In Conversation with Sonia Puccetti Caruso

“… L’attività poetica è diventata una continua invenzione, una creazione quotidiana (re-invenzione poetica del quotidiano), la poesia tende a essere non più esercizio letterario (sui sintagmi e il linguaggio usato) ma azione, anzi gesto-a divenire sempre più scrittura oggetto. La nuova poesia in Italia si nega recisamente come poesia (anzi cerca il nuovo-mentale negando se stessa) – per giungere a una zona o stadio di possibili intercomunicazioni – rivoluzionando con processi poetici  tutti i possibili mezzi che ha l’uomo: anche il gesto di una mano è una scrittura comunicabile” 

[Luciano Caruso, ‘La poesia come gestazione mentale’, Il gesto poetico. Antologia della nuova poesia d’avanguardia, Uomini e Idee, vol. 18, Naples, 1968]

Luciano Caruso (1944-2002) was a leading figure of the Italian Neoavantgarde. I haven’t had the chance to meet him in person, but I had the opportunity to visit his rich personal library, now the Archivio Luciano Caruso in Florence, various times. This extraordinary material body of books and artistic works has become eloquent to me, thanks to the dialogues with Sonia Puccetti Caruso, the director of the archive. In the past couple of years, we have had long and lively conversations on Caruso’s artistic and intellectual practice, as well as on how this activity relates to broader national and international debates on visual poetry, intermedia, political activism.

Caruso was born in Naples, where he lived until 1976, and spent the rest of his life in Florence. After a degree in Medieval Aesthetics and a dissertation on the carmina figurata, he collaborated with intellectuals such as Salvatore Battaglia, Francesco Arnaldi, Nino Cortese, Vincenzo Cilento, Giuseppe Galasso, Francesco Compagna, and the painters of the Gruppo 58 Mario Persico, Guido Biasi, Enrico Bugli, Bruno Di Bello, Lucio Del Pezzo, Salvatore Paladino, and Mario Colucci. Thanks to Colucci, especially, he acquired significant knowledge about the Milanese movement of “nuclear art” (Enrico Baj, D’Angelo, Piero Manzoni) and established contacts with the Parisian groups of Lettrism and Situationism. These experiences significantly informed his radical experimentation of creative writing, especially in the area of poetry, towards a utopia of democratisation of the artistic practice and of revolutionary creativity.

Caruso played indeed a crucial role in developing a certain idea of ‘total poetry’ meant to overcome the traditional formal and material boundaries of the genre and coincide with political action and life. In the 1960s, he was active in a number of neo-avantgarde reviews revolving around visual poetry, such as Ex, Linea Sud, Ana Etcetera, Tool, which are commonly known as ‘esoeditoria’, namely self-produced counter-industrial publications. Overall, these reviews all tried to rethink the relationship between form and ideology in fiction and poetry, some of them experimenting with either concrete poetry and/or visual poetry, wall poetry, sound poetry, happenings, and mixed media installations.

In 1968, Caruso edited, together with Corrado Piancastelli, an anthology of experimental poetry, Il gesto poetico, including a selection of poetic experiments published in these reviews throughout the 1960s. It was a foundational act for a new poetry which aimed at the fusion of all arts, as to realise a full fluxus, or continuum, of poetic energy across artistic boundaries.

Two theoretical writings opened the issue: ‘La poesia come gest-azione mentale’  [Poetry as a mental gesture/action] written by Luciano Caruso and ‘Una proposta di lettura nel dissenso’ [A proposal for a protest reading] written by Corrado Piancastelli. In ‘La poesia come gest-azione mentale’, Caruso explains how this anthology was intended as a continuous poetic re-invention of our daily lives [reinvenzione poetica del quotidiano]. Far from being a literary exercise based on syntagms and normative language, this new poetry was based on action, gesture, and on a closer relationship between subject and object to the point that it would go beyond its own definition of poetry. Significantly, in 1967 Caruso founded, together with the poet Stelio Maria Martini, the review Continuum, which later metamorphosed in Continuazione (1973) and E/mana/zione (1976). These reviews became a laboratory for the rethinking of the concept of the literary review itself, as well as notions of ‘authorship’, ‘text’, and ‘artistic disciplines’.  

Today, the Archivio Luciano Caruso hosts the majority of Italian neo-avant-garde reviews, as well as libri d’artista, volumes on Futurism, visual poetry, new writing. The archive is an invaluable resource for any scholar working in the area of interart/intermedia relations, art and politics, interconnections between the historical avant-gardes and artistic practice in the digital age, and so many related fields of research. And it is not a typical archive. What is most invaluable is the key role played by Sonia Puccetti Caruso, a unique intermediary to enter this fascinating world. 

[This blog post will be followed by an interview with Sonia Puccetti Caruso]