El Poema incomprensibile

In this article I am pleased to present El poema Incomprensibile, a renewed edition enriched with new illustrations becoming a real non-fiction graphic novel. The new title replaces the old "Estemporanea d'arte a chiusa peso".

An exercise in style that helped me warm up my pen for the new graphic novels that I plan to create for next year. This poem was my first attempt at illustration that after years still has its expressive power. Now, for the more curious, available in versione Ebook qui.

Below I have the honor of sharing the beautiful review by Lorenzo Barberis, journalist and intellectual, on that very difficult cabalinguistic poem by Stefano di Lorito illustrated by me in 2013.

Within the project “Opera Chiusa Aperta”, the Turin artist Michele di Erre has taken care of graphically reworking the poem created by Stefano Di Lorito, according to his approach to anagrammatic combinatorics. Di Lorito's poem presents itself as a work that is certainly surreal in its individual components, but the poetic form and the courtly style create a sort of halo of coherence that makes it relatively plausible to the reader.

A graphic interpretation could therefore aim to explain this characteristic, further amalgamating the text with “synthetic” illustrations, relating to the various stanzas, on the model, for example, of Doré who illustrates Dante's Divine Comedy. Di Erre has instead chosen a diametrically opposite path, certainly more singular and therefore more interesting: that is, he has proceeded to an illustration for each single verse, effectively further breaking the already - intentionally - labile continuity of Di Lorito's verses. Some graphic elements remain, between one image and another, which create connecting traits, usually between two contiguous images; but at a first perceptive level the prevailing choice is that of the "non sequitur", as Scott McCloud defines it in his analysis of sequential art: that is, a rare type of sequence which, while presenting itself as such, and therefore implicitly forcing the reader to look for a connection, presents a substantially minimal degree of connection between the various components. A characteristic, in fact, already partly present in Di Lorito's text, but which di Erre accentuates. The radicalization of this “breaking of meaning” of the illustration (which, thus, intentionally, “does not illustrate”, or does not literally make it clearer, but more cryptic) is also evident in the literal adherence to the verse, not even merging the implicit meaning highlighted by the continuation in the next verse, through enjambement. Let us take, for example, the beginning of the interpretation. The first illustration interprets the first verse in this way: “line up the jellyfish poets” becomes an alternating lineup of jellyfish and poets portrayed as Renaissance humanists; “shoot” becomes their shooting.

The next image, which tells us about apathetic, thoughtful and angry nuns, completely separates the representation from the previous scene, maintaining as a connection that of the television image that the three nuns (one apathetic, one thoughtful and one angry, it seems) are watching. Several times the characters return even after one or two frames: the nuns will return for example in frame/verse four. These sub-continuities, however, do not create a narrative, on an apparent level: even if the overall sense that is evoked (in coherence, we repeat, with the starting text) is that of a degraded cosmos, of little futurity compared to ours. The connection via a television screen that refers to another previous image in the series is however Michele di Erre's main form of connection in this series, as it is also underlined by the shape of the screen typical of all the vignettes, like the monitor of an old TV.

Television combined with the “non sequitur” immediately evokes the concept of Ghezzi's Blob, the best example of postmodern mash up applied to the television medium, at least in Italy. But here there seems to be something more radical and even deeper, as a reference. Perhaps it is the suggestion of the line, which almost evokes certain atmospheres of underground English science fiction comics, such as 2000 AD. Perhaps the first two panels, paradigmatic as they open, which show us the killing of poets and the passive acceptance of apathetic viewers. In any case, the reference that comes to mind is that of Orwell's 1984 (1948) and Bradbury's Fahrenheit (1953), which in the infancy of the medium, more than half a century ago, had predicted some of the current (complacent) drifts.

Also very significant is the exhibition structure conceived by the author, who arranged to mount the various images created on a circular and rotating structure inspired by the “mobile sculpture”, cited by Eco as the first evident form of Open Work of Art in the early twentieth century, especially with Calder's Mobiles. Each movement imparted to the work itself modifies its conformation, making every assumed configuration ephemeral.

The “rotary” structure imparted by the artist almost refers to the tarot wheel, which shows the alternation of the different dominations and becomes a symbol of the cyclical nature of the major arcana, whose series is in fact circular; but its association with the television idea evoked so far suggests the random chance of a “blob effect”, precisely. A further element of “breaking of meaning” suggested in the way of consulting the work, which refers even more to that neo-language for images, knowingly broken up and fragmented, that was evoked in Orwellian pages.

Lorenzo Barberis, 2013

Here you can buy a copy. Italian Version

El poema incomprensibile by Michele di Erre