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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

I Novissimi: Poetry for the Sixties

— Anthology —

Edited by Alfredo Giuliani
American Edition edited by Luigi Ballerini and Paul Vangelisti
Prose and Notes Translated by David Jacobson
Poetry Translated by Luigi Ballerini, Bradley Dick, Michael Moore, Stephen Sartarelli, and Paul Vangelisti

A Bilingual Edition

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A Sun & Moon title.

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No postwar literature has been as fundamentally and relentlessly experimental as Italian poetry since the mid-1950s. In the forefront of this renewed interest in experimentation were five neo-avant-garde poets called the Novissimi, from the 1961 publication of their anthology of the same name. Their work exploded the aesthetic conventions and tolerances of their contemporaries, fostering wave after wave of innovative poets and fiction writers in Italy and other countries. The five poets of the Novissimi--Nanni Balestrini, Alfredo Giuliani, Elio Pagliarani, Antonio Porta, and Edoardo Sanguineti--shared a definite sense of linguistic crisis, demanding of poetry a life within the critical moment.

This first English language publication of I Novissimi provides, in bi-lingual form, the original poetry and notes with translations, and features a new foreword by Giuliani (as well as his forewords to the 1961 and 1965 Italian editions), recontextualizing the critical debate throughout Europe regarding the impact and significance of this important anthology.