The Collected Works, Volume Two: Poetry, Criticism, Selected Translations - Softcover

Emanuel Carnevali

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1955190550 ISBN 13: 9781955190558

Publisher: Sublunary Editions, 2022

Synopsis

Shakespeare sent desperate Hamlet to exhibit his awful brain tangle, puffed him full with the rage of all the storm winds, made him nasty and brutal with as sweet a wench as Ophelia, encouraged him to end it all with a mighty butchery, and you ask whether criticism is the exclusive concern of bald-headed professors or a way to appreciate Mary Robert Rinehart. Criticism is hellfire, death and destruction, war and revolution and all the fun there is in rockets and gas bombs and smoke-screens and camouflage, butchery and a dance macabre of ghosts, of murdered kings and princes gone mad withal, that's what criticism is. William Blake stuttered and stuttered until he went insane, went insane for the sake of showing you how he could stick to it (because his insanity was out of punctilio) and you ask whether rhymed poems are better than free verse ones, and how I like Sara Teasdale. Rimbaud threw it all out in cataracts of gold and emerald and ruby and was done for at twenty and you ask what symbolism is. Symbolism is the sinister will to get out of the filth you live in, that's what it is. —from "The Book of Job Junior"

“His poems will not be constructed, they cannot be. He is wide open! He is black, speckled with flashes. But he is wide, Wide, WIDE open. He is out of doors. He does not look through a window.” —William Carlos Williams

Emanuel Carnevali arrived in New York City in 1914 at the age of 16, knowing English only from pulp novels and scraps of conversation. By 1918, he began to be published widely in magazines like Poetry, The Little Review, and The Dial, and had ingratiated himself with the leading American poets of the day, including William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Lola Ridge, and Max Bodenheim. But Carnevali's early literary success was short-lived, as chronic health issues and his inability to hold steady work forced him to return to Italy in 1921, where he lived in various inns, clinics, and hospitals for the remainder of his life. His only book, A Hurried Man, was published in 1925 by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions, and his Autobiography, edited by Kay Boyle from his extant writings and her correspondence with Carnevali, was published in 1967. This two-volume set brings together for the first time all of Carnevali's published works, as well as a trove of unpublished materials taken from his notebooks, correspondence, and other archives. This collection brings to the fore an unsung modernist, a fearless writer and poet whose frankness and outsider’s vantage designate him as an heir to Walt Whitman.

Volume 2 includes Carnevali's poetry, including many never-before-published pieces, as well as his published criticism, and a selection of his translations of works by Giovanni Papini, Arthur Rimbaud, and others.

Emanuel Carnevali (December 4, 1897–January 11, 1942) was an Italian American writer. His body of work includes poetry, literary criticism, autobiography, and other prose writings. He was a friend and correspondent of many important figures of literary modernism in the United States, including Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Kay Boyle, Lola Ridge, Robert McAlmon, and Ernest Walsh.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sublunary Editions
• Publication date: 2022
• ISBN 10: 1955190550
• ISBN 13: 9781955190558
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 402