Il cerchio che non chiude: forme della temporalità nella poesia contemporanea

Abstract

Drawing on Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s reflections on the ways in which poems from different epochs point out their ending (Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, 1968), Timothy Bahti’s study on the circularity the lyric entails in its reading (Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry, 1996), and finally on John Emil Vincent’s considerations about the queerness of incompletion (Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry, 2002), the article investigates – in poems by Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Louise Glück, and John Ashbery – how contemporay poetry copes with its own incompletion. The hypothesis is that, from Modernism on, lyric poems embark on their internal trajectory but the awareness of its impossible accomplishment prevails. Such a failure becomes structural in lyric discourse. Therefore, “the circle which cannot be closed” becomes a specific form of temporality in the lyric, which cannot pursue a successful linear path but has to accept its endless approximation and work on the awareness of its own practice. On the other side, incompletion also allows the repeatability of the text. Assuming formal iterability as a main feature of the lyric (as in Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric, 2015), the article reflects on the fact that the lyric text can end without fully concluding itself thus becoming a performance which can be repeated throughout the centuries and can be renewed by each act of reading.