Background to DANTESSERAE<\/p>\n
David Annwn: This sequence is \u2018illusion. Artifice \/ as world and vice-\/versa\u2019. As usual, I don\u2019t want to make too much sense or imply a rational overall structure because so much here is fragmentary, composed of snippets, dreams and fleeting intuition. It takes a cue from links between Dante\u2019s late period and his viewing of various mosaics in St Vitale and other churches in Ravenna. Most of the mosaics of Ravenna were made of glass tesserae but, at the outset, I imagine the disparate sections of my sequence as resembling coloured stones suspended in space in the kind of buildings designed by Gaudi and Piranesi.
\nThese poetic sections are jagged and uneven, seemingly random in arrangement, perhaps rather like disjecta or misfits taken from different mosaics or Steve Simpson\u2019s accompanying shard-like paintings. As with other after- or fore-images of experience, they are culled from various times and places and don\u2019t add up. At first glance, they might then seem a jumbled mass, yet there are many underlying and intricate connections between them, such as references to the export of violence to other lands, the musician, Nicola Conte\u2019s, mention of Bari being the final destination of Crusaders on the Via Francigena pilgrim-route before they embarked for \u2018the Holy Land\u2019 and Cacciaguida, Dante\u2019s great-great grandfather\u2019s, \u2018noble\u2019 Crusader status. Fashion and power, both in mosaics and elsewhere, are foregrounded, for example in Christ\u2019s purple robe, Hugo Boss\u2019s creation of fascist uniforms, Alessandra Mussolini\u2019s cashmere and Alessandro Michele\u2019s show for Gucci Cruise at Alycamps, (a location mentioned in the Commedia) which is juxtaposed here with the characters, Dante and Virgil\u2019s entry into the City of Dis, a scene also shown in Howard Munson\u2019s stills and film of this section.<\/p>\n
Some sections also contain games of lexical chance: the picking out of the near-anagram of \u2018Ante Alight\u2019 in Dante\u2019s name, the punning on \u2018andante\u2019 and a slip into an incredulous chaos of particles in \u2018the of and to a in for is on s\u2019 after the CEO of the Italian munitions firm, RMW\u2019s shockingly complacent response to the carnage caused by their bombs. Language here registers its own ruptures, insufficiency and splintering.<\/p>\n
In the Paradiso, Dante, the narrator, imaginatively leaves our planet. We are not told how this earthling re-adjusts to his life after days in the Heavens of Venus and Mars, yet we are all and each, individually, visitors to Terra. Our memories make each of us time-travellers and the Inferno is mostly made up of memory. Steve Simpson\u2019s paintings reveal contemporary and different ways of seeing, an unconditional love for the homeless realised in the shelter of the crypt of St George\u2019s in Leeds.<\/p>\n
Robert Duncan wrote that we all stand \u2018Before the war\u2019, as in the sense of \u2018preceding\u2019 but also \u2018in the presence of\u2019 that entity. As my sequence moves towards its last section, words are left hanging like scattered tokens. There is a struggle between \u2018I\u2019 and \u2018we\u2019 or \u2018our\u2019 (Dante\u2019s \u2018nostra vita\u2019): my life or our lives. Can love, in \u2018earthing\u2019 us, remind us we are set \u2018before \/the light\u2019?<\/p>\n
David Annwn<\/strong>\u00a0 is a poet, playwright, critic, and authority on the phantasmagoria lantern show. He has read as part of the online \u2018Wales to Bay Poetry\u2019 series and been interviewed by Peter Spafford on Chapel FM. Recent publications include\u00a0Re-Envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror 1896-1934<\/em>\u00a0(2018, University of Wales Press),\u00a0Red Bank<\/em>\u00a0(2018, Knives Forks & Spoons) and\u00a0Resonance Field<\/em>\u00a0(2020, Aquifer), which includes images from his collaborations with the master-calligrapher Thomas Ingmire and innovative film-maker Howard Munson. In 2016, his collaborations with Ingmire were the subject of an exhibition at the California Book Club, San Francisco. Jeremy Norman has called their book Palimpsest<\/em> (2019) \u2018the perfect embodiment of themes found within\u2019 his work on the \u2018history of information.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n His poetry also appears in\u00a0The Edge of Necessary<\/em>, an Anthology of Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2018<\/em> (2018. Boiled String and Aquifer) and in the\u00a0Blackbox Manifold 25 \u2013 \u2018Experiments from Wales\u2019, online anthology (2021<\/a>) where John Goodby writes of \u2018the variousness and versatility of\u2019 Annwn\u2019s \u2018styles, continuing: \u2018more than any other poet in this anthology David has a mastery of different genres and modes (concrete \/ typographical, discursive, lyrical, neomodernist paratactic, etc.) and the ability to switch between them in the course of a single poem.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Background to DANTESSERAE David Annwn: This sequence is \u2018illusion. Artifice \/ as world and vice-\/versa\u2019. As usual, I don\u2019t want to make too much sense or imply a rational overall structure because so much here is fragmentary, composed of snippets, dreams and fleeting intuition. It takes a cue from links between Dante\u2019s late period and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[63,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/images-2.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1Kx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6729"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7515,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729\/revisions\/7515"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Click here to go back to:\u00a0Contributors and Links to Pages 1 – 4<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"