METRICS @ SAN SERRIFFE

I’m very pleased to be presenting my new volume with Phil Baber and Andrea di Serego Alighieri devoted to Amelia Rosselli’s metrical theories, Delirious Verse, from the Amsterdam-based press The Last Books, in conversation with Andrea at the beautiful space of San Serriffe in Amsterdam.

DELIRIOUS VERSE: a talk on ‘Metrical Spaces’
edited and translated by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Phil Baber, including ‘Metrical Spaces’, translated by Jennifer Scappettone

conversation between Jennifer Scappettone and Andrea di Serego Alighieri
San Serriffe, Friday May 23, 7.30 pm

Delirious Verse presents the first English translation of a talk delivered by Italian poet Amelia Rosselli (1930–1996), in which she read aloud from and expanded upon her seminal essay “Metrical Spaces.” Drawing on intensive literary and musical studies—and influenced by her trilingual upbringing as a refugee from fascist Italy—Rosselli conceptualizes a new kind of poetic form: a graphic-prosodic “time-space” capable of containing “all possible imaginable rhythms.” Delirium here is both frenzy and method, signalling the “spatial and temporal repositioning” of verse—a turn that is also a deviation from received identities and national traditions. Disjointed yet resonant, diasporic yet communal, Rosselli imagines a poetry unmoored from empire yet insistently bound to history, biography, and collective address.