Guernica Editions

Antonio D'Alfonso (Editor) and Joseph Pivato

The ten essays included in this volume address the themes of immigration, migration, and history in Pasquale Verdicchio's poetry and scholarship. Giuliana Gardellini, Joseph Pivato, Anna Zampieri Pan, Diego Bastianutti, Carmelo Militano, Leonardo Buonomo, Kenneth Scambray, Laura E. Ruberto, and Antonio D'Alfonso discuss Verdicchio's unconventional forms and contents that reveal the difficulties of being considered a marginalized ethnic voice in North American culture. Not conforming to conventional poetic models, Verdicchio writes poetry that presents itself as a puzzle in which for decades he demonstrates the role that politics, history, and culture play in self-analytical writing. The immigrant (or defined as such by conventional terminology) offers as his central theme a “moving” cultural landscape that he must personally inhabit from the moment he leaves his native home. The ever-changing persona in Verdicchio's texts defies linguistic and literary constraints. Verdicchio challenges the conventional role that nostalgia plays in ethnic poetry and contributes in a daring manner to how view immigrant and post-immigrant studies. Pasquale Verdicchio is one of the few poets today to reposition the post-immigrant identity in our growing pluricultural societies.

According to Pasquale Verdicchio, the task of the poet is to disclose global unconsciousness and to poke at the mechanisms of false probity. And no solution remedies the troubles that ensue. No language can be trusted. No emotion is self-sufficient. No concept totally accurate. Pasquale spreads open the fissure between word and word, between culture and culture.