On COPIA
- broether9
- 50 minutes ago
- 7 min read
"Is the reader a copy of the author, or is the author a copy of the reader?" Borges suggested that whether one is the reader or writer is largely a matter of chance." Giulio R.M. Maffii
[Editor’s Note]:
If we are to believe in the wisdom of chance, and why wouldn’t we, reading unsolicited manuscripts is a kind of grail adventure. Most of the encounters lead nowhere, but then, something different arrives. Something you’ve never seen before, but that also seems strangely familiar. There is a moment of recognition, that this work, (this message) has existed in some nascent form, in your heart or mind or memory, and is finally, in the manuscript in front of you, brought to life. It is a critical piece to understanding something larger. And it leads the seeker outward into new ways of thinking. Giulio Maffii’s Copia is this kind of book. It is a book that has led me, (and I think will lead readers) to renewed appreciation of poetry’s power to pose essential questions about our collective experience. It has revived my belief in experimental poetry’s role in dismantling social assumptions; in as much as those assumptions are embedded in language. It leads to a new view of contemporary work culture, to new authors, and even to Florence. An old city awash in what were once, new ideas. Maffii grew up there in a multilingual family, and taught at the University of Florence for many years. In April, under the impossibly massive shadow of the Duomo, amidst the whir of helicopters running security details over a soccer match between England and Italy, we were able to meet briefly. We celebrated, with other Italian writers and editors, the publication of Copia in English (WCP) and in the Italian edition published by Pietre Vive Editore. Later, we asked Giulio to share some of his history, and influences; his eloquence needs no further introduction. You can buy Copia now! BR
Interview with Giulio R. M. Maffii
On the Contemporary Work Place as a Subject
“Too often poetry still remains tied to the vanity of the writer instead of confronting the environments that are actually shaping contemporary existence.”
I think poetry very often speaks about interiority, the self, or civic events, but the real center of contemporary dispersion and depersonalization is probably the workplace itself: in many corporate environments, human relationships become artificial because everything is ultimately subordinated to efficiency. Productivity is rarely compatible with solidarity or genuine empathy.
I have always been fascinated -and disturbed-by managerial language: those motivational formulas, empty strategic expressions, entire conversations that seem to circulate without ever touching reality. To me, it often feels like air produced for limited minds, a form of linguistic manipulation that slowly increases alienation.
And then I started asking myself: why not contaminate poetry with the same industrial and bureaucratic languages used by this sick material society? Why should poetry avoid those spaces?
Sometimes I wonder what office procedures actually are. How is it possible to spend eight or ten hours every day inside hostile environments that progressively consume our sense of being human?
I want the reader to feel that much of the confusion surrounding us is not accidental at all, but produced by systems of control and power pretending to be rational and neutral. Perhaps that is why irony becomes necessary for survival. Culture, literature, visual disruption, they become forms of resistance.
Our society trusts images more and more while progressively distrusting language itself.
Flow charts and similar visual systems increasingly contribute to the depersonalization of contemporary life. They often function as subtle manipulations of thought.
I became interested in entering those systems from the inside rather than criticizing them externally in a simplistic way. Flow charts promise order, clarity, efficiency but very often they generate confusion, disorientation, and alienation while presenting themselves as neutral models capable of shaping the contemporary mind.
By fragmenting, distorting, and exploding those structures, I try to recover the instability of language and restore an active role to the reader with Spatial Poetry. I am not interested in a passive spectator simply receiving the author’s thought. I want the reader to move through the poem, to reconstruct connections continuously, almost becoming part of the architecture itself. In a certain sense, Copia is a sabotage operation conducted from inside the language of contemporary systems.
I want the reader to get lost precisely in order to find themselves again. There should be a conscious mental effort involved, something very different from the passive consumption encouraged by much mainstream poetry.
The chance aspect fascinates me. I like the paradox that these diagrams and systems were originally created to produce one clear result, one efficient direction, and yet inside poetry they can suddenly generate multiple readings, unstable paths, contradictory interpretations. Poetry is also a form of play, of course, but beyond the game there must be attraction, reflection, disturbance.
The interaction between words and images helps create this awareness.
On Languages & Origins
I grew up attending an Irish boarding school where only English was spoken, while at home we spoke only Italian. Later, Spanish also entered both my mind and my language partly through my studies, partly because part of my family is Spanish. So I never experienced language as something fixed or monolithic.
Multilingualism gave me an immense perspective, less limited and more unstable in a positive sense. It probably helped me develop a voice that moves constantly between irony, distance, and fragmentation.
When you live between languages, you quickly understand that every language alters reality differently. None of them completely coincides with the world. That awareness certainly contributed to creating something personal in my writing, but also in the way I think about images, identity, and perception in general.
It is difficult to say exactly what influenced my writing because I started reading and writing poetry very young, so I was crossed by many different literary rivers. The first strong impact probably came from French poetry, especially Apollinaire’s calligrams, before being overwhelmed by the energy of the Futurists and Dadaists such as Tzara. My real fixed points, however, have always been T.S. Eliot whom I still continuously reread and Montale.
At the same time, Italian visual and concrete poetry from the 1960s and 70s was extremely important for me, especially Adriano Spatola and the more linear works of Corrado Costa; and, of course, a great deal of American poetry from the 1960s and 1970s, from John Ashbery to Jerome Rothenberg.
Sometimes I find more poetry inside a visual artwork than inside an average contemporary poetry book. Being both a writer and a visual artist constantly forces me to look at reality through different perceptual systems. Writing in multiple languages intensifies that instability even further.
Sometimes my work feels close to what could be called a kind of “bureaucratic surrealism”: a collision between concrete poetry, visual poetry, and the cold architectures of administrative systems and invisible regimes of control speaking industrial, alienating languages.
My background as an ethnohistorian, together with later literary and artistic studies, created a sort of bridge between research, visual thinking, and poetry. At the university, my relationship with students was always based on exchange rather than hierarchy, people trying to search for something together. Last year, for example, I taught Contemporary History, but poetry continuously entered the classroom as a way of understanding how societies express fear, memory, violence, and hope. Perhaps I did not prepare my students perfectly as historians, but they had developed a strong human and cultural awareness. After all, history can often be narrated very well by writers too, not only by scholars. I was never interested in creating dead specialists, but culturally alive human beings.
"But honestly in terms of origins, I prefer speaking about atmospheres rather than influences. I like to imagine all poets gathered together outside chronology, working on a common project. Whether that project is later called lyric poetry, experimental poetry, visual poetry, or something else entirely is not particularly important. We begin from a shared point of departure and eventually arrive somewhere much larger, perhaps even a kind of poetic metaverse. We believe we exist, but we are only one link in a vast human chain.”
On the Idea of One
[Each poem in Copia contains the phrase There is One]
The answer is already in the title of the poems: There is one. One is simply what is there. One is lost in everyday life, in the anger of things that never happened, in the crowd, in the alienating repetition of gestures and emotions performed out of necessity. One lives in the suburbs, in offices, under the fluorescent lights of shopping malls and corporate buildings. One is the writer and the reader. One is ourselves, with all our contradictory and imperfect humanity. One has an identity and does not have one. One is anonymous. One cannot really be identified; at best, one can be copied. One believes it exists. Perhaps One never had an original, just as books never really do. We keep hearing about originals, but everyone seems to be a copy of someone else. Sometimes a copy can be more interesting than the original. Every attempt to identify an original leads to provisional and contradictory results or at least to a mild headache. In that sense, each book is a copy
In the end, Copia suggests that the problem of copying existed long before computers; and, if we are honest, Copia promises an original only to make it disappear. And, of course, One is also a game.
I cannot know the origin of anything neither of a book nor of a thought. What I have before me are only copies. The reader copies the writer's ideas and makes them their own, only to discover that perhaps those ideas were already there. Then comes the inevitable question: where did those ideas originate? The reader is never passive. The reader is always a builder -or a dismantler- of books.”
Find More of Giulio's work here: https://giuliomaffii.com/
Find the Italian Edition of Copia and more Italian poetry at https://www.pietreviveeditore.it/
Find the Archive of Adriano Spatola for a historic look at visual and experimental poetry https://www.archiviomauriziospatola.com/ams/indexweb.php?name=WEB
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