ENZO MINARELLI – LEGENDARY FIGURE OF POLYPOETRY – IN LONDON APRIL 5
Italian ‘polypoet’ Enzo Minarelli is truly one of the great figures in the history of sound and experimental poetry and, for one evening only he will be performing in London on Saturday April 5th at The Outsiders Gallery at 5 pm. The event as a whole is titled: ‘What’s your Type? art-poetry-music in typing and computing’.
I am so excited that he is in the UK, and also very biased because he has been a great supporter of my own work, where I was experimenting with text on screen and sound, and also The Poetics of Poetry Film. He was the first reviewer to really write about the book, in Italian, for Juliet art journal, and is also featured in The Poetics of Poetry Film itself, as well. And how apposite that Enzo is bringing his work to the UK since, via Marc Zegan’s column, we have been touching on cut-ups and permutational approaches with Peter Wortsman in relation to his book The Laboratory of Time and other cut-up poems.
Then again, who better to fulfill this website’s name than Enzo, who strides out in (and beyond) the footsteps of his countryman, Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. This timely and rare event will be a refreshing and invigorating experience for the jaded art world, since the inspiration behind this particular performance is the 13th-century mystic philosopher and rabbi Abraham Abulafia and his prophetic theory of a linguistic Kabbalah. Entitled ‘Romanzi nelle I’ (Novels into the i) which is an anagram of Enzo’s name, the recital lasts for around forty minutes, and is set to hold your attention until the last exhalation of breath. Whilst Abulafia’s aim was an extreme form of mystic experience in relation to God, here Minarelli is using vocal combinatorial and permutational techniques to, as he puts it, ‘be alert to the performative experience and achieve a deep reflection on language’.
O L’aperta prigione delle vocali / The Open Prison of the Vowels – an image of the score he is performing.
For those of you who would like to learn more about the path that this truly original artist has taken in constructing this complex work, Enzo has forwarded to me a translated and in-depth critical essay on Romanzi nelle I – the sound of the sounds, the word of the words; polypoetical work n.11 for Abraham Abulafia. Here, you will encounter the mind of performer as he wrestles with computation, the ‘clean and righteous’ air of the voice itself and the Kabbalah as a source of inspiration for many years.
As he states: ‘In some parts I follow literally the permutations as written by Abulafia, elsewhere I myself invent them, the only words clearly intelligible are Dio [God], Satan, Romanzi nelle i, and in the last section, where I work on the pair Poet/Prophet, developing almost a paronomasia. All the other language combinations are an endless, infinite field of continuous permutation where one can immediately perceive that there is the triumph of vocality, of the pure sound, the vocal prevalence, the exuberance of the signifier.’
What is so significant is that this feels rather like a form of yoga or sound poetry as meditation. As he relates in the very enlightening YouTube description of his rationale (‘where I am explaining the sense or the hidden sense of the performance’) he assiduously follows a set of precepts or rules. These relate not only to place and approach but also to the body and its resonances, originally a purposeful route to achieving a mystical state and divine connection. Here, being contained and restricted by such an ancient web of ritual, promises conversely a liberation from thought, from pain, from all we needlessly carry. Almost a rebooting of the self, to begin again.
He follows a ‘triadic respiration system’: the first being inspiration, the second holding the breath inside, and thirdly exhaling. There are many other rules he could follow as determined by Abulafia, such as to wear white and to cover your head, but the three he can practically follow (in terms of a private experience) are: to be alone; to be in a place where no one else knows where you are; and to practice this at night. To these he has added his own precepts based on spatial tonality and movement of the head for example, and the poem is based on the power of the five vowels. Each vowel has its own connection to a part of the body, which he focuses on at that point of recitation: A the oesophagus, E the vocal chords, I to the nose, O is the diaphragm, and U to the stomach. He also notes that according to Abulafia the head is to do with fire, breath symbolizes the wind, and the lower part of the body is water; and he says he continually thinks of these elements during the performance, too.
Gallery information.
Minarelli feels like a dedicated follower of Abulafia’s life and work: for example, he has visited the island Comino, just north of Malta, where he died, and has copies of some of his sacred texts, found in a library in Modena. He states that taking this approach to sound poetry is a deliberate way to stimulate a field that has become in Minarelli’s words ‘stagnant for a decade’. It also feels like a sharing of the power of letters, where words, to follow the Kabbalah, are the actual sources of divine energy, through history, from the 13th century and Abulafia to today. Perhaps religious services offer a similar chain, in which we take part, but here a poet is adapting and bringing forward the creative aspect of a philosophical practice and approach to being: the esoteric, alchemical, hypnotic and transformative power of sound and language. Minarelli has a list of quotes which he feels might shed more light on his aims, one of which states: ‘the science of the combination is a music of pure thought, where the alphabet gets the role of musical scale’. In this light, we might think of an experience somewhere between John Cage and Brion Gysin – not on offer every day in London, so go watch and listen to this landmark event.
Enzo Minarelli https://www.enzominarelli.com is an Italian polyypoet and the theorist of the Manifesto of Polypoetry (1987). He has an extensive history of international polypoetry performances and is the editor of numerous records, CDs and DVDs. Minarelli is, also active in the field of linear and visual poetry with several solo gallery exhibitions as well as exhibitions of videopoems and video sound-poetry installations to his credit. He is the publisher of the vinyl series 3ViTre Records, founder of the 3Vitre Archive of Polypoetry which collects verbo-voco-visual materials, and is now permanently archived at Lincoln Center Library in New York City and at the Bologna University in Bologna, Italy. Books of Minarelli’s essays include Vocalità & Poesia, (Reggio Emilia, 1995) and La Voce della Poesia (Udine, 2008). Other publications of note are The Weight of Words (Gallery Aroldo Bonzagni, 2016) a catalogue of visual works 1974-2016, the CDs Fame (Pogus, 2012) and Phonosensitivity (Pogus, 2017), and the DVD/booklet Romanzi nelle i (Recital, 2015). For further reference see Italian cultural critic Renato Barilli’s monograph Enzo Minarelli il Polipoeta (Udine, 2016).
