The Maid and the Castle

Ocean liner staffs in the 1960s were the most concentrated and serious population of poets in the world.

The last time Della Worthy cleaned a house in Newark, New Jersey was February 13th, 1966. She aimed to clean a house on February 14th as well, but when she arrived that morning at Mr. Delmore Williams’ Vailsburg Victorian she didn’t clean a thing. The door was unlocked and the lights were on, as usual, but the house was quiet, eerie. Della called out, “Mr. Williams?” But the moment the words left her mouth she knew there would be no reply. She found him hanging in the garage. She was alone with him, and he was no longer there. She heard herself say, “Mr. Williams has hanged himself.” Then she ran from the house.

The intervening days are lost to history,¹ but somehow after seeing the corpse of Mr. Williams on the 14th she got a job cleaning rooms on the ocean liner Cristoforo Colombo and boarded in New York five days later. The next day the ship was in Boston and from there headed across the Atlantic to Málaga on the Spanish Costa del Sol, which it reached on February 26th; Naples and Palermo on February 28th; Messina, March 1st; Piraeus, March 2nd; Venice, March 4th; and finally Trieste on March 4th. The return trip added Lisbon and replaced Boston with Halifax. She worked seven trips on the Cristoforo Colombo before disembarking at Trieste for the final time on June 9th. She never again saw New Jersey.

Della had gone to school and learned to read and write, but her real education began the first night on the ocean liner. By day she cleaned first class and cabin class rooms. At night she was inducted into the sorority of ocean liner women. Ocean liner staffs in the 1960s were the most concentrated and serious population of poets in the world, but the staff of the Cristoforo Colombo—Italians, Americans, and Argentines—was uniquely talented even in that golden age of literary seafarers. Staff culture centered around the Berardelli sisters, Dominga and Giovannina, poetesses from San Mango d'Aquino who wrote long poems and comedic dialogues in the dialect of Catanzaro and translated poems from the English and German, and a pair of Argentines, María Esther Prieto and Nélida Villalba, masters of poesia del transatlantico, a formal poetic style that emerged on the post-war ocean liners and disappeared with the triumph of the airplane.² The structure of poesia del transatlantico poems resembles the movement of a swimmer in the water of a swimming pool on the deck of a ship in a storm, if that water were suddenly frozen and the swimmer left flailing, half above the ice and half below, unaware of the coming wave whose size and violence will destroy the ship and make senseless the concepts “floating” and “sinking”.

Dominga Berardelli took Della in her care. As they cleaned rooms together, Dominga taught Della Italian and the history of poetry. Della took to the language and the poetry with the speed and ferocity of one who has nothing else than what she is learning, for indeed, she had nothing else. And on her fourth voyage she composed her first and only transatlantico poem,³ an evocation of the room where Mr. Delmore Williams killed himself and the futility of suicide, in which New Jersey is the sea and the Atlantic ocean is an endless pasture and death is defeated by the pasture’s infinitude.

When Della quit the ship on June 7th in Trieste she was known to staff on a dozen ocean liners as la poeta nera and had the addresses of poets in two dozen cities and three continents. Dominga wrote letters to prepare the way for her tour of the Republic of Letters.

But she never took the tour. The coming wave arrived. The frozen swimmer drowned with the ship. “Sinking” and “floating” sank into senselessness. On her first night in Trieste, Della met and fell in love with the poet Armado Gregori.

She found Gregori that night engaged in his favorite after-dark hobby: throwing rocks at Libreria Antiquaria Umberto Saba. She had never seen a man so handsome and reckless, and when he explained why he was throwing rocks at that storied bookstore and the eternal poetic struggle between stone and soul, he won her heart. They wandered through the night with a bottle of Pelinkovac and recited the poems of D'Annunzio and Villalba until dawn.

To understand Armado Gregori you have to understand the history of the poets of Italy, Austria, and Slovenia, of whom he is the most talented and misbehaving heir. There is no time now for a history lesson! To put it simply, he believed in poetry, violence, lovemaking, and geology. As he wrote at the close of Litični pesniški manifest, “Poets must understand their internal lives geologically. Our eternal struggle is against psychology. The struggle must be conducted with poems and with arms, on behalf of lithic truth. Friends beneath; enemies above.”

After a week of drinking, poetry, broken windows, and fistfights in Trieste, Carletto Cerne put a price on their heads, so they hit the road. Armado brought her to the Karst Plateau, where she took up sketching and writing page-length single-stanza poems with triskaidekasyllabic lines.⁴ And then to Brunnenburg Castle.

If Della’s education began on the ship, it was consummated in Brunnenburg Castle. Ezra Pound⁵ threw books at her feet: Ernest Fenollosa, histories of currencies and banks, Provençal troubadours, Confucius, Anthologia Planudea, Chaucer, and the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson. She and Armado moved into the castle. They floated from room to room, buoyed by Pound’s incessant barking lectures. The form of Della’s poems shrank to a single stanza of twelve heptasyllabic lines. The poems built on each other like strata of rock and sediment. They told the history of the Americas as the story of man’s encounter at birth with solidity after the liquid home of the womb; and the heroism of William Brown and Bernardo O'Higgins, the great Irishmen of Latin America; and how every word uttered at sea condenses to a single point in the center of the Atlantic ocean, where it is heard and transcribed by the transatlantico poets; and why the Decline of the West is a matter not of war or art or demographics or politics or confusion, but instead of weights and measures; and how the poems of the future would reveal themselves in the ruins of castles yet unbuilt. Della shrank like her poems. She read but did not eat. When Pound died she was so tiny as to be nearly transparent. She traveled again to the Karst Plateau and disappeared into the stones. Armado remained hidden away in the castle. He read and copied her poems. The piles of copies grew, stacked upon the good stone, each block cut smooth and well fitting, until his room was filled with them, and the earth welcomed him, and he fell to the earth, and he became one with the stone. And so the lintel of the room’s door was marked with the last line of Della’s last poem: Atone atone, rest, atone.

1. The best I can reconstruct, she returned home and told no one what she saw in the garage. She packed her few belongings into a suitcase and took a bus to New York City, where she stayed with a cousin. Every human community is a conjecture concerning the nature of the human and the nature of the good, but this reconstruction does not rise to the level even of a conjecture.

2. The only surviving anthology, Transatlantico!, was compiled by Rafael “Bastardo” Olivetti and published in 1964 by Edizioni PPB, a publisher in Trieste, defunct soon thereafter, that was called in jest by local poets “Edizioni Poesia Presumibilmente Bella”. Copies can be consulted in the usual Italian and Argentine private libraries, with which we presume readers of the BRB are familiar. (If you are not familiar, call on Lautaro Ramiro Aguirre in Ciudad Oculta, Buenos Aires. Address him in Venetian and bring a gift.)

3. Never anthologized but widely mimeographed. I keep my copy under lock and key!

4. Some of the poems and sketches she mailed to the Berardelli sisters and to María Esther Prieto. The sketches are untrained but uncanny. The exposed limestone of the plateau, as she drew it, seems to consider itself in the mirror and find itself fitting. The poems address an unnamed “desirable woman” who teaches her daughters how to slaughter lambs and calves that are not lambs and calves in a village that is not a village on the side of a mountain that is New Jersey if New Jersey were not New Jersey but instead a mountain. María Esther committed the poems to memory and never wrote a poem of her own again, though she lived to 93 and had many grandchildren and great grandchildren and was called at her funeral, “our mother, the poetess.”

5. “Pound è il poeta che si è posto con più rigore e quasi con ‘assoluta sfacciataggine’ di fronte alla catastrofe della cultura occidentale.”