as far as Italy goes; it was bombed heavily during WWII as it was a major site of arms manufacturing, and the fountain was damaged as a result. After the war, it was reconstructed. The fountain dates from 1932-36, a full decade before Taja ch’è rosso! – his first collection – was published.
photos by the author
The second is the Post Office in Piazza Bologna(1935) in Rome. It was night when I visited, so the photo isn’t great, but you can get some idea of its modernist lines.
photo by the author
Architecture makes frequent appearances in Dell’Arco’s poetry, as one might expect. Even his nom de plume is a play on architecture: Dell’Arco, ‘of the Arch‘(itect). Here is one of my favorites, “Spiral Staircase”. The poem alludes to what in all probability is the spiral staircase of Bramante in St. Peter’s Basilica (below).
I joined Facebook in 2008. During Obama’s first campaign I was involved with a group of Obama supporters in Italy, and Facebook was new and hip and a great way to organize, especially for those of us living abroad. It felt like the future, and the future – like Obama – looked liberal, open and social.
Of course, that feeling frayed gradually, and broke entirely (for me, at least) in 2016. At that point Facebook, and less so Twitter – which I had joined in 2009, ever the early adopter – had begun to seem like a bar fight, the kind of place you go to get rowdy and bust a few heads and go home with a bloody lip and a black eye. And, of course, the next day you go back for more of the same. Only, the bar never closed and those throwing the barstools were often friends and family. It seems almost insane to me now, thinking back, but arguing was model behavior on social media. We were sold the idea that it was a public square where one was to spend one’s time debating everyone in one’s path in the name of free speech and democracy. And, for a while, I did. I debated religion and atheism, Israel and Palestine, Clinton and Trump, apples and oranges. I made allies and lost friends. I lost members of my family, as well. I stopped checking in to Facebook after the 2016 election and came back reluctantly years later, though never with the same fervor or sense of ease. It was no longer a place I felt like I wanted to be, and that feeling has stayed with me.
I’ve often been one step away from simply deleting my account, as I did with my Twitter/X account a year or two ago, a step which Facebook makes deliberately hard. I’ve been kept from doing that by virtue of the fact that I am ‘in touch’ with people in my life I’d otherwise surely have lost touch with by now. This was the original selling point for Facebook – other than a way to vote on who the hottest babes on campus were – and it remains the only reason I haven’t pulled the plug yet.
In the early days, you could ‘poke’ someone to let them know you were thinking about them. It was cute. Then came the news feed, which ruined everything. I refuse to read the news on Facebook to this day, even to click a link to a news story. You used to see what people you cared about – or were at least tendentially interested in – were up to. Now all I see is AI-generated garbage, pages they want me to follow because my profile says I like the Ramones or bagels or skateboarding, advertisements and posts by people I’ve never heard of before and have no connection with. They want to up my engagement, and I want them to stop it. This is basically what’s left of the experience for me.
Even when I post something like a new poem or a blog post the level of engagement is pitifully low compared to what it was in its salad days, when engaging with friends was the actual point of Facebook. One suspects that the only way to increase engagement is to engage, meaning unless one is constantly on Facebook ‘liking’ and commenting and sharing others’ posts, the algorithm will pay little or no attention to yours. I guess they want to discourage freeloaders, but I’m no longer willing to spend the necessary time and energy required to get any benefit out of it for myself, if that is even the right word. This principle seems to be true across social media, and it’s one reason I’ve grown tired of it. It doesn’t give me back anything I value, and has become mostly an old habit: post, like, comment, repeat.
I grew up before the Internet, and was already in my thirties when social media blew up. I remember a world without this stuff, when you just stared at the ceiling if you were bored or went outside to see who was around to play with. Of course, now all those kids in the street are on Facebook and I can see photos of their kids whenever I like, which is – paradoxically – almost never. That is, I am connected to them through Facebook, though my level of interest has decreased so much that it seems just being connected to them is the whole point, seeing their names and avatars, not actually checking in with them and exchanging messages. It feels like going to a party where everyone you know is and standing by the wall the whole time with a drink. And perhaps we are all standing by the wall with our drinks, ignoring each other. What a party, right?
Ten years ago I would’ve written this as a Facebook post, or ‘note’. It might have generated some comments and discussion, perhaps even a minor skirmish. And, of course, it would’ve disappeared along with the thousand other posts and tweets which are the constant chatter of social media, all flushed immediately down the toilet of the timeline. Today, if I need to write something down to find out what I think about it, I do it here. I own the bar.
This is not a post about poetry (for once), but pop music. I’ve been a devotee of the Velvet Underground since I first discovered them in college, and they have been more or less my favorite band my entire adult life. The first poem in my second collection Still Life with City is about a VU concert (“Live in Dallas”), and imagines the interplay between the band and the audience during performance. It was inspired by the Live 1969 album and Lou Reed’s semi-comical stage patter during the sets. So, I’ve been listening deeply to the Velvets for over thirty years and I think I may have made a discovery about “Sister Ray”.
I’m not an expert on pop music, and I haven’t read everything there is to read on the subject of the Velvet Underground or Lou Reed or the Sixties or anything of that sort. I just know what I know, y’know? “Sister Ray”, for those who don’t know, is a 17-minute song on side two of White Light/White Heat (1968), the Velvets’ second studio album and the last to feature John Cale. “Sister Ray” is notorious for taking the VU’s obsession with the wild side (“Heroin”, “Venus in Furs”) to its logical extreme, and recounts an ambiguous tale of a drugs-and-sex fueled orgy culminating in homicide reminiscent of the long scene in Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn(1964). I picked up a copy of Selby’s novel while working at Strand (1995) precisely because I’d read that it had influenced “Sister Ray”, and it didn’t disappoint. (I immediately attempted my own versions of Selby-esque stories based on my own dissolute social life in mid-’90s New York, but they were predictably adolescent failures.) As well, the lyric “Who’s knocking on my chamber door?” is easily traced back to Poe’s “The Raven”. (Reed later released an entire album of Poe-inspired songs called The Raven in 2003.) I’ve always thought that when the police show up to bust the sordid soirée it may have been a reference to Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” (“and when the po-lice knocked/both doors flew back” – Reed’s intonation of po-lice perhaps mimicks Berry’s), but that was a pretty commonplace trope in early rock-and-roll songs I think.
What has all this to do with Aretha Franklin, you ask? I’ve listened to many versions of “Sister Ray” on numerous bootlegs, some of them reaching the 40-minute mark (a “Sixty-Minute Man“, indeed), but the album version is the one ingrained on my consciousness. It’s extremely raucus with John Cale’s organ duelling with Reed and Morrison’s guitars for sonic prominence, and Reed’s vocals are often buried beneath the onslaught of noise. They can be indistinct or just plain unintelligible at times, leaping out like flames from a yule log before receding into the background, not unlike the way certain images come and go in your consciousness, perhaps pinging back and forth between the hemispheres. But I digress. Suffice to say the album version was the one I’ve always ‘known’. Yesterday I discovered another live version of the song from a 1967 show in NYC, as part of the WL/WH Super-Deluxereissue (2013). As a completist, I’m late to the game. One can assume this is an early version of the song, recorded before or around the time of WL/WH, and it appears along with “Booker T“, ostensibly part of the same set. I’m just riffing here, mind you. But on this version the lyrics are clear and distinct, and Lou sings repeatedly “Just like Sister Ray says, ‘Sock it to me!'” and “Whip it on me!” When I heard that I, of course, thought of Aretha’s “Respect”, which popularized the phrase “Sock it to me!” in 1967, or thereabouts. Andrew Hickey goes into this on his his 500 Songs podcast in the episode on “Respect“. I listened to “Respect” after “Sister Ray”, then toggled back and forth for a while, and indeed Aretha even sings “Whip it to me!” which I’d never consciously heard before and which is repeated rapid-fire deep in the album cut of “Sister Ray” (“Whip it on me, Jim” it sounds like). On the live ’67 version, Lou repeats “Sock it to me” over and over, and when I compared it to the album version I noticed the phrase no longer appears in the most familiar recording of the song.
One further clue is that the name “Sister Ray” – who doesn’t appear as a character in the song, but is a kind of lurking presence of ambiguous sexual identity, a subject Lou dealt with regularly– could be “Sister Re” – that is, Aretha. Hickey explains that the line “Re, Re, Re, Re” in “Respect” was Franklin’s nickname (A-re-tha), and of course “sister” was a popular way to refer to Black women in the late ’60s (“Brothers and sisters!” is shouted in the intro to the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams“, for example, showing how white rock musicians often borrowed terminology from Black culture to give themselves clout). Given that the Velvets were always very open about the influence of Black music on their own (Tucker loved Bo Diddley, Morrison T-Bone Walker and Mickey Baker, Reed doo-wop music, as sourced from Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story) is it hard to imagine they were listening closely to Aretha Franklin in 1967?* Not at all. Again, remember that the song “Booker T” – as in “Green Onions” – was recorded at the same show, or in the same period, confirming their habit of paying homage to the music they admired, their internalization of influence. Like all great rock-and-roll bands, they wore their influences on their sleeve.
So what is Aretha Franklin doing in “Sister Ray”? Maybe John Cale or Moe Tucker can answer this question with some accuracy, as they are still with us. My guess is that either it was a somewhat unconscious interpolation, the way the zeitgeist can impose itself on us in ways we don’t necessarily control, or perhaps Reed – who had studied writing with Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse and was a gifted storyteller (“The Gift“, also from WL/WH, is proof) was using techniques he’d learned from Selby and Joyce, a kind of stream-of-consciousness in which narration, dialogue and background detail are all squeezed together in a non-linear, surreal, textured way reminiscent of a cubist painting.
I like the idea that “Respect” is playing on the radio or the record player during the orgy scene, and in the drug-induced haze and confusion “Sister Re” gets superimposed onto “Sister Ray”, and the two eventually merge into one, much like the vocals and instrumentation create an organic, indivisible whole. The song feels more like an psychodrama than a pop song to my mind, which may be the most truly innovative quality of the Velvets’ music.
In any case, I’ll never hear either song quite the same way again.
* A few days after writing this I came across thisarticle listing “Lou Reed’s 46 favorite songs of the 1960s”, which Reed apparently detailed before his death in 2013. Number 40 on that list is Aretha’s “I Never Loved a Man”, which is of course the title track of the album that features “Respect”. So he was definitely paying attention to Aretha Franklin while writing “Sister Ray”.
I’m always thrilled to have a poem at Rust & Moth, which has one of the most reader-friendly presentations of any litmag out there. This poem is called “Splitscreen: Skatepark” and attempts to capture some of the sweat and grit of the local skatepark on a fine summer’s day. I spent my teenage years in such places, and the scene drawn in the poem is largely a composite of those languid afternoons, including one more recent episode viewed from my current perspective as an adult skateboarder that prompted the poem itself. For those keeping score, it’s a sonnet written in rhyming couplets.
I have a new poem at One Art. It’s neither a j’accuse nor a mea culpa, but an exploration. Be sure to click the link at the bottom of the page for context. Thank you to Mark and Louisa of One Art for accepting this one.
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!
Marc Di Martino 