Mario
Petrucci: poetteacherperformerscientistecologistwarpoet
by Roger Humes
Perhaps
the title of this article, taken from Petrucci’s web
site, says it best: in a period of time where people
seem to be more and more channeled into the niche of one little
area
of expertise Mario is perhaps as close we have to a 21st Century
Renaissance Man.
A visit to Petrucci’s web site (http://mariopetrucci.port5.com/)
shows that the title of this article is merely scratching the
surface
of the man. He is, among other things, a songwriter and
BBC 3’s first ever “poet in residence”:
Mario's biography is complex, to say
the least. He
was originally a Natural Sciences graduate and moved into freelance
writing after a stint at teaching, a PhD in optoelectronics
at UCL, organic farming / goat-herding in Ireland, and a further
BA in Environmental Studies at Middlesex University.
Currently Royal Literary Fund
Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, his poetry performances
attract
international recognition
(for example, with the British Council).
He now works as an educator and creative writing
tutor for all ages, and as a radio/tv broadcaster. As a long-standing
member of Blue Nose Poets and co-founder of writers
inc.,
Mario teaches widely in schools.
Mario is also a songwriter and librettist/lyricist
and has become a regular Arvon tutor.
The collaborative performance poetry
group he co-founded, recently swept the board in terms of awards
and
has been running
voice training seminars and acclaimed performances across the
country.
Mario has published five books of poetry: Shrapnel
and Sheets,
Bosco, The Stamina of Sheep, Heavy Water and Half Life. Lepidoptera is a hybrid book of long poetry and short prose. Flowers
of Sulphur is to be published in 2005. Mario
is currently working on two further collections, one entitled
Monte Cassino.
In 2003, Mario became the Poetry Book
Society's first pamphlet selector (joined by Sian Hughes) and
was elected to
chair the Advisory Fellowship. He also won the Essex
Book Award for Best Fiction Publication (2000-2002) with his
illustrated collection The Stamina of Sheep the unique result
of an innovative public and educational arts project for Have
ring, the Thames and Essex.
Perhaps
it is because of this diverse background that Petrucci is able
to do what few other poets can do: write poems that are
political in nature that not only work (few others sadly do)
but are of a timeless nature that will allow their power and
vibrancy to stand long past the events they observe.
This
is because he never forgets the human element of which he writes,
that at the base of all historical and political events are
the micro-historical accounts of the individuals affected. Their
confrontations with said events tell us the true stories, painted
often on canvases of anguish as in his poem Olya:
Little woman the nurses called her –
for the way she brought a lifetime’s grace
to a child’s demeanour, how
when she
danced she hardly parted those feet –
her small weight so subtle from ball
to arch, heels barely lifting for each
quick surge she sent up her spine to
fountain arms and sprinkle fingers.
Later she began to move like that doe
they filmed returning from the Reactor:
skinny and slowed into some other,
parallel time. I’d quarter fruit and she’d
refuse it. Near the end she drew nothing
but ballerinas. Beamed at visitors who
befriended her for articles and art
then never came back. Her sister says –
Two angels took her. One each hand.
I prefer facts to moon dust. And yet
the intern shakes a methodical head, insists
that with her spine completely rotten
still the impossible happened. In that
long
black sleep before she stopped – before
the machine’s insolent bleep – those
wasted toes stirred. Practised steps.
Taken
from his collection Heavy Water this poem tells more of the face of the events of Chernobyl
than any newspaper or magazine article or historical treatise
ever would. Perhaps within the faces of the characters
his poems “paint” in Heavy Water and it companion volume Half
Life we
to better understand such events.
However,
this is, like everything else involved with Petrucci, is merely
only one aspect of his poetry. Another is his concept
of spatial
form in poetry:
… spatial form helps us to examine, closely, one of the poem's
most mysterious and fascinating moments: that moment we turn
the page onto a poem, and recognise it as a poem. At that instant,
we haven't yet started to read. We haven't broached the poem's
linear sequence of words. Our typewriter-carriage brain is
not yet enabled. The poem hovers there, as an aggregation of
geometrical lines and symbols set against white canvas. Before
it can flare into comprehension, it must first present itself
to us (albeit instantaneously) as a primal, patterned bulk
on the chalky cave-wall of the page. In fact, most poems (unlike
the majority of prose) are mostly the blank of canvas or wall.
This is the instant in which we see the poem as a whole - as
a 'Gestalt'. It is a crucial moment, because it can frame how
we take the poem in. It's a bit like love/ hate at first sight;
or the way some people make a powerful first impression on
us. It colours, for us, everything they subsequently do. (Part
of a talk first delivered by Petrucci at the 'Words by
the Water' Cumbrian Literature Festival, March 2004.)
The development
of the concept of spatial poetry is further seen in “LiterARTure” which
Petrucci refers to as “principles of visual art embedded
in the text and its creation - or - literature/text contextualising
and framing an artefact.”
LiterARTure is
exemplified by his work as Poet
in Residence for the Imperial War Museum with the development
of such concepts as “Search and Create”, a poetry
hunt aimed at awakening the eye of the observer:
Too many attempts
at visualisation of poetry fail because the artist becomes
more concerned with the form rather the word. When observing
such works from Petrucci is apparent that he never loses the
site of the fact that the base for such work is still the word. It
would be interesting to see what he could develop with his
LiterARTure if he was to collaborate Julian Rothenstein, a
true master of exploring the form of the letter and word.
Still another aspect
to Petrucci’s poetry is the concern for the sound as
well the content and physical form, as exemplified by his work
as BBC 3’s “poet in residence” where
he has performed several times for Listen Up.
By performing his
poetry live he shows the recognition of the fact that one of
the roots of poetry is the oral performance. Too often
poets forget that the sound of the words is not to be discounted
and is an integral part of the poem. When one reads such
poems as The Crystal Set aloud it is apparent that Petrucci has
a great love for this aspect of poetry:
One matchbox. One sixpenny
crystal. One pancake coil
for coarse tuning. No
battery. A fortnight's
torture while the earphone's
mustard stopper dallied in the post.
The soldering iron sent up its
tiny smoke signals. Then
I slid a thruppenny bit
by bit across that coil
in a brass on lead eclipse
to reel in the Radetzky March -
those cymbal-happy ranks of
sound far-off behind static
that could pass as Time.
Blue Danubes trickled
behind watersheds of hiss.
All summer they looped those
same few Strausses over and
over - that champagne of
waltz and polka going
flat as I watched (with
one ear pressed) the shadow
of our apple tree sundial the lawn
until shadow began to dissolve
into dusk. Which only made
the Strauss grow firmer.
Closer. As if that music
were the very first to enter
a garden. As though some fresh-
created body of water were being
brought home wave upon wave
like an ocean to its shell.
The language of
these verse roll lovingly from the tongue, adding yet another
dimension to the man’s work. The power of his verse
is increased by this love for the sound, connecting his poetry
to the roots of the form. If one also takes into account
his work with music one could assume he would have been quite
comfortable in another time period in role of a troubadour.
This article has
touched upon only three aspects of Mario Petrucci as a poet,
all illustrating points of why he is one of the most interesting
and best poets of our times. Time does not permit me
to delve into his roles as lecturer, tutor, songwriter, etc.,
let alone that of a scientist. Petrucci already at this
stage of his life would be the fascinating subject of a biography.
In closing his
work is perhaps best summed up by the Rainer
Maria Rilke quote from The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge that
Petrucci cited in his essay “Are
Great Poets Dead?”:
For the sake of a single verse, one must
see many cities... one must know the animals... feel how the
birds fly
and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in
the morning... But one must also have been beside the
dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open
window and the fitful noises. And still it is not yet
enough to have memories... Not till they have turned
to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no
longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not till then can
it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse
arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
The works of Mario Petrucci
truly “turns to blood” within reader, illustrating
that poetry is alive and well in such capable hands as his.
