SOME CRITICAL VOICES ON DANIELA RIPETTI-PACCHINI'S POETRY

 

Some critical voices on Daniela Ripetti-Pacchini’s Poetry 

Daniela Ripetti (full surname: Ripetti Pacchini) is an Italian poet and writer. She worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist, and collaborated with various national newspapers and magazines. In earlier years, she was active in theater, performing in Italy and France with Carmelo Bene. During her university studies and professional training, she lived primarily in Rome until the early 1980s, when a serious illness led her to return to her hometown of Pisa.  This selection includes some translated excerpts from critical reviews and prefaces. 

 

Preface by Alberto Moravia (1982) to the collection of poems "Dei trapassati intendimenti" by Daniela Ripetti Pacchini 

Dear Daniela, your poems reveal the amiable Tuscan exuberance—timeless and unbound by space—that is instantly modern (or postmodern, as one might say today). You belong, in essence, to a culture that knows how to seize the fleeting moment, even if tradition is on the street corner, at the very moment it is rejected and denied. This is your fortune; but isn’t fortune itself a quality we can, in the end, claim as our own?

You alternate the idea of a poetry of civil revolt with that of a poetry wholly for yourself—perhaps cryptic, perhaps anchored in the very place where your existence slowly is consumed. It is once again typical of your Tuscan nature to cast an imaginary bridge between Pisa and San Francisco. But in these twinnings of the Maremma (“Had I become now/ a single solid ancient clod/ were the Maremma/ my definitive soul”) with the Californian counterculture—you move gracefully and with ease. Yours is a province that, by mysterious vocation, becomes at once a metropolis.

Perhaps poetry is recognized above all in its ability to stop on the threshold of the speakable; for the poet is naturally induced to speak of the self, and such introspection, to be poetic, must be discreet. Thus with discretion, you are able to say about yourself: "But of women / I would be the vestiges/ like fleeting gestures enclosed in myself/ and the not finding / leaves us silent/ searching alone / through flatteries the way / to remain in two/ hopelessly unique."

Elsewhere, you don’t fear to adopt a unanimous emphasis, an approach to the political event of the day. I’d say the first inspiration cannot be fully understood without considering the second.

Your way of being “present” and “civil” explains and justifies the intimacy of poetry when it delves into private, existential matters—even if, as you say: "Never/ it will never be possible/ through noisy distances of air/ to tell you of the bewilderment/ of my room."

In truth, your poems attest to poetry’s relevance even when it doesn’t strive to be current. To give us a poetic vision of your time—and ours—it was perhaps not even necessary to invoke the so-called “political” poems (like the memory of Giorgiana Masi or “Storm and Popular Festival in Pietralata”). A completely private self-portrait would have sufficed, in which those who know you will easily recognize your openness, your curiosity, your acceptance of every experience of a "historical" kind. Ultimately, it's also "civil" poetry to speak about oneself, as long as it is done not “outside” the age, but “within” it. Especially since you are never truly alone.

Through your allusive and dreamy verses, reminiscent at times of Campana’s flashing viisions, male presences emerge—fascinating, accidental—recalled with an exact retrieval of the moment’s texture. What comes through is a frank femininity, precisely because man is regarded as the irreplaceable “other.”

So, whether you recount an anecdote, capture an irrepeatable instant of intimacy, or pause to define a state of mind, you are able to evoke a certain way of being with the colors, the words, and the inflections—not of all times and all days—but of those times, and those days there. 

 

From: “In a poetry collection, the ‘civil certainties’ of Daniela Ripetti-Pacchini, a thoroughly Tuscan author,” La Nazione, Tuesday, October 4, 1983

“A collage of impressions and revisited forms, captured in an ‘immediate’ time without falling into sentimentality; a constant shifting from the private sphere to the public and political; a self that remains alert, sustained by a strong and accepted femininity. Dei trapassati intendimenti is the latest poetic work by Daniela Ripetti Pacchini, who has chosen to gather here some of her poems previously included in earlier collections […] In the preface-letter by Alberto Moravia, he writes: “In your poems one can see the amiableTuscan exuberance that knows no spatial limits and is instantly modern (or, if you prefer, as we say today, postmodern…).”

Daniela Ripetti Pacchini is indeed Tuscan—deeply so—born in Pisa, though she has lived mostly in Rome for several years, where she works in journalism and psychology. She has appeared as an actress in Federico Fellini’s television specials, performed on stage with Carmelo Bene, and acted in the television production Visita a casa Marx.

Dei trapassati intendimenti is closely tied to these experiences, as it gathers in miscellany poems presented at national and international poetry festivals and concerts. Especially in Les bleu roses, the verse evokes music and theatrical gesture […]

The impact of this collection may provoke a sense of unease in the reader due to the diversity of the poetic voices reproduced here: from political engagement and protest—as in Visione di Giorgiana (Masi) e Anna (Eugenio)—to private, existentially vibrant poetry, rich in color and form, alternating rhythms, as in Yer Blues and Divinità-contro Divinità:

“/ I without God / without self perhaps until / autumn suddenly takes my breath away…” But the unease perceived stems only from the contingent genesis of the collection.

 

From Of the body and the scene in poetry by Nino Maiellaro in “Spirali”, n.65, July-August 1984.

 "[...] Regarding Daniela Ripetti’s poetry, it must be remembered that she comes from a long experience as a performer in which the gesture and the scene are essential parts. Her poetry is of a metaphysical sign rather than a real one, interwoven with chromatic vocality, theatrical sounds and echoes, in which the vocabulary is very tight, very essential, reluctant to grant more than the requirements of the written page. A poetry that from the score finds all the possible solicitations for acting, but does not adapt it to the voice, does not inflate it, let the text be born before the voice, that the sign precedes the sound, so that the page continues to exist when the lights of the show will be turned off [...]

 

From Altiplano, Issue 4; Issues 7-91. Mexico (Mexico:State). Direccion de Patrimonio Culturale, 1985:

“The Eternity of the ephemeral is established in her poetry [...] Her verses move in the sea of everyday life and there it is precisely their charm: out of nowhere that is the whole, the text rises [...]”

Raffaele Pellecchia from the Anthology: La poesia nel Lazio (Poetry in Lazio), 1988

"Civil tension and emotional urgency weave the fabric of Daniela Ripetti’s poetry to such an extent that one might identify the oxymoron as her most persuasive spiritual and stylistic hallmark. Removed from the cold virtuosity of Mannerist literature, the oxymoron here embodies the unresolved laceration of a conscience oscillating between intimate withdrawal and remorse, between 'enchantments' and 'intentions.'

A telling sign of this condition is the frequent use of the optative mood ('If only I had become now'; 'If only life were now the center of my life'; 'if / I could reach the countryside'; 'I would like to be – you and I – the class / … how I would like / children drenched in rain / to be…'; 'and I would like you, / as if touching air / as if touching earth / I would like / an archangel…'), which reveals a persistent gap between being and wanting to be—or, in other words, between reality and dream.

Hers is a poetry that, although nourished by the constant input of the author’s concrete experience, plays its expressive hand on the side of an anti-realism pursued through a highly figurative diction, capable of revealing the depth of reality in estranged forms—sometimes aided by a skillful use of spacing and verse displacement. 

Introduction by Giampaolo Piccari to the collection of verses March of Prudence 1981 by Daniela Ripetti Pacchini from “Quinta Generazione” 1992     

 Among the latest trends in poetry is choral expansion, which brings it out into the open and makes it adopt theatrical techniques suited to the need for encounter and dialogue, for testimony and the message of solidarity, for monologuing confession.

Daniela is an actress, so she knows the gestural techniques that must create the amplification of the scene, including its ambiguity, therefore chromaticism, sonority, graphic devices such as spacing, dislocation of lines with spatial dilation, suspensions and a condensed vocabulary, voids for echoes of silence, lapidary essentiality and all the expedients offered by Futurism and the avant-garde for phonic poetry.

In a statement on her poetics, Ripetti then makes it clear that she is not interested in literature of identification and consolation, but rather in that of opposition and activation that promotes movement and knowledge: a bit of mystery with many vantage points so that the feeling of many combinations remains.

Averse to the immobility of order, she favors its flaws: “Peace is a disrespectful respect/, peace/ is undermining the order/ of order itself”. We must escape on a tangent, from reality into dreams, into myth.

Pellecchia believes that this poetry, provocatively feminine in the irresolution of the lacerations of conscience, oscillating between intimate withdrawal and remorse, between civil tension and sentimental urgency, between "enchantments" and "intentions," in the persistent gap between being and wanting to be, between reality and dream, achieves its goal by escaping into the optative through the stylistic code of the oxymoron, as a spiritual cipher, in the ambiguity of the scene; but in the collection we present here, the retractile advances are increasingly less noticeable, and increasingly, instead, we encounter allusive and dreamy verbs that enrich an ideal of 'natural' life: as long as it remains a sign of a dream . 

Preface by Romano Luperini (1994) to the collection of poems Apache Tear included in Poetry and its Double by Daniela Ripetti P.

In an article by Daniela Ripetti from 1979, published on the third page of Il Messaggero on July 14th, I find this question, which already takes us to the heart of Apache Tear: “How is it possible to feel the breath of the body of the word when our body, our breath, and all the various expressions of our physicality are counter-reformistically chastised by dark hair shirts?” The tension toward a fusion—even through alchemical means—with the world, to cast into a single crucible writing, corporeality, sensitivity of the self and of things, the physicality of nature, aided by talismans, encounters with ancient legends, ancestral wisdom, runs through nearly all these pages. One strongly senses a formation rooted in the themes of desire and corporeality, typical of the Seventies, in which political radicalism and libertarian impulses from French culture (Deleuze and Guattari, above all) were sometimes reconciled, as here, in a balance between symbolist irrationalism and anarchism. (And powerful traces of this political inspiration remain in one of the first poems in the collection, from 1981: “Peace is not / respect, peace/ is undermining order / of order itself.”)

The author of these verses seems drawn toward a dizzying vanishing point—a sort of zero point—toward an “intersection of dream/ and time,” in which her senses might be reborn through an identification with panicked correspondances, of which writing itself should be the immediate manifestation: “Thus, I feel/ in the changing tingles and blocks of my body/ between sky and ocean/ in a light rippling of the sheet…”

But “to return new / to the world” is a utopian program: the almost mystical ardor with which it is pursued collides with a limit, one that recurs stylistically in the frequent use of ellipses, whose abundance is proportional to the failure of the endeavor. And this limit ends up affecting the implosion of verses that sometimes struggle to unfold, as if hindered by the very ineffability of the attempted or hoped-for experience. For Daniela, however, it could not be otherwise, since for her, “Disclosing meaning / is not a question of meaning,” but of recovering a sensitivity and corporeality frustrated by contemporary civilization.

Behind it, one can perhaps hear the echo of American poetry (Ginsberg), and certainly the “Orphic” impetus of Campana (indirectly cited several times; see, for example, the poem Canone enigmatico, which implicitly refers to La Chimera).

The limit is crossed in two key moments:

when the attraction I mentioned becomes the same one that signifiers exert on themselves, magnetizing one another, echoing the same sounds and thus sliding along the metonymic axis of assonances and alliterations toward that “empty hole/ bottomless” described in the poem Essere e Tempo (“I would like if it could…”), which I previously called the “zero point”; and when they suddenly stop, privileging the interruption provided by meaning, semantic closure.

In the first case, the unexpected meanings produce surreal outcomes (sometimes originally coupled with a sense of primitive virginity); in the second, a sudden and trembling lyrical clarity, more traditional, but perfectly accomplished in itself, as in the poem Riarsa di vita….

This last text, in fact, is a beautiful example of the fusion of the various aspects of Daniela’s poetic research: the shift in meaning (“norm… form… leaf… shadow”) does not tend toward infinity here, but condenses at the end into a firm and perfect clause: “… when the norm fades/ neither form/ nor living soul remains, but a/ light, mobile rustling/ of leaves that lulls and/ shadows my departure…/”   

Review by Riccardo Tavani of Daniela Ripetti-Pacchini’s collection of poems Poesia-Phoenix

 

The Transeuropa Publishing house, has published Daniela Ripetti’s collection of poems Poesia-Phoenix in its Nuova Poetica series. An avant-garde author whose two previous publications we have already written about on “Stampa critica”. These are, in chronological order: Una giovinezza rubata (A Stolen Youth), an important historical-political reconstruction of the rebellious generation of the second half of the last century, which we highlighted in issue 12 of June 30, 2020. This is followed by La poesia e il suo doppio (Poetry and Its Double), an almost complete work by the poetess, which you can read about in issue 7 of April 17, 2021.

The book Poetry and its double, previously mentioned reveals the vast scope of the avant-garde architecture and poetic justice developed by Ripetti-Pacchini. Poesia-Phoenix, the 2023 plaquette, is instead a fleeting vessel that detached like a fragment from the mother ship to sail swifter waters and, like Dante’s vessel of ingenuity raising its sails in the first canto of Purgatorio, crosses the Leopardi-like endless spaces and superhuman silences, among inner galaxies of scattered consciousness. This is because now: "ground level is our highest heaven / and at the idea of/ looking at it.../ at the idea of touching it/ we are already lost." And even Orpheus under that sky "wanders with his feeble singing / staggers with his lyre, leaning slightly askew/ drunk on the Hereafter…”.

From his descent into the underworld, Orpheus is no longer awaited even by Eurydice, who, instead, awaits the justice owed to her. Justice for the attempted abduction, rape by the shepherd Aristaeus, and the snake bite that scattered her from the sight of life – not from the existence of consciousness. A consciousness that cannot cease waiting, because Justice is inscribed in Eurydice's very name: Eury-Dikē. The etymology is: Eury, vast, broad; Dikē, justice. That is: widely just, most just. Eury, precisely because of its meaning of vastness, also gives its name to Europe. Justice and Europe are originally inseparable in our civilization. For this reason, poetry, as the homeland always actively originating both mythos and logos, that is, the word, cannot cease, cannot help but strive for justice. This is its necessity, because the primordial form of justice lies precisely in the authentic expression of the word, not in its negation or contradiction. In the form of consciousness, perception, and speech, justice itself, like Eurydice, like poetry, is the supreme victim of aggression and poisoning by injustice. Injustice—in the many forms and guises in which it appears and strikes us—is truly the most dramatic of human experiences. And mostly, humanity fails to find any defense against it other than other tragic forms of injustice. On an individual, collective, and state level. So it is inevitable, almost a fatal curse, that the world goes off its hinges. And it is no mere jest of fate, to borrow from Hamlet and Shakespeare, that it falls to the great poets, the true artists, the immense task of setting it right again. Or, to say it in the poet’s own verses: "I will not reorder this universe / nor will I hope in the blue / but I will descend into the blue… / a tear in the weave or a dawn already torn… / a color without bottom / more beautiful / than the human."

The title of Daniela Ripetti’s Poetry-Phoenix plaquette is taken from a composition dedicated to another great poet of her generation and her brother in poetry, Dario Bellezza. The title of his book Secret Death, winner of the Viareggio Prize in 1976, is echoed in the first verse: "It is in your kind of death… secret / that you return, Dario, in my memories."

In the "Forgetting… rediscovering", it is "as if it were childhood and instead / always on the verge of ending / reborn at the end like the Phoenix / each time among the garbage bins / and the delights."

This kind of opposition, expressed here with garbage/delight, recurs in nearly every composition in this collection. From the first pages to the last:

• infinite bite / infinite laughter
• the antecedent was my consequent
• when I learned that I / was not I, was not / born… / to understand myself, I decided / to forget myself
• where did I find / the new question / that would rid me of the answers?
• everything enchants / everything chains
• in summer he fatally returned / with a false and true profile
• so gentle you are / like a gentle drop / from a black abyss
• that the many yous are finally one
• serious dreamers /… intimate executors of wonders in fieri
• peace / is to break the order / of the the order itself
• like abstract asphalt / and all desert / or all radiance/ of faded asphalt
• in sparkling flashes of Black…

·       cherubic wanderers / exiled from exile

·       or for the morning bright darkness /… or for the holy obscurity /… like rejoicing / on Ash Wednesday…

·       the words that grow / growing Word / decrease in meaning / verba deficiunt

·       of the heavenly ill/… to die and to celebrate

·       milk and bile /… bitter enchantments

·       While there is the infinite, there is a door / and the desire remains / on the threshold…

·       though worn is the threshold of the saying… / Orpheus continues to sing… sings and dies / dies and sings… condemned not to die. His head cut off from his white neck… / with his dying voice, Orpheus repeats: / "Eury-dike… Eurydice…"

·       Empty time / yet full /… Sweet time / though very harsh /… reveals the moon / pregnant with eternal sun

·       We, intermediate terms / between immensity and emptiness

·       like a thorn that lasts eternally /… that rises like invisible music / and reveals the Paradise of the meantime.

 

Precisely because "peace / is to crack the order / of the very ordering", that is, order as constituted injustice, the incessant return of Ripetti’s verse to contrast, to opposition against injustice, is not mere utterance, however lyrically elevated, but also act, performative verb—that is, a word that executes, in its very instantaneous and intrinsic saying, what it says. In the deepest abyss of the logos, that is, in our own subsoil and foundation, it reestablishes and restores the justice unrecognized, but existentially, poetically owed to every being and originally given.

Certainly, not all aspects—also shining in this brief collection—of D. Ripetti-Pacchini’s entire oeuvre can be exhausted in a short article. But if we have chosen to insist here on a particular theme, it is because justice, first and foremost, should be restored to this great poetess of our avant-garde, whose verses, as a background echo, "tremble, / as if clinging to the air." So much so that a girl, a boy from yesterday, in their "very high / confused… blasphemies…", can still prophetically sense in them: "An era divides us. / You, will shine for me after." But before “after,” she is already shining and continues to do so, simply weaving poetry not only in the form of a rose or a thing, but of and with the inseparable Dikē, Justice. Breathing metrically, whispering: "Now I sit for a while / in this old place / to dust off the dust / the dust… and the Gold…"

Commenting on Good bye Rome and other poems, the poet, writer, and essayist Gabriella Sica writes:

"I see that the Roman period is your archetypal and chronological totem, to which you return with your usual delicacy, veiling the dark and nostalgic undercurrents.

This is your good bye to Rome and your arrival in another time.

It's beautiful that you remember, as if drawing watercolors and coloring nuanced hues."

 

And the poet and Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Gerard Malanga to whom I sent  various poems from my collection Addio Roma translated by me into English, to see if they also worked in English language, comments as follows: “I am thoroughly surprised! These are your best poems of anything I have encountered in close memory to anyone else’s work in Italian of your compatriots. The poem “Goodbye Rome” is a gem of linguistic. No need to doubt the translation here… They are all good and they work.”