Giovanna Riccio

            On Tuesday my thumb was still smarting during guitar practice from the little cut it got on Sunday.  I assume it's healing though since it doesn't look worse and because it's the thumb, which is a heavy blood flow appendage.

            I worked on another poem that I'd started the night before, using three older pieces and the technique of using lines that are complete in their meaning but that flow also into the next line. I brought it with me to school in case I had time to work on it there.

            I walked out into a beautiful afternoon and removed my winter gloves to place them in my backpack with the extra scarf that I might need later since the temperature was supposed to drop very fast that night.

            In Koreatown a white guy was crossing the street with some Korean women and when three of them veered right he followed the younger one. She turned to sort of gently push him back and told him that she was going to work and that the others would show him where to go.

            Just past Bathurst there was a bicycle locked to a stand but it had fallen away from it so that it was lying halfway into the bike path. I decided that I had time to stop and prop it back up. A cyclist coming up behind me thanked me but it might have been just for getting out of his way.

            I had planned on leaving home half an hour early so I could renew my french exercise books at the OISE library, but I ended up leaving only fifteen minutes ahead of time. That turned out to be pretty much perfect.

            After OISE I went down Devonshire and then around the back of University College. There were only two students in the classroom, probably because it was such a nice evening. I mostly had time to update my journal before George arrived with a surprise guest, though it wasn’t that much of a surprise to me. Our focus of study that night was Giovanna Riccio’s book, “Strong Bread” and George had brought Giovanna to read for us. When I said to George, “I had a sense you were going to bring Giovanna tonight!” she looked over and saw me then said hello. I greeted her and told her it was good to see her and she said, “Likewise!”

            George announced that it was the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and World Poetry Day. Giovanna added that it was also the International Day of Happiness. I found out when I looked it up later that she was a day late on that one.

            George told us that Giovanna would be reading for twenty minutes just before our break at the halfway mark. She said she didn’t want to torture us for that long. He mentioned her involvement with the Shab-e She’r reading series and also another called “The Not So Nice Italian Girls”, which George said he’s read at and so he must also be a not so nice Italian girl. Giovanna corrected him that the series is called “The Not So Nice Italian Girls (and Friends). I asked if that was anything like The Friends of the Black Panthers.

            George described “Strong Bread” as a very fine feminist unity of various interests and subjects. He asked for a volunteer to read the first poem in the book, “Mondays in Hell”. Giovanna said, “Great reading Christian!” It’s a revisitation of girlhood and the Puritanism and oppression of a Catholic school. It contains a train of metaphors that refer to heat both of hell and lust. It invokes the hijinx of youth outside of the reach of parental probity. The lines: “God’s love? Yes! / We wanted it” are ironic in that god’s love and carnal love are equated. George added that as an African Baptist from Nova Scotia he could confirm that there is not much difference. Giovanna explained that the poem is not based on her own experience but of other girls who had attended Catholic school. I offered that the allusions to hell call to mind the very scary description of hell by the priest in James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.

            The next poem we looked at was “Libby”, for Libby Scheier, who was a prominent feminist Toronto poet of the 80s and 90s. Giovanna writes about having suckled strength from her. There were a couple of words I didn’t know. George laughed when I asked what the “pudendum” was. Giovanna explained that it’s the vagina. Another word was “lupanars”, which were brothels in Pompeii. I think that’s what they were called throughout the Roman Empire. George said the poem reclaims the female genitalia and that the description of a lunar crescent as “that lip of the moon” serves to humanize our satellite. The imagery is welcoming and clear.

            Her poem “Night Shift” adds a dimension of class. The book overall is about strength and makes a space where it’s okay to be an Italian Canadian.

            Her poem “Runaway” is about a woman running from an abusive relationship and it has a social dimension because it is also about survival from being treated as second class because one is either an Italian woman.

            At this point it was time for Giovanna to read. She told us that she was humbled by all of the intelligent comments the class had made in response to each poem. She informed us first of all that “Strong Bread” is not a themed book. She said that she was once part of a collective in which some of the members wanted to be post-ethnic, but she said, “We’re not there yet”. Some immigrants leave their country of birth but they never quite arrive at the new place. She told us that her sister is like that. Of her previously read poem, “Night Shift”, she asked rhetorically, “What is more invisible than someone who works at night?”

            She read her poem, “The Pull of the Tide” which describes her sister’s relationship with her home in conflict with her desire to travel. Giovanna declared that Italians are obsessive cleaners of their homes. She says she liberates her sister in this poem.

            Giovanna’s father was severe and her mother worked in jewellery factories painting bobbles. She brought lots of necklaces home to her daughters until a series of strokes put her out of commission. Giovanna shared with us that she had a difficult relationship with her mother because “she never understood me”.

            Of her poem “Snow Globe”, she pointed out that the publisher made a typo in printing it as “Snow Globes”. The piece is about the death of her mother.

            The idea of “The Not So Nice Italian Girls” reading series came out of the trend of a lot of guys wanting to marry a “nice Italian girl”. There had once been a reading series named “The Nice Italian Girls” but when it was rebooted they decided to change it.

            Before reading her last poem, “Under the Covers” Giovanna explained that she has tweaked it since it was printed and indeed, some of the words were replaced with others. After she went back to her seat, George asserted that “Under the Covers” was a metaphysical poem that calls to mind John Donne.

            We had a fifteen minute break and I had planned on getting Giovanna to sign my copy of her book, but so many people approached her to either buy books or to get theirs signed, while others engaged her in conversation and so there wasn’t time. I instead informed George that he’d gotten his castles mixed up last week. I had found out that Hawthornden Castle in Scotland is not the one owned by Queen’s University as he said, but rather by the publisher of the Paris Review and that the castle owned by the Kingston school is actually Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex. I didn’t remember the names of either castle but someone else looked it up and confirmed that I was right. He appreciated the correction.

            I made an appointment to meet George next Tuesday at 15:15. He said he could spare me half an hour and then he’d go back to reading articles about Donald Trump. I told him that I’d watched an interview with Dave Chapelle, who said that he disagrees with the trend that claims that Donald Trump is good for comedy. He said the fact is that Donald Trump causes a lot of comedians to write the same jokes.

            After the break we looked at Giovanna’s poem “I Imagine Myself As Mrs. Hale”. The word “torte” is not just a cake, but also a legal term. He stated that this is another poem with metaphysical imagery. It’s from the perspective of a young Italian woman engaged to an Anglo Saxon man who takes her to visit his parents in Peterborough. George started making fun of Peterborough. It turns out that Canadian troops ran Italian prisoner of war camps during world war two. In the poem, the father of the woman’s fiancé shows her a bronze plate that was carved for him by an Italian prisoner. I commented that there is an interesting contrast between the prisoner’s plate and the later reference to “ … Ghiberti’s bronze doors / and the chain of figures carved / on the Palazzo di Giustizia in Florence …” because one was made in captivity and the other is the result of a flowering culture. Giovanna pointed out that “Palazzo di Giustizia” means “Palace of Justice”.

            George confirmed that Canada also had interment camps for Italian men both in Petawawa, Ontario and in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Of the Fredericton camp, he informed us that the interns had to live in tents, even in the wintertime. He disclosed that it was Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie, the one that ran the country with séances and by talking to his dead mother through his dog, who approved the internment camps, despite the fact that he was a big “L” Liberal. Up until the war he actually admired Hitler and there are photos of the two together.

            Patrick asked Giovanna about the lines: “feet firm on familiar territory, you / could afford to quote Dante …” She explained that the woman’s fiancé was trying to use an Italian quote to compel her to be detached from the anti-Italian behaviour of his bigoted father.

            George observed that the poem is like a Robert Altman film in how it portrays a surface politeness with a context of hostility.

            The poems of the book work in sequences. For example one poem ends with someone looking down while the next has a character looking upward.

            He mentioned again his wish of putting Tony Blair and George Bush behind bars at The Hague. He insisted that he would be able to testify and the only evidence he would need is the speeches of Jean Chretien.

            We looked at the poem, “Namesake”, which George stressed is about finding one’s voice. He insisted that every poet has to write a poem about finding their voice. He pointed out that there is a tension in the attempt to find one’s Italian voice in English because it also resists English. He stated that the piece is cinematic and also a mini-odyssey. He called us back to the title and presented us with the image of bread rising being a metaphor for the rising consciousness of the poet as a result of returning to her roots. In contrast to the previous poem the protagonist marries herself in Italy rather than an Anglo Saxon guy in the Cawarthas. Of the reference to Queen Giovanna of Naples, our guest inserted proudly that the monarch reigned for thirty-six years. The lines: “the teacher unrolling my “r”s / clipping my name – Joan” led to a long conversation about the forced Anglicization of the names of immigrants. The young woman next to me confirmed that it happened to her. I interjected though that people also do it to themselves and then related how I’d once known a guy from Kenya named Ibrihim who wanted me to call him “Brian”. I said, “Why would I call you Brian if your name is Ibrihim?”

            George brought forward that it was the mini-series, “Roots” that started the trend of Black people taking on African sounding names or of young African American mothers giving such names to their children. He also confessed that he has considered changing his own name but he feels the urge to keep in touch with his familial roots. Giovanna asserted that he was too famous now to change his name. Staying relatively on the same subject he pronounced that the next poet that he would be putting up on the parliamentary website is Saskatchewan poet Stephen Brown who he let us know now lives in Mexico City and that “Stephen Brown” is not his birth name.

            We looked at the poem, “Plastic Arts”, dedicated to Gianna Patriarca, who is also an Italian Canadian poet. The piece begins with a quote from Piet Mondrian’s essay on the plastic arts. The poem is in two parts, with the first a background to the second. The subject is the reputation that Italians have for putting plastic coverings over their furniture. Giovanna revealed that other immigrant groups did the same thing but Italians got stuck with the stereotype. In the last section the question is asked, “What’s it like to grow up / with plastic on the furniture”. The implication here is that the question is a rude and superficial one and the answer is that it’s the same as growing up without it only there’s plastic on the furniture. I argued that it’s an unsatisfying answer since any question could be answered that way.

            There were a lot of comments to this section, but I would add that the class responded more to Giovanna’s book than to any of the others we’ve covered. Perhaps the immigrant experience is close to home for a lot of people.

            George had wanted for us to hear Giovanna’s long poem, “Vittorio”, but we were down to the last few minutes and so he only had time to talk about it a bit. He pronounced that it reminds him of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Wasteland”. Owning words puts one in a higher social class than a landowner. The poem is elegiac.

            The last poem we looked at was “Catalogue 1 – Stuff”. George vouched that it’s epistolary in that it was written in the form of a letter. It contains lines from Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”.

            In conclusion, George told us that “Strong Bread” is a testimonial to survival; it’s epigrammatic, cavalier, metaphysical and imagistic.

            His final statement was, “Immigration is class warfare!”

            I asked Giovanna to sign my copy of her book, and while she was doing so I recounted to her about my trip to Italy back in 1987. She asked how I found the Italians and I related the sad tale of my getting ripped off for my camera and passport. I offered her my theory though that places with a lot of thieves also have a lot of exceptionally generous people, as I can attest to with examples of people in Italy giving me the equivalent of a hundred dollars on more than one occasion without me asking them for anything.

            She told me that she enjoys my music and my morbid sense of humour. I seem to have a reputation for being funny without that being my main intention. What Giovanna wrote in my book was very nice: “To Christian, Thanks for reading, and looking forward to hearing you sing and play. Warmly, Giovanna Riccio, March 21, 2017.”

            The temperature was starting to drop when I left University College, so I was glad that I’d brought along my gloves and my extra scarf.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I needed to get toilet paper and paper towels, and I also stocked up on grapes, tomatoes, avocadoes and mangoes. I would have liked to get orange juice but I hadn’t bothered to keep track of how much everything was going to ring up to so I didn’t know if I would have enough. It turned out that I did but I’d just have to go back for that later.

            I had a late dinner of tomatoes and avocadoes with no dressing with mangoes for dessert while watching an interesting episode of “Leave It To Beaver”. There is a character that has appeared from time to time named Benji, who is younger and more naïve than Beaver and his friends. In this story Beaver and Larry are on a magic kick and they go halfsies on a little coin-switching device from the local magic shop but none of the adults are impressed. When Benji shows up talking to a container full of ants they try the trick on him and totally blow his mind. Then they decide to try a bigger trick on the younger boy. Larry holds a blanket in front of Beaver while Beaver hides in the woodbin. Then he removes the blanket and tells Benji that he’s turned Beaver into a rock. Benji shouts, “Turn him back!” but Larry gets called home. Benji picks up the rock and takes it home then when his mother finds him sleeping with it he insists that it’s Beaver. The next day she takes Benji over to the Cleaver house to prove to Benji that Beaver is not a rock, but Beaver has gone away to spend the weekend with his Aunt Martha. In the end, to allay Benji’s trauma, Beaver’s father has to drive the long distance to bring Beaver back early so as to give Benji peace of mind.

            It reminds me of a story that a cousin of mine recounted about a dirty trick that my mother and her younger sister played on him when they were kids and he was a few years younger. They whitened his older brother’s face with flour in the barn and had him lie very still, then they called my cousin in to say, “Look, your brother is dead!”