V Festival internazionale della poesia
22-25 Settembre 2005
Orta San Giulio, Italia

An American poet I read a lot of in my youth was Paul Blackburn. I've not re-read him recently, but there was something about his urban, melancholic, ruefully macho personality. He was one of those Americans in love with things Mediterranean. His VW microbus, nicknamed after a troubadour poet, the Gaucelm Faidit Uzerchemobile, always pointed south. My own battered Honda has a similar homing instinct. But when I read Auden on that southern subject, I shake my head: '[coming] Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere / Of vineyards, baroque, la bella figura, / To these feminine townships where men / Are males, and siblings untrained in a ruthless / Verbal in-fighting as it is taught / In Protestant rectories upon drizzling / Sunday afternoons' seems a typically preposterous Audenesque proposition. 'Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno', in which he bids farewell to the south (to move to Austria), might describe Auden's own personality, but doesn't say much that is true about Italy, or the Mediterranean region. Why should steady sunlight put to scorn 'any notion / Of change or escape'; why would anyone turn 'flabbily, dingily lecherous' if they lived there, as Auden maintains? Although the south has embraced Protestant capitalism, it lives, I'd say, in its intimate relations, at a curious tangent to it, always the epitome of hospitality and good manners. It also feels to me to be more hospitable to poetry. Whenever I have a chance to test this proposition, I head south.

On a coolish September morning, the Honda pointed its nose out of the German capital for Italy, making for Lindau on the Bodensee (Lake Constance). Why Lindau? Well, Austria and Switzerland have now instituted the vignette, a tax on motorway use. We didn't feel like paying the price of one of these for the four kilometres of Austrian motorway linking Germany and Switzerland. However if we came off the German Autobahn at Lindau, we could use the untaxed Austrian bit of lake road linking Germany with Switzerland, and then just pay the Swiss. Seven hundred kilometres south from Berlin, in Lindau, where the four corners of the Vier-Länder Eck meet (Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein), we ate Maultaschen (a kind of ravioli) and Sauerkraut. Then the following morning we chugged into Österreich, filled up with cheaper Austrian petrol, and slalomed the potholes bravely into Switzerland. Beyond the San Bernardino tunnel was the stronger sunshine of Italy. Our destination was Lake Orta, for an unusual poetry festival.

The steeply descending hairpin into the minute car park of the San Rocco Hotel was an alarming example of mediaeval Italy's adaptation to the motor car. We handed the car keys gratefully to the hotel porter, forgot our tin carapace, took an exploratory stroll through the narrow, traffic free lanes of the town, and crossed a piazza dedicated to the poet of Orta, Ernesto Ragazzoni. Ragazzoni, I discovered, both eccentric and ironic, 'used satire and irony to combat the things he most detested: mediocrity and clichés'. My kind of poet exactly.

Entering the Piazza Motta, the town square, we looked for the Palazotto, where I knew the festival was to take place. What was a Palazotto, anyway? Standing underneath the arches of a mediaeval raised building, I saw two men in conversation and approached them with gutter Italian: 'Scusi... Palazotto?' One of them pointed straight up with his finger: 'Questo.' I was standing underneath it. And so the festival began on a Friday evening in the raised hall of the mediaeval community centre, or Palazotto, or town hall, with a welcome address by the mayor of Orta. I say began, although nothing began exactly, in this festival. There was more of a gentle segue into an event and then a kind of decrescendo out of it. The Piazza Motta, lined on three sides with cafés, and on the fourth aside by the lake, was a busy place at that time in the evening. I became conscious of being at a focal point where parallel events could occur with disharmonious cheerfulness – poetry readings, weddings, tourist pilgrimages, or just plain fishing.

In accordance with this pleasantly simultaneous principle, nobody bothered to put up a notice saying Do Not Disturb – so that when the events truly did begin quite a few tourists who had climbed to the top of the stone steps to the main room of the Palazotto creaked open the door to find themselves in the midst of something they could certainly not have foreseen: a poetry reading in English by Carol Ann Duffy. Some stayed. Some creaked out again. After Carol Ann's reading, the chairs were carried downstairs and set up in the square. For the second part of the programme, I was to read a set of poems, with musical accompaniment from the bass player Andy Hamill. As we were setting up, a few American tourists floated by. 'Rock concert?' 'No. Poetry reading.' 'Oh. Gee. Maybe catch you later.'

The acoustics seemed friendly. Trying the microphone, I bounced my voice off the washing hanging from a window. Some of the Italian bystanders, obviously bemused, but smiling broadly, stopped, stared and moved on. I wondered what it would be like if Italian poets came and set up a festival, say, in the market square at Keswick on Derwentwater. My own voice sounded very loud in the square. During an American Indian chant, I caught the eye of a portly, mystified bystander. What strange English rite was this? Dusk crept in. Andy took a solo on the kazoo and in the middle of this – he was also playing bass and making rattlesnake noises with... well... a rattlesnake noisemaker – he rather over-enthusiastically blew the kazoo right out of his mouth. I looked up and saw the portly bystander, still watching. After the reading we squeezed into cars and drove along dark roads to an even darker restaurant. The wine flowed. We ate many different kinds of foccacia. With garlic. Without garlic. With cheese. Without cheese. Italy likes you to eat.

On Saturday morning, in the hotel, we realised that Orta is also a focal point for weddings. The San Rocco was full of elegantly clad guests: young men who seemed to have been tailored for their suits rather than the other way round; young women not dressed to kill, just perfectly clad (there is a difference). Is the north shocked 'to own / That surfaces need not be superficial', as Auden put it? Exhilarated, more like. Put a British and an Italian wedding party side by side, and scrutinise them carefully. Are the British – as I once heard an Englishman wistfully remark – 'the Italians of the north'? I don't think so. The south lives outdoors whenever it can. It lives to be seen, and doesn't bother too much about the interior décor. The north of course has to think about the weather, and stays home. Does living in the south mean, as Auden had it, 'to-be-visible-now'? Does being there, living there, mean that you are – this is a disconcerting thought – who you look like?

In slightly apologetic shabbiness, we set off for Sacro Monte di Orta, and the next part of the festival programme. This sacred hill, just beyond the town, has twenty one chapels, each one representing, through sculpted earthenware figurines, a different part of St Francis's life. You enter the darkness of each chapel in turn and peer through a barred grille at a kind of waxwork tableau – a cross between fairground peepshow, and Christmas nativity crib. Most of the time it was hard to work out what dramatic event exactly was being depicted – but a small brochure from the tourist bureau retrospectively unravelled all. We were to make a pilgrimage from chapel to chapel and read one or two poems at each stop. All the participants in the festival were themselves poets, and had come to read, so each chapel saw one or two of us, in turn, make a verbal tableau. Jim Ciletti, a poet from Boulder, Colorado enacted, rather than read, a poem about chopping wood. And everywhere you looked, there was the lake, with its island. And a mushroomy smell. We must have seemed odd pilgrims, but the event held a strange, processual, anticipatory quality. Then we stopped doing that and descended the hill for lunch.

In the afternoon, we ascended the steps to the Palazotto once more for further poetry readings. It started with serene unpunctuality. That, and the mysterious red curtain that hung at the back (concealing what?), and the intermittent stumblings-in of tourists, and the fact that the whole building was up in the air on legs, gave the whole thing an absorbing, displaced kind of quality. It occurred to me that a poetry reading on a spaceship might be a very fine thing.

The Saturday evening programme was given over to the awarding of poetry prizes. This event took place on the Isola San Giulio, an island in the middle of the lake. To get there required a boat, and a boatman, so naturally that involved a dispute over the fare. The signboard with ferry tariffs was not to be taken literally. If a return journey cost three Euros, that didn't mean a single fare cost one Euro and fifty cents – unless, of course, you had an Italian woman travelling with you. By the end of the argument I was expecting the boatman to refuse all payment, his honour demonstrably compromised (if it had been Serbia, the boatman would have hurled all the money into the lake). However the evening sail to the mysterious island was very agreeable and pilgrim-like. The organiser's ancient house had balconies, steps and terraces, and from wherever you looked you could see water. On one terrace I found Carol Ann Duffy and her ten-year old daughter Ella gazing fascinatedly up at a window through which the wimples of nuns could be seen heading purposefully to mass in the basilica next door. Look, Ella, another one! What was it exactly about nuns? Carol Ann had been brought up by them, but her tone didn't exactly convey devotion and respect. Yet she was delighted at the thought of taking Ella to the mass there. I concluded this might be a case of that Empsonian predicament: I, a twister, love what I abhor. The Benedictine order – which is what it was – is devoted to prayer, obedience, poverty and humility. Not qualities I've noticed poets aspiring to. Staving off poverty, for example, is a cardinal tenet of the Parnassian order.

For the prize-giving, we were led next door into the mediaeval Villa Tallone, the one-time residence of an illustrious maker of pianofortes. This was the high point of the festival. Among our company was a number of poets who had won a prize, or were runners up, in a themed competition. There was also a prize for a very short poem. What you could have won, apart from a free trip to the festival, was the Silver Wyvern. A wyvern is that creature in Uccello's painting of St George and the Dragon: two legs, vicious wings, a forked tail, and a demonic head. Why a wyvern? The island was a wyvern's nest until St Giulio himself sailed his cloak over the water (the boatmen wouldn't go near the place) using his staff for an oar and slew the creature with his vorpal blade. This year's wyvern was a pendant with a real diamond eye mounted on a specially designed blue glass plaque. It squinted balefully as we trooped past it to tour the rest of the Villa. Then it was on to the island restaurant, where we consumed another encyclopaedic Italian meal, with a first course, second, course, third course, fourth course…and so on. The boatman who ferried us back to the mainland required me to drain my grappa glass and surrender it to him before he would allow me to set sandal to shore...

By Sunday morning, we had resolved to stay on for a couple of days, and moved out of the rather sumptuous San Rocco into a more modest place. Here Orta presented a problem to the tourist. The town being traffic free (well, virtually), we had to find a car park from which luggage could be dragged down into the town to the new accommodation. Rumbling two suitcases on rollers not designed for cobbles and steps, I weaved through ongoing wedding parties, beautifully dressed couples posing for pictures on ancient steps, Uncles and Mamas waving from ancient doorways. At eleven AM (give or take an hour or so) there was a final reading of translations of English first world war poets into Italian. I couldn't judge the quality of the translations (by Massimo Bocchiola), but I could approve the choice of poems. As that line of Edward Thomas's came up: Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon, I recalled the poet Ken Smith telling me of his surprise when his mother, Milly, not an educated or in any way literary woman, suddenly quoted the line. Then, as we vacated the Palazotto for the last time, a newly married couple climbed the stone steps to have their pictures taken. The bride turned her back on the well-wishers gathered below in the square and threw her bouquet over her shoulder. It was caught by a young woman who was roundly applauded, signifying she was next in line for marriage. Now it was time to say goodbye.

The reviser's instinct – the instinct that makes you hate to part with a manuscript because you know it can be written better – always makes me feel at events like this that the time to say goodbye is really the time to begin again and do it properly. It was all over too quickly. Perhaps a real pilgrimage would be the way to do it, long-drawn-out, Canterbury Tales-style, with a genial host who, despite geniality, would be merciless to the long-winded. And which of yow that bereth hym best of alle / That is to seyn that telleth in this caas / Tales of best sentence and moost solaas / Shal have a soper at oure aller cost. We did have a genial hostess, of course – the festival's organiser: Gabriel Griffin. And we did get supper at her cost. Which brings me to the question of the justification for an event like this. In a world where poetry finds itself in a kind of limbo between commerce and charity, the individual enthusiasm of someone prepared to take on the organisation of such a festival is its own justification. Such commitment needs to be recognised. Without people of similar conviction there'd be no small presses, no little magazines, no readings either. The other justification, of course, is the location itself. With a meditation-inspiring backdrop such as the mountains around Lake Orta, and the Isola San Giulio itself, floating serenely on the water, the place has the quality of an old painting into which you step and are transformed. The encounter with Italy takes place tangentially, in terms of atmosphere, history, legend, and of course, conviviality. OK, there are drawbacks to Italian life, not least the lunatic driving style that never seems to travel with less than floored accelerator, and the closure of everything for lunch – but there is lunch. Keep an eye on the competition themes for next year and chance your arm. You could win a dragon, drink excellent wine and eat focaccia. What more do you want?

Poetry On The Lake

poetryonthelake@yahoo.co.uk


© 2006 by John Hartley Williams
Used by Poetry Daily with permission.

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