Gabriele Micozzi
Artwork: Gabriele Micozzi
Survey of a Mother Tongue
Survey of a Mother Tongue is a set of three map sheets in which the terrain is language. The first is a relief map: each contour line is one of the names a person is called, from the passport at the foot of the hill to the name used only at home near the summit. The second is a geological section: the languages of one life laid down like strata, English for work at the surface, Italian from school below it, the kitchen dialect deeper still, then first words, then breath. The third is the key, where the usual symbols are given other meanings. I grew up between a dialect and a national language and now work in a third; the sheets are an attempt to survey that ground while it can still be walked.
Gabriele Micozzi is an Italian poet and professor. He teaches communication at LUISS Business School in Rome and works mainly in visual and hybrid forms. His calligram- manifesto Culology appeared in 34thParallel and his visual poem Thermometer for a Fever Called Human in Cathexis Northwest Press; the American journal ballast devoted an issue to six of his experimental texts, and Asymptote published his essay on hybrid form. Other work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cha and Poetry Lab Shanghai. He lives between the Marche, Rome and Milan.