1. “The beauty of Existence! Sit at the window/ & moan on the Chicago stone & brick/ rising upright tenderly,/ suspended in the sky.” They are lines by Allen Ginsberg from “An Open Window on Chicago”, which I read in Poetry of the Americasan anthology that the preface Valerio Magrelli himself was wary of in principle – “Talking about a Poetry of the Americas between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (…) appears to be such a daunting task as to leave one perplexed…”
It’s almost 8am on Wednesday 6 November. While the next president is being decided in the United States, I scroll through the biographies at the back of the volume looking for names to cover. I discover that Ernesto Cardenal was born, in two and a half months, a century ago. That Lezama Lima has been dead for fifty years in a year. That Ginsberg’s birth will also be commemorated in 2026. And by randomly opening the volume I find “Ode to the Confederate Death”, by Allen Tate, which I begin to read. A few minutes later I discover that Trump is the new president of the United States. I decide to translate the “Ode to the Confederate Death”. I look at the portrait of a sixteen-year-old American Civil War soldier. I come across Bruce Levine’s essay, The American Civil War (2023). On the cover there is a color image of another very young soldier from that war. Wars will be even more the theme of every day with the new presidency of the United States. There are around fifty of them in the world but we are really worried about two. And fleetingly, fortunately, but sinisterly, Elon Musk appears to me jumping. He became fixated on the fact that Europe was on the brink of civil war. As if it were a single state. A man so cumbersome that he ends up in Allen Tate’s analysis of his own poetry: “To give an example, a poet would also be someone who is unable to derive sufficient self-justification from being a car salesman (whose security is based on sale of a certain number of cars per month)…”
2. “The paradox of the United States – writes Antonio Muñoz Molina – is that there is no other country that seems more familiar to us, because since we were children we are fed by its images and its stories, and yet it is, deep down, so distant and intimately alien. Bill Bryson, when he returned to his native Iowa after many years in England, wrote a book which he entitled The lost continent.”
The northern border of Iowa is a straight line and the southern one is also. Further to the center of Iowa is only Nebraska, its neighbor. On the coasts they usually vote Democrat, in the center and in the south (and in the center-north) they vote Republican. The United States has a very extensive Center, as is known, but also a South that never ends. I cut out a map to learn the location of the various states, little by little. And just yesterday I saw Jack, the neighbor’s dog, dragging an American flag towel around the yard because it was starting to get cold. It’s impossible not to notice the coincidence (Jack expresses his interest in the current elections). “On a thousand lawns of New England towns,/ the old white churches retain their air/ of sparse, sincere rebellion; worn flags / quilt the cemeteries of the Grand Army of the Republic.” “For the Dead of the Union,” by Robert Lowell, has an evident common air with Tate’s ode. Once the first verses have been written – “The old South Boston Aquarium stands/ in a Sahara of snow now” – the shadow of Allan Tate’s begins to descend.
What wears out flags? Even the light wind tears them apart piece by piece, until they disappear. Rain and smog make them dirty. The climate is anarchic. But the real wear and tear and the real dirt are due to human beings. A good symbol, the scrambled flag, of the political class’s contempt for the people it governs, with the usual exceptions. It is not necessary to refer only to authoritarian regimes. Example after example, newspapers and newspapers for years, decades, centuries, seem not to have yet convinced us of such clear evidence. Unless parasitism can occur without hatred. Or without contempt.
3. The wind is very present in Tate’s poem, from the first verse. We are in November there too. Gravestones, trees, wind and leaves. The poem was published in 1928. In an essay ten years later, he says that i refrain which act as a bridge from one verse to the next – “The leaves dive in flight / Stunned by the wind…”, “We will only say the leaves / In flight, they dive and expire” – did not appear in the first version. He introduced them to loosen concentration. And the pauses have become an indispensable image in which the two essential motifs merge. A man is standing at the gate of a cemetery of Confederate soldiers, and the memory of those events – epic – overlaps with his own reality and that of the time in which he lives – not epic at all. These are the two reasons: the memory of the civil war, which ended sixty years earlier, dominates the present whose substance is fragmentation. The leaves are figures of dead soldiers, but moving forward they also become a symbol of the individualism of the years in which Tate wrote.
Lowell’s “For the Dead of the Union” was born in Boston, in front of a monument “stuck like a bone / in the city’s throat. / Its Colonel is thin / like a compass needle.” And a little further down: “The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier/ grow leaner and younger every year.” I think of the two portraits of young people seen just now and immediately of the ten thousand young Koreans just given by Kim Jong-un to Putin. They have already arrived because the Ukrainian army met them. Now I look at another image: young Russian soldiers being blessed, continuing to march. New uniform and hat, just delivered. They receive the jet of holy water thrown by the priest, who is also quite young. And absorbed, more than serious.
The first of the two young soldiers seen earlier is “identified as William T. Biedler, aged 16” and we do not know his fate. Sitting, with the butt of the rifle resting next to him on the chair. The serious face that doesn’t know the razor. The boy on the cover of the book on the civil war has the blue uniform and the rifle in his hands, the flag behind him. He is serious too and seems two or three years older. Smiling was not customary in photographic portraits around 1860. Not even sixty years later, when Tate wrote his ode.
4. The first description of New York Bay dates back to 1524. Exactly half a millennium. Giovanni da Verrazzano leaves three years after Magellan for a similar purpose. There were supposed to be four ships, but between storms and piracy operations gone wrong, only one remained Dauphine. The king is French instead of Spanish, the goods are silk, the captain is Italian and will write the report himself. The substance remains the same: an explorer who seeks the east from the west – and a passage further north, between Florida and Newfoundland -, a nation that does not want to lose the race with its neighbors and Lyon merchants who want to make money. And Verrazzano, looking for the strait that cannot be found, was the first Westerner to sight the bay where New York was built. What he did not succeed in the first of his three voyages, “to penetrate those happy quarrels of Cathay”, he did not succeed in the other two but he was the first to cover the whole of North America mile by mile. He will be the first to write about the Sioux, about the various Algonquian tribes, and what follows is the Hudson Estuary: “A very pleasant site, placed between two small eminent hills, between which a great river ran to the sea” . And these are the “people” you find there: “almost similar to the others, dressed in bird feathers of various colours”. The sighting was anything but hostile: “they were coming towards us cheerfully, making huge cries of admiration, showing us where we were sure to land with the boat.” However, it was a missed meeting, because “a strong wind blowing against the sea, we were forced to return to the ship, leaving the said land with much regret”. They then also left the inhabitants on their “30 little boats”, to anxiously go from one bank to the other, anxious to meet the guests.
5. The lover of great or small power has learned three useful things, three Lombrosian-level cause-effect relationships and he always uses those because he doesn’t need the others. One of them is systematically lying. So listening to it will be of no use. Looking at it alone, turning off the volume, won’t do much good either, although it will be more useful. But perhaps the point is not to understand. What happens inside a person who craves power and then obtains it and exercises it, those who don’t want it can only imagine. But to oppose power you don’t need to know it. Countering it is just as instinctive and easier than wanting it. You already have it, if you have it, to say “no” to unacceptable abuse. Perhaps evil is not increasing in the world, as it seems. Certain signs raise fears of the predominance of violence and authoritarian regimes, others show that liberal parties and associations, and individuals, are resisting. Since everything is communicated, dignity, solidarity and courage are also communicated.
Tate and Lowell were particularly fond of the poets of classical antiquity. An attraction that can be seen in the themes of their verses and even more so in the forms. Lowell titled one of his poems: “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid.” Falling asleep onAeneid. The epic disappeared from books much more than a century ago, but not from our lives. It has fragmented into the words and actions of individuals, which fly like the leaves of Tate’s poetry. And the history of the world is always the same. (I used the following lines on another occasion, identical, and I will use them again). In the world there is Weakness, or Fragility, in the form of human beings who are weak, for different reasons. This Weakness makes some feel pity and makes others proud. From here arises the uninterrupted struggle, most of the time underground, of the pityful against the proud.
