By LIESL JOBSON
On my side of the glass
POLICEMAN KILLS CAT
are burglar bars
on the other side
“DR DEATH” ACQUITTED
a grille
Poems by LORIS JACOPO BOLLINI and art by ANDREA POGGIPOLLINI, with an introduction by MARTHA COOLEY
Andrea Poggipollini is a Bologna-based artist who works in multiple media. His summer-long installation “Omnipresence” in the medieval borgo (walled village) of Castiglione del Terziere in Lunigiana, Tuscany, featured sculpture, photography, video, and excerpts from poems by Loris Jacopo Bononi. Bononi, an Italian writer (earlier in his career, a doctor), writes poetry and prose; his work has been lauded by Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. He is the author of Trilogia (Diario postumo, Miserere dei, and Il poeta muore), Libri e Destini, and other texts.
Viewers walked through the borgo to encounter Poggipollini’s and Bononi’s collaboration in unexpected places: on placards on walls high and low, windows, on the ground, and in cellars. Among the installation’s elements were life-sized sculptures of human figures in black or white—kneeling, standing, sitting—which materialized as unexpectedly as phantoms on stone walls, in a bell-tower, and on the balcony of the village’s once-grandest house, now abandoned. In a passageway between two buildings were photographs by Poggipollini of sculptures he’d previously made, to which Bononi’s poetry-excerpts are an implicit response.
The photographs of Poggipollini’s work are echoes of echoes of echoes, one might say.
When I vomit
it will be through my forehead.
Be warned, stand far off
because the vomit will not spare you.
By KAREN PRESS
So we’re monads after all,
that’s a relief, complete and separate
and also connected to every other agglomeration of fundamental particles
(aka pine cone, parking meter, vodka orange)
we’ve ever touched however tangentially,
boson from a breath of Plato’s used air
gone two millennia later into the feather of a chicken in Mumbai,
air I exhale full of fermions from the fourth king of Axum’s coronation dinner,
so that if you read any electron’s palm now you can tell
what it will be feeling in 4005.
By KAREN PRESS
1
A relief supply ship for the bombed citizens of Iraq
called Sir Galahad
arrives tomorrow in the port of Basra.
Oh where is the beautiful lady
who will come out of the charred crowd
to lay her long hair along the shore
and wave the green scarf of welcome?
There is a stain on the horizon.
It leaks into the world, covers
the linens, covers the faces
and turns this ocean, shuddering,
from its course.
On occasion, the animals
curl into themselves, their skins,
and we—not knowing why—
put our faces to the wind
and sniff.
from Imprendehora
Do not say “I hear the laughter of birds
above our heads.” Say, it is the laughter
of women who empty their washbasins
on the steps of very high houses
whose walls, they say,
can never be cleaned.
By ARI SITAS
from Around the World in Eighty Days: The India Section
It was important to have a conversation with
Pandit Nehru in Allahabad
After the visitors left the fine house
We sat down for tea
Overlooking the confluence of the sacred rivers
I marveled at the variety of trees
By KELWYN SOLE
Don’t trust any harbour. Already
those reflections that match each boat
turn restless, yearn to fracture:
each wave beyond the quay dishevels.
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