Roman Piazzas: Civic Poetry in a Text by Patrizia Cavalli (Critical Essay‪)‬

Already from the title of her first book, Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo (My poems won't change the world, 1974), Rome-based poet Patrizia Cavalli thematizes her awareness that one cannot expect revolutions from poetry. (1) Counter to the social enthusiasms of her generation, Patrizia Cavalli's writing has always privileged a private, personal, or, better still, an individual dimension. In fact, her entire poetic production could be summarized as a constant and richly modulated self-auscultation on the part of a feminine, lesbian subjectivity at times tormented--even by her self-analysis--at times pleased, more rarely balanced, that conquers the reader by means of the irony, the lightness, the intelligence that pervade the texts. That "io singolare proprio mio" ("my own, really mine, singular I") (2) that Patrizia Cavalli indefatigably deals with is at all effects, or so we are asked to believe, her coeur mis a nu; its beats supply the rhythms to the countless forms embodied by human unhappiness, as well as the sudden, and mostly unexpected, manifestations of joy. As for the latter, they are for the most part ephemeral, just like the luck dispensed in games by the blindfolded goddess, one venerated by Cavalli, a passionate card player. (3)