[I]s this not precisely what happens in every genuine poetic enunciation, in which language’s movement toward sense is as if traversed by another discourse, one moving from comprehension to sound, without either of the two ever reaching its destination, the one to rest in prose and the other in pure sound? Instead, in a decisive exchange, it is as if, having met each other, each of the two movements then found the other’s tracks, such that language found itself led back in the end to language, and comprehension to comprehension. This inverted chiasm - this and nothing else - is what we call poetry.

Opposing poles are shown to dwell in an exchange, a cross-questing, crossmirroring. The word "category" itself hails, etymologically, back to "against" + "assembly/place of public speaking": the category anchors itself versus the definitions of consensus.

Yet despite the dynamism of these ponderings and the preface’s stress on their source in reformulations of categorial structures, when translated into English, Categorie italiane was called The End of the Poem - presumably in order to render the contents more broadly germane, to departicularize its value in the service of an Anglophone all. At the end of the labor of "curating" this sheaf of poems (to adopt the Italian term for editing, akin to "caring") from a Midwestern metropolis far off - having all the while taken the import of this work for granted - I find myself wondering explicitly what value Italian structures extend to a foreign readership. What constitutes the Italianness of thought produced in the languages of that welter of a peninsula; to what does this weighty but vague cultural and geographical qualification point? To rebuke the mistaken market, I ask as it does: what possible relevance might the italicized phrase pose to an English-speaking audience?

Crossed oppositions between mother tongue and global language, language vivid and dead posit nodes of particular urgency and lure for readers from our society who look to Italy, echoing a pastime that has often been conflated with looking Past. "There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject," opens Henry James’s 1902 essay on Venice. The same could be uttered, and often is, of Italy - from the outside. Yet contested borders and allegiances, civic corruption and governmental upheaval, concretely shifting, even vanishing, terrain: "Italy" is an entity more balkanized and more contingent, more demanding of vigilant description, than those of the touring West are prone to face. True, it is a nationstate, speaking more broadly than ever the dialect of Dante. The homogenization of idiom effected by mass media (thanks initially to Fascist wiles) obscures, but does not quell, deep-seated clashes of disposition and socioeconomic circumstances between South and North, Mediterranean and Adriatic, inland and coastal regions deriving from remote acts of history and persistent acts of weather and terrain. All are reflected in language.

Locating the current in this fissured, contradictory, history-hauling state is no easy task, and diverging from those already identified and shelved has involved much self-confoundment for this guest editor. This labor, some on paper, some onscreen, some, as habitual in that culture, in the open air - was a labor of seeking and finding comfort in being lost. This is no genealogy, then, nor a map, but a set of paces, of passi, toward a language of emergence in Italy - toward what is being called "the poetry of research." In order to adequately represent this "poesia ultima" (a phrase implying the latest and lasting), I had to construct a context that many Anglo-American readers of poetry lack. I looked back to a prior generation of edges, but tried to clear a different path backward and into the future - one that would represent aesthetic risk, small-press and e-production, and a range of regions and subjects.

Attempting to penetrate or diffuse the male-dominated surface of Italian letters without sacrificing other objectives was possibly the most difficult of my tasks. Anthologies had not aided me much in learning about new women poets. A well-regarded 1978 Garzanti anthology of 20th-century Italian verse contains 51 authors, one of whom is a woman (Amelia Rosselli); a 2005 Einaudi anthology, otherwise admirable, features 43 authors, five of whom are women. Small presses and, to a lesser degree, blogs, have been far less myopic, and things are changing; but by dint of some sociological non-enigma, women still seem either to lack access to or to opt out of the podium of outspokenness - even or especially in "experimental" circles. The considerable toil involved in overcoming this impasse resulted in a singular thrill in discovering the work of Maria Attanasio, Giovanna Frene, and Florinda Fusco over the course of this project.

The feature is distributed over two halves, constructed according to a rough chronology. I begin with two postwar authors whose work remains regrettably underrepresented, if not missing, in Anglo-American markets, even in the wake of homages brought about by their recent deaths: Emilio Villa and Amelia Rosselli. Belated appreciation of their work is no mystery, but the logical result of their difficulty, their vocational, residential, and linguistic hybridity, and their willful estrangement from triumphalist literary circles. It would be tough to overstate the consequence of these "marginal" authors for contemporary Italian poetics and, more particularly, for the younger poets gathered here, various of whom are writing and translating between rival languages and categories. The section continues with fresh translations of a poet who may be familiar to some, celebrated spinner of language emerging equally out of revivified dialect traditions of the Veneto and obsolescing globalism: Andrea Zanzotto. A younger series of writers working across literary traditions and genres follows. I am delighted to include a representative range of the work of Nanni Cagnone, lyricist and novelist, lecturer in aesthetics, translator of Hopkins, and founder of the gutsy publishing house, Coliseum; and extracts from the latest volume of Milanese author Milli Graffi, sound and page poet, researcher of the comic function in the early avant-gardes, director of the long-crucial journal Il verri, and translator of Carroll, Dickens, and Darwin. The work presented here by Sicilian poet Maria Attanasio, who is also a philosopher and author of historical fiction, is characterized by Carla Billitteri as a rigorous grappling with "cybernetic transpositions of selfhood, thought, and memory" - a "new biomorphism" measured "against the desolate political void of the century." The section closes with the opening text from Giuliano Mesa’s "last," serial work-inprogress, nun - a title that, while echoing the English and Romance "non," calls into contemporaneity the German "nun," the Latin "nunc," the Sanskrit "nu," and the Egyptian "nun," which defines primordial chaos.

Marco Giovenale’s critical piece on crossing categories of chill and speakability in contemporary Italian poetry provides a hinge for passage to the emerging authors of this issue, and a key for understanding the broader scene of their production, literary and extraliterary. Andrea Raos, resident of Paris and one of Italy’s foremost rising critics of Japanese language and literature, follows with a section of his new book-length poem, which chronicles the tragic mutations arising from a 1956 Brazilian experiment to breed killer bees with honey producers in order to make them more productive industrially. Kathleen Fraser notes of the piece she has translated that it "speaks from the mind of the disoriented bee (or hive) which, having experienced the effects of genetic splicing, no longer behaves according to known biological or ethical codes." A recurring concern with the human body as aftermath arises in the work of Giovanna Frene, scholar of the history of language and poet of scrupulous mobility, or of what she calls the "oscillation of reality"; amid the verse included here is a departure from the sestina form produced after September 11th. The disseminated stanzas of Barese poet/critic/translator Florinda Fusco’s the book of the dark madonnas share obsessions with bodily mass haunted by technology; they transmit uncannily feminized corporal parts while shaping space itself as both material in extension and as abyss.

The internet has altered and is altering Italian letters at a pace that can hardly be tracked on paper, providing not only new channels of distribution, but newly available fonts of inspiration: Second-Wave Modernism; the New York School; Language; the Kootenay School; Post-language; and Flarf - to name only the North American sources cited in a recent essay by Gherardo Bortolotti wryly dubbed "The Discovery of America." The geographically dispersed, farsighted young men of GAMMM — Bortolotti, Alessandro Broggi, Marco Giovenale, Michele Zaffarano, and Massimo Sannelli — are responsible for a remarkably characteristic implosion of poems, translations, and critical endeavors, readings and conversational forums, chapbooks, e-books, and broadsides (like the one by Esse Zeta Atona whose bits punctuate this dossier). Readers may access these projects via a website of daunting proportions and scope. I can only bring forward a shard of this effort here, but include a collaboratively authored essay that lays out the principles of their installation-oriented poetic. Giovenale, a Roman poet and critic who frequently self-translates, plumbing the discomfortable region between languages, has contributed a section of poems from his recent cross-genre work of dissolution, The Exposed House; Bortolotti, a tract of his blog-emanating installation, traces; and Sannelli, a set of linguistically interstitial lyrics that form part of the writing he calls his "second body." The liminal status of Sannelli’s poems, which he has asked us to print only in English, so as to release them into the status of "second original," provides an exquisite comment on the work of these writers as a whole: it can hardly be contained by - even while emerging from within - the qualifying adjective of a single syntax, vocabulary, or nation-state. The categorical structures of Italian culture will only be revealed, as Agamben proposes in "Plan for a review" (the last essay of Infancy and History), in a "destruction of the destruction" of tradition, of cultural transmissibility - because the fluid "Italian phenomenon" derives from an originary and continual unwelding of patrimony and its transmission, authority and writing.

The majority of the poems published here have not before been translated into English; and, though the world-wide web and the new ease of selfpublishing render prior confinements of distribution thankfully obsolete, for several younger writers this represents a debut in an Anglophone or US offline forum. Each translation was broached in a different mode, more or less "literal," though persistently concrete, crossing vectors of sound and sense; such choices depended upon the character and intention of the original. Endeavoring to include a range of pages from each author and the Italian texts has resulted in numerous lacunae; if space, time, and economics permitted I would have included the serial stanzas of Michele Zaffarano, the theatrical work of Giulio Marzaioli, the cross-media work of Alessandro De Francesco, the neon lyrics of Lidia Riviello, work from African and Eastern diasporic communities now well settled in Italy...and others whose poetry I am only now, at this project’s provisional end, beginning to discover. I find consolation in the fact that further authors are discussed in Marco Giovenale’s generously conceived overview. It is my wish that these pages will be treated by readers as they were by me: as touchstones for further curiosity.

I’d like to thank the 21 other poets and translators for bearing with me through hundreds of emails eked out in the interstices of other labors, for their patience, and attention to detail. Special gratitude goes out to Gherardo Bortolotti and Marco Giovenale, for their initial solicitousness, tireless, manifold pointers, and copious gifts of pages along the way. Ultimately I have to thank all of my Italian and Italian-speaking friends for their banter, hospitality, and affection, which have borne me through countless exchanges of joyous puzzlement and recognition.