{"id":160791,"date":"2022-08-05T10:57:12","date_gmt":"2022-08-05T14:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=160791"},"modified":"2022-08-29T10:03:11","modified_gmt":"2022-08-29T14:03:11","slug":"if-kim-novak-were-to-die-a-conversation-with-patrizia-cavalli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/08\/05\/if-kim-novak-were-to-die-a-conversation-with-patrizia-cavalli\/","title":{"rendered":"If Kim Novak Were to Die: A Conversation with Patrizia Cavalli"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Patrizia Cavalli. Photograph by Mario Martone.<\/p><\/div>\n

I first met Patrizia Cavalli in 2018, in her apartment near Campo de\u2019 Fiori, where we drank tea with honey and talked from early afternoon until sunset. Every surface was covered with books, papers, notebooks, scissors, and scarves, and each bore the same handwritten note, a warning to visitors: \u201cDo not move! If you move anything, I\u2019ll kill you.\u201d Over the course of two years, we had three more conversations, speaking for five hours at a stretch. The apartment had been her home for decades: in the late sixties, as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, she rented a single room there; she had just left Todi, the town in Umbria where she grew up, and in Rome she felt unmoored and lonely. In 1969, through a mutual friend, she met the writer Elsa Morante, who was then working on her novel<\/em> History. Morante was the first person to look at Cavalli\u2019s poems, and after reading them, she called to say, \u201cPatrizia, I\u2019m happy to tell you that you are a poet.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

More than fifty years later, Cavalli\u2019s poems are translated and loved across Europe and the United States. Her first collection,\u00a0<\/em>My Poems Won\u2019t Change the World (1974), signaled the forthrightness and disregard for authority that would characterize all her work. Cavalli examines the causes and conditions of pleasure and pain, and the moments in life, often imperceptible at the time, that herald change. Her work explores infatuation, boredom, deception, conflict, grief\u2014all in a poetic voice whose nonchalance belies its artistry.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Cavalli died in June, it felt as though all of Rome wanted to pay tribute. A beautiful ceremony took place at the Campidoglio, where flowers were piled upon flowers. Her admirers and friends crowded the stairwell, and the room where her body lay in state. Cavalli might have criticized the extravagant floral arrangements, but she would have been moved by the words her loved ones chose to speak\u2014some of them her own.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did you start writing poems?<\/p>\n

PATRIZIA CAVALLI<\/p>\n

My first poems were written for Kim Novak, in the fifth grade, after I saw the film Picnic<\/em>. At one point, Novak is coming down the stairs, blond and beautiful, clapping her hands in time to the music that\u2019s playing, and William Holden is watching her, fascinated, and he leaves the other woman to dance with her. I fell in love, went home, fasted for a week in protest because I\u2019d never be able to know Kim Novak\u2014and after the fast I wrote two poems. I found them recently while going through some old notebooks. One is titled \u201cIf Kim Novak were to die.\u201d \u201cWhere are those black clothes of mine?\u201d I wrote. \u201cWhere is the grief that shows on the outside? It\u2019s not there? Well, doesn\u2019t matter. I\u2019ll have precocious grief in this deep heart of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is what I\u2019ve always done in my poems\u2014they begin from something physical. I am sustained by eros when I write. Now, with this illness\u2014this cancer that was diagnosed in 2015\u2014it\u2019s as if I\u2019ve lost the memory of certain passionate feelings. But I haven\u2019t lost my ear. I can hear when a word isn\u2019t the exact word. Poetry is about being precise. The word must surprise you even in its necessity, as if you were hearing it for the first time. You should never slide into habits of speech, because there\u2019s nothing more beautiful, more startling, than language. \u201cThinking about you \/ might let me forget you, my love.\u201d This couplet, it glides into the air\u2014do you hear it? Poetry knows how to glide into the air.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So you\u2019ve been writing since the fifties. Were you difficult as a child? Your book of essays, Con passi giapponesi<\/em> (With Japanese steps), is a portrait of your mother and her sadness.<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

My mother was in a state of despair, but for her own reasons. She\u2019d chase me around the house with the rug beater; she\u2019d wait behind a door to surprise me with a beating. But I\u2019ve always done whatever I wanted\u2014I\u2019ve never asked anyone for permission. I wanted to get sick, to contract pneumonia or something else serious, so that my mother would feel it was her fault. I tried everything\u2014I\u2019d go into a freezing cave when I was hot, or stand out in the rain to drench myself. But my health withstood every assault, so I could never avenge myself against her that way.<\/p>\n

As an adolescent, I\u2019d go and get drunk in the countryside, and we\u2019d have to be taken home all passed out, me and my girlfriends\u2014I was always corrupting them. We\u2019d drink gin because I\u2019d read that Billie Holiday drank gin. I was living a dissolute life, truly dissolute. I\u2019d ask truck drivers for rides, or challenge them to a game of morra<\/em>. And I\u2019d always win. I\u2019d win chocolates or sweets, and then they\u2019d drive me back home in their trucks.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Did you never feel that you were in danger?<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

Nothing ever happened to me. The truck drivers behaved perfectly, they were kind\u2014in those days, at least. None of them tried to lay so much as a hand on me. They must have been stunned to see a fifteen-year-old girl asking for a ride to the service station at two in the morning. It was like a dare. Maybe I was just so strange that I brought out some timidity in them.<\/p>\n

Those who did try something with me were all people of a different sort\u2014lawyers, my piano teacher, family friends. It was fun sometimes, I liked the perversion of the unfamiliar. It was a kind of power, and I enjoyed exercising that power. I lived in Ancona for two years because of my father\u2019s job, and there\u2014it was incredible\u2014every man tried to touch me. It\u2019s not that I was shocked, but I did think less of them. I was never the victim. I was too full of myself to stand for being the victim.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

And you never fell in love with a man back then?<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

You could see it from a mile away, my predilection for women. Except for one time, when I got a bit of a crush on my neighbor, a beautiful boy\u2014we\u2019d become friends in a way that was almost erotic. But no, I never fell in love. Mine was also a moral decision. I couldn\u2019t stand being the one who had to submit. I couldn\u2019t stand being told, Well, but he\u2019s the man\u2014in the sense that he was freer than me, stronger than me. I would go crazy. I could never have stayed one step behind, been less important than a man. I\u2019ve made love with so many women who\u2019ve been disappointed by their men. And I used every experience of falling in love, every one of my body\u2019s sensations, to write my poems. I don\u2019t have a soul, I have only feelings and words.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Have you always written in the same way?<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

Of course not. For a while, until I left Todi in the sixties, I thought that writing poetry meant changing words a little. I invented words, truncated them and made them mysterious, and I wrote things that meant nothing, absolutely nothing. I was unhappy, even in my writing\u2014I was fake. But I never stopped writing.<\/p>\n

Then one day I announced that I was going to Rome, and I went, to a rented room near Termini Station. I didn\u2019t know anyone, didn\u2019t have a watch, couldn\u2019t get my bearings. I\u2019d stand on the sidewalk with one hand in my pocket and I wouldn\u2019t ask anyone for directions because I didn\u2019t want to seem like a tourist. Every month I\u2019d spend all the money I had right away because I was always taking taxis, so then I\u2019d have to go back to Todi. All I had was this group of gay American friends, who were elegant and sophisticated. I\u2019d go out with them at night. I was the only woman, and I spoke very little English. I\u2019d ask, So, where are the lesbians? They found me funny. Really, I was depressed and alone.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You once said, \u201cElsa Morante pulled me out of my unhappiness and made me a poet.\u201d<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

In 1969, Elsa Morante had just published The World Saved by Kids<\/em>. Pier Paolo Pasolini called it \u201ca political manifesto written with the grace of a fable, with humor, with joy.\u201d Once I\u2019d read that book, I was certain that I was like her\u2014but I was just a conformist, still stuck in 1968, while she was already past that, and impatient with my platitudes. In Rome, I finally met her, thanks to a friend of mine who introduced us. But I was too proud, and I arrived late, just as she was leaving. Still, she said, Telephone me if you want. I was a snob then\u2014I pretended I was cool when I wasn\u2019t, pretended I had money though I didn\u2019t\u2014but I did telephone her. I can say with certainty that that\u2019s where everything began for me. I met all my dearest friends thanks to her\u2014critics, editors, historians, actors, artists, set designers. A whole bunch of us would go out to lunch in a pub, some humble, unpretentious spot\u2014this was when she was writing History<\/em>, so her head was deep in that world\u2014and she was the queen of those lunches. Almost always she\u2019d pay for everyone. Then we\u2019d go have a gelato somewhere. We spoke properly, were careful not to use words that annoyed her. We\u2019d be together from twelve thirty on the dot until four or four thirty, when we\u2019d walk her to her front door, and she\u2019d sit down to write until late into the night.<\/p>\n

She was thirty-five years older, but she always treated me as an equal. I took care at first not to mention that I wrote poems\u2014I knew how difficult she could be, how quick to scorn and exclude. For her, poetry was the ultimate, the most important art form. I knew that what I\u2019d written up to that point would have horrified her. I imagined she would say, Aren\u2019t you embarrassed? But one day she stopped short in front of me and said, So you, what do you do? I don\u2019t know how it came to me, this wicked, impulsive idea to say, I write poems. She gave me a sadistic look and said, Oh yes? Well, let me read them\u2014not because I\u2019m interested from a literary standpoint, I just want to see what you\u2019re made of.<\/p>\n

It was hell. After that, I went into hiding. I shut myself in at home to rewrite\u2014that is, to write\u2014my poems. It was a kind of spiritual exercise, and the wonderful thing\u2014no, the miraculous thing\u2014is that from this quasi-fraud emerged the truth of my lines. After six months, I brought to the restaurant a little folder of thirty poems, all short. Then I went home. Half an hour later, the phone rang and it was her. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever again in my life been so glad. I had been accepted\u2014no one could kick me out. Now I was a poet. Everything that happened after that seemed natural. Writing, publishing, the reviews\u2014nothing mattered more than the recognition from Elsa Morante. She was the one who chose the title of my collection, My Poems Won\u2019t Change the World<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We argued a lot over the years of our friendship. Actually, we argued right up until the end of her life. By the end, it had become very painful. And then I abandoned her. I can\u2019t say I have any regrets\u2014being with her had become impossible. But that was the crucial meeting of my life.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve published six collections of poetry, but you\u2019ve also translated Shakespeare, Moli\u00e8re, Oscar Wilde. What does the work of translation mean to you?<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve translated The Tempest<\/em>, A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, Othello<\/em>, and Twelfth Night<\/em>. I sought to understand the voices Shakespeare wanted to give his characters. I listened to them, imagined them. I tried always to produce living translations, ready for the stage. It\u2019s like verbal gymnastics. You can\u2019t just ferry the words from one language to another, and you can never search for synonyms, which don\u2019t exist, because every word is unique\u2014every word wants to mean exactly that. You even have to imagine the faces of the actors and their voices, an audience applauding, the box office revenue you\u2019ll rake in. That\u2019s the only way for the work to be open and fruitful, the only way for me to speak directly to Shakespeare, to Moli\u00e8re, the only way not to wrong them.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You often personify what you write about. One of the brilliant, labyrinthine essays in Con passi giapponesi<\/em> is titled \u201cHeadache.\u201d Like Joan Didion, who also wrote beautifully on the subject, you treat this painful invader of the head as a companion.<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

My headache was almost always preceded by euphoria, and then it would crash into me brutally. When I got the aura, I\u2019d collapse into a visionary state. First comes that uncontrollable happiness\u2014you feel the universe, the continents, the seasons, infancy. I\u2019d start singing in the street. It was irresistible. I wasn\u2019t even embarrassed. I\u2019d start singing operas that didn\u2019t exist \u2026 then I\u2019d get emotional, and I\u2019d cry. Maybe it was a kind of lunacy, a primal passion. And then, all of a sudden, boom! As if I\u2019d been struck in the head, that ecstatic experience would become pain, pain, pain. It was a confluence that made me levitate, until it passed and I felt at peace. Then it felt as if there were two of me, because it seemed impossible to have borne such intense pain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But now he won\u2019t come back, and I miss him. I get bored. The headache was an extraordinary thing\u2014like love, when it lands and shatters everything\u2014and as I said, when it comes to writing, I\u2019m always moved by some ecstatic form of adoration, or contempt, or hate. By something corporeal that possesses me\u2014desire, or a headache. It seems to me, now that I have neither, that I\u2019ve grown duller, dazed, that I don\u2019t feel anything anymore.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You have described this moment as a kind of poetic crisis.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

Writing poems is strange, like being dragged toward something that, before, didn\u2019t exist, that you hadn\u2019t conceived of. Inspiration, for me, was a mode of transport toward a vision that was dictated to me. Now, well, no one\u2019s dictating. I don\u2019t feel the wave. Once in a while you can conceive of some poems mentally, but it\u2019s no good. Especially if you have no memory. There must be an immediate memory, while you\u2019re writing. Writing i<\/em>s a memory, a word-for-word memory. The cancer has caused so many changes in mood and such physical weakness. There are moments when I forget my own feelings. I can only repeat the old ones, like something I know, more or less.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always written to be loved, but now what? I haven\u2019t been writing beautiful poems. I wake myself up at night, I think of something, and transcribe it. Then I go back to reread what I\u2019ve written, and I think, Are you stupid? Right now, I feel far from poetry. And if I reread my shortest poems, well, I tell myself, often they\u2019re bullshit. So as a result, all I do is self-cannibalize. I take these millions of manuscripts I have and recopy them in nice handwriting. Since they\u2019re also fairly old and I\u2019ve forgotten about them, this gives me a kind of pleasure\u2014discovering that I wrote that thing.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You are also famous for your fantastic dinners, which delight and terrorize your friends.<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

Yes, I love\u2014and in this love, too, there is eros\u2014making dinner for my friends. Even now, when I tire so easily. Setting the table with the most beautiful tablecloth, marvelous glasses, flowers arranged just so. My friends are terrified because they know that if they bring wine, the wine has to be only the best. The flowers have to smell good, and not everyone knows how to choose flowers. And not all the guests will be wearing a nice scent\u2014for me, smell is the most developed of my senses, the one that is the source of the most pain. I buy cheese in only one place, marrons glac\u00e9s in another, breadsticks in another. My dinners are a work of seduction. There was a time when everything came very easily, even souffl\u00e9s. You know how hard it is to prepare the perfect tomato sauce, to make the perfect spaghetti in tomato sauce? But what I like most is a messy table, after dinner, with the remnants of the meal, the half-empty glasses, the stains on the tablecloth, the crumbs, the pitchers of water, the chairs out of place. I\u2019ll take pictures of the scene.<\/p>\n

I need this continuous mise-en-sc\u00e8ne. I used to love climbing onto the table to tap dance. I need to perform, to be on the stage, to let my comic side come out, to use my whole body. The voice, the words, the body. The truth is, I wish I had a kind of entourage with me at all times, someone to compliment me, someone else to compliment me again, someone to touch me lovingly. And I\u2019d read a poem, sing a song, fall in love, have fun, let myself be coddled. This is the life that I like and that gives me that bit of happiness I need to write poems.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Although you said that to write poems is to be dragged toward something that previously didn\u2019t exist. A kind of miracle, something beyond the body.<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like that, and it\u2019s also like being dragged toward precision. There are many ways to write poems. The shortest ones are like shards that have broken off from a larger whole. Poetry is the collision of intention and chance. Something needs to fit into something else, but without overwhelming it, in such a way that it seems that everything has to be like this\u2014that the first time you open your mouth, this is the breath that comes out. If you can manage to stay just at the point when the words resonate, where they arrange themselves into a whole that is obvious, necessary, and surprising\u2014then what\u2019s happened is a manmade miracle.<\/p>\n

But when I open some book of poetry and my eyes slide along as if over a mirror, and they don\u2019t stop on any word, they keep moving because the words are insignificant and hinder every emotion and you don\u2019t know why they\u2019re there, then I feel as if I\u2019m sliding into a black pool, and I have to close the book right away. And I can never remember who wrote those lines.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When do you write? How do you write?<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

I write wherever, at whatever hour, with a pen. Usually, I write on sheets of paper. My house is full of papers, my drawers are overflowing. I\u2019d need a secretary to organize everything.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Geoffrey Brock has written that you \u201crevitalize the traditional techniques.\u201d What\u2019s your technique?<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t say that I have a technique. I\u2019m open to anything so long as the poem sounds a certain way, so long as it resembles an unexpected reality. The sound of a word, which is not an empty sound, produces a wave that has its own duration. I have no preconceptions, nor do I have any preformed forms. I don\u2019t try to make a sonnet. The rhymes have to be almost inadvertent, casual. The most important principle is to leave the words their liberty, as if they were animals on a soft, flexible leash.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Who are your poetic models?<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

Contemporary poets, unfortunately, don\u2019t come to mind. What can I do if there\u2019s no one I admire? Maybe it\u2019s a form of rivalry or envy. When you read the real poets, the words come at you, they open themselves up rather than close themselves down. This happens to me with Dante, with Cavalcanti, with Leopardi, with Emily Dickinson, with Sandro Penna. I learn them by heart, they keep me company. I\u2019m walking down the street, or around my house, and at a certain point they come to my rescue. With them, it\u2019s never just the beginning of a poem, it\u2019s more like the beginning of a concerto. I set the poems of Emily Dickinson to music, and when I read them the music comes to me along with the sound of the words. My nature is theatrical, and my poems are inseparable from my voice and from my way of saying them. I don\u2019t recite poems, I say them. Or I sing them.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What is your definition of poetry?<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

I studied Greek as well as Latin meter\u2014I have it in my ear. It\u2019s a natural, musical rhythm that has guided me, always. I wouldn\u2019t be able to start writing a poem if I didn\u2019t immediately hear something that sounds\u2014call it a regular rhythm, or stress, the eruption of a line that already has its own form.<\/p>\n

But many of the short poems I\u2019ve written are like stories in verse. Rarely could you say of me that I\u2019m a lyric poet. There are some poems that are like songs, but those are few. In my poems, there\u2019s always some visible, solid matter. This is lightened and rendered more delicate by the language, by the rhymes, by the assonances, by how the lines move, how long they are, all things that are natural, and that are also born before the thought\u2014that the thought is chasing after. The idea reveals itself, it inheres in the words that brought it along. It never precedes them.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There is also the familiar furniture of your poetics\u2014the chairs, the pillows, the lamps, the kitchen tiles, the basket of dirty laundry, the brush.<\/p>\n

CAVALLI<\/p>\n

I love objects, it\u2019s true. In fact, if I think about my death, I almost\u2014almost\u2014feel sadder about the objects than about the people. My eyes will never again rest on that<\/em> armchair with that<\/em> fabric. I\u2019ll miss the beauty of vases, of books, of photo albums, of little wooden chairs. I love to listen to music on my record players. I love to look at my piano even when I\u2019m not playing it. No one can move my things, no one can borrow my books.<\/p>\n

But against the serenity, against the lightness of these domestic objects, there\u2019s always this contrast, the unpredictability of the body and the environment\u2014it\u2019s a double movement. Right now, this one bathroom at the top of the stairs torments me. It made me fall one night. There\u2019s a feeling inside objects, but above all they contain the memory of feelings\u2014these paper lampshades, these notebooks with their white pages, on which I may never again write.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated from the Italian by Miranda Popkey.<\/em> Introduction translated by Oriana Ullman.<\/em><\/p>\n

Annalena\u00a0Benini\u00a0is an Italian journalist, columnist, and author. She has been writing about books and culture for the daily newspaper<\/em>\u00a0Il Foglio\u00a0since 2001, and currently edits its monthly magazine.<\/em>\u00a0I<\/em>n 2021, she received the Premio Viareggio Repaci for journalism.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read Patrizia Cavalli\u2019s poetry<\/a> in the archive. In 2013, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published an English-language anthology of her poetry, <\/em>My Poems Won\u2019t Change the World<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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