Elsa Morante exclaims, “Patrizia, I’m happy to tell you that you are a poet!” Emerald eyed, long student hair parted to shoulders shaded black, Cavalli has nervously arranged and rearranged her words upon invitation to show them to the esteemed Italian novelist known to run with Alberto Moravia and American translator William Weaver.
“One day she (Morante) stopped short in front of me and said, ‘So you, what do you do?’ I don’t 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.’ 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.” Cavalli, then
working on aesthetics of music dissertation for philosophy degree in Rome, was thankfully believing of Morante’s encouragement. Her first collection, My Poems Won’t Change The World, published in 1974, would prove a playful, soundproof title prefacing reflection on self-aggrandizement in art and life. The conversations Cavalli wished to have were those of authority, judgment, conflict, grief and the pitch of speech when impassioned by eros. She writes minimally, perhaps informed by close study of time signatures, durations and memories of courtyard bells that peal to halting silence; “Don’t count on my imagination,” she warns, “You arrive like this, as always / To spread the suspicion of paradise / And before I open the window / I know you from the gentler light / From the dust that hangs in the air / And when you come in and I surrender my senses / I’m living in unfamiliar houses again and feeling nostalgia / For things that never occurred / And across your labyrinths / You hand the continents and seasons on my back / And I become the wall of shouts and reflections / The platform flight’s take off from / Till the silent eddies of summer.”
Beyond an ear for meter, precise language, she has a keen eye for subtle shifts in light, she returns to corridors of past through fluorescence of present to examine submissions or exaltations. Witnessing another or oneself become a guarantor of hope is as much a lesson in listening as it is in directing aperture. Cavalli candidly says she writes to remember and to be loved, but these self-proclaimed aims, to
me, don’t fully acknowledge the miracles she performs with what is too precious to be destroyed or deferred when left up to the discretion of another. Whether she knows it or not she makes joy her terrain, the joy of a vision, the joy of a rebellion in remaking and unforgetting collective memory, the joy that is inherent to oblique stanzas of liberation. Her poetics and interest in functions of text include years
translating Moliere’s dramas and Shakespeare’s comedies into Italian. “You can’t just ferry the words from one language to another, and you can never search for synonyms, which don’t exist, because every word is unique,” she says. “You even have to imagine the faces of the actors and their voices, an audience applauding. That’s the only way for the work to be open and fruitful, the only way not to wrong them.”
La Cavallina, or the filly, her friends called her. There is a sportive determination with Cavalli’s disposition and oeuvre. One vividly sees and knows her acrobats, her ease and laugh lines through fits of frustration, more so than the furrowed brows of entanglement’s terms.
-Katie Calderon