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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.

The Position of Things: Collected Poems 1961-1992

Adriano Spatola

Translated from the Italian by Paul Vangelisti, Edited with an Afterword by Beppe Cavatorta

A Bilingual Edition

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Adriano Spatola (1941–1988) was one of the most important poets of the Italian neo-avant-garde. And yet, his poetic oeuvre has remained in only small and often out-of-print editions both in Italy and abroad, the result of his (as critic Beppe Cavatorta notes) “uncompromising belief in his own poetic project and of being a true ‘renaissance poet,’ one extremely difficult to label: a visual poet, a sound poet, a concrete poet, a linear poet, editor of innovative magazines, a refined critic and translator, organizer of historical poetry happenings… and founder of his ‘republics of poetry.’”

Paul Vangelisti, rethinking most of the previously published translations, has gathered together all of Spatola’s poetry—with the exception of the very first chapbook, in which the “impetus toward neo-avant-garde experimentation… had not yet been metabolized.” This collection, of 67 poems from seven books and three unpublished works, brilliantly reveals not only the poet’s great talent but his social sensibility, his aesthetic, and his political engagement.