Panick Love was the first book I read by Antonio D’Alfonso, founding publisher of Guernica Editions. This was shortly after Antonio accepted my first collection of poems, Birdheart, for publication—back at the turn of the century. From cover-to-cover and outside-in, Panick Love introduced me to the ‘House of Guernica’, to Antonio the publisher, designer and poet; to qualities of thought that kindled my thinking, and writing that nudged me out of my comfort zone.
A book-length prose poem compromising forty-six unnamed pieces, fifty-three pages in all, Panick Love was first written in French under the title L’amour panique, published by Les Lèvres urbaines in 1987, translated by Antonio himself, and published by Guernica in 1992. The slim volume, its silk-finish matte cover with flaps, also known as French flaps, displays a chic aesthetic with a European edge. And the cover art, A Mythological Scene, by Italian Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522), known for his moody, quirky depictions of mythological subjects, complements the moody text.
Panick Love is a beautifully-designed and produced, compact book that made me prize the compact over the bulky book of poetry, and piqued my awareness of the importance of the cover spread—how it stages an author, the work, and brings a reader in; the back cover no less than the front. The back cover of Panick Love features a black-and-white headshot of a very youthful Antonio—photo credit included, a synopsis of the work, a two-sentence bio note, and cover art credit in small font at the bottom. Clean, minimal, informative. No blurbs. Nowadays blurbs are di rigueur and all the rage. Front, back, and inside. Authors (and/or publishers) want to trumpet praise rather than let the work speak for itself. As a new Guernica author, twenty-two years ago now, Panick Love was a model of uncluttered elegance. Just the essential. A pleasure to hold, behold, and open.
The “long poem” itself is an idiosyncratic homage to the myth of Ulysses—a man abroad, on a journey, in search—rendered in Antonio’s distinctive voice, laying out, early in his oeuvre, personal themes and concerns: the complex texture of plurilinguistic and pluricultural realities (identity): paradox and oxymoron; failure and negation; love and fear; community and singularity; form and style.
Looking back, I now see Panick Love as classic D’Alfonso—an abiding companion to his other books of poetry, fiction, criticism and ideas: among them, The Other Shore, Fabrizio’s Passion, Duologue: On Culture and Identity (with Pasquale Verdicchio), A Friday in August, In Italics, Gambling with Failure, An Irrelevant Man, The Two-Headed Man: Collected Poems 1970-2020, and the many works of translation that intimately connect Antonio to publishers, editors, writers, filmmakers, performers and artists across Canada, and beyond.
What struck me in my early reading of Panick Love was what felt to me like its unruliness, discordance. Juxtapositions of sentences like, “For so long, sickness was synonymous with creativity. The cry, an interstice between two silences.” And “Our eyes do not darken in the clarity of communion; thinking leaps over the vicious circles of fixation.” Juxtapositions that challenged, lines that gave pause for thought: “What is important: our refusal to harden into fossil … The truly free person circumscribes his freedom.” The leaps in the writing, the provocations and restraints. Panic Love felt transgressive, anarchic (there’s reference to Bakunin, “oh dear brother”). At the same time, it felt exciting—a prod to let go of what I considered a poem, or prose poem. Charles Simic has called the prose poem “the result of two contradictory impulses, and therefore it cannot exist, but it does. It is the sole instance of squaring the circle.” The contradictory impulse is thematic in Panick Love. Tensions reverberate and electrify the whole work with a magnetism of opposing charges: “White night”; “sad happiness”; “Never alone and yet totally solitary”; “In which strait-jacket will you feel free?”
Thirty-two of the forty-six segments feature some form of the negative: no, no one, nothing, never. In my early reading of Panick Love, the prevalence of negation in the poem seemed to be a calling out for the opposite—the yes, the someone/anyone, the something, eternal. Even healing. I suppose I was reading into the work my own proclivity for resolution, a homecoming, a happy ending. In fact, there is no resolution in Panick Love. There’s assertion of “unequivocal failure.” In the penultimate segment, “the end is a wall we cannot cross.” And in the final segment, which features the name Penelope twice, for the first time, the author submits an entreaty: “help me find my way out of this labyrinth of panick passion.” Panick is written with a ‘k’, as the Notes relate, “to stress the often forgotten etymological link that exists between fear and the Greek work panikos.” In Panick Love, “fear” and “love” are poles that sizzle each other.
Panick Love introduced me to Antonio’s poetry, a style of writing that was not familiar to me. So different from the poetry I was drawn to—by Louise Glück, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, Charles Simic, and from my own toned-down, lyrical work in Birdheart. And yet Antonio accepted my first manuscript, published the work, and fostered my writing. Already by my second collection, Mask, I was an altered writer, and a more open-minded reader of poetry.
In recent readings of Panick Love, I noticed lines that had not stood out for me in early readings: “To go from I to the other, there is God; the rest is commerce.” “Life is tough when death cannot kill.” “The sheet of paper is atheist, far from any theological inspiration.” There’s darkness in the poem, plenty of it; the admission that “This scatterbrain is tired of the non-poetry of the too-poetic:”—hence the defiance, the pushing against the grain. But there’s incandescence too. And now I saw a spiritual/metaphysical side to the work: “spirit” (three times), “Supreme Being” / “God.” And lyricism, which had not stood out for me in earlier readings: “we will speak the language of water-listening men and women who crawl on ocean beds”; “drops of white blood on the lilac trees”; “the golden coin blazing on the forehead of the world.”
Perhaps I’m reading my own hope into the poem—we do, after all, read with our own sensibilities and proclivities—but in recent rereading of Panick Love I also discerned a nod to the notion of simultaneity: “This baroque movement set on going beyond the straight line and circle. To seize the perspective of a spiral. All, the conglomeration of spirals that at times overlap.” A kind of embrace of antipodal forces: “the temporalness of our state” … “where eternity begins.”
Panick Love challenged me when I first read it twenty-two years ago. It still has provocative power, but I now see its intimate connection to Antonio’s subsequent works, that have deepened into the author’s themes and concerns while not eclipsing the early work. And I’m now heartened by a light note and benignant vision that I failed to see earlier on: “The future of poetry. Images of our dignity.” I can close with this.
—October, 2022
Elana Wolff lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario—the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations. Her poems have recently appeared (or will soon appear) in Arc (Awards of Awesomeness), Bear Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, CV2, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, Montréal Serai, Pinhole Poetry, Prairie Fire, Taddle Creek, The New Quarterly and Waterwheel Review. Her latest poetry collection is Shape Taking (Ekstasis Editions, 2021). Her cross-genre Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in 2023.