Donato Mancini
Biography
Toronto-born, Hamilton-raised, and Vancouver-resident Donato Mancini is a writer, visual artist and polymath whose individual and/or collaborative works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Cuba, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. He has written extensively about music and contributed more than 600 articles to www.allclassical.com from 2001 to 2004. His poetry has been published in such magazines as Matrix, Broken Pencil, Vallum, Grain, W, Rampike, and Queen Street Quarterly. Mancini has published eight chapbooks; his first full-length book is Ligatures (New Star 2005).
Poet's Note
I first executed “Ligature”—ostensible title poem of my first book of visuals, procedures, and extrapolations—in 1999, directly sparked by my local rediscovery of James Joyce’s “portmanteau” words, and the even more local discovery that I find coinage a particularly fruitful poetic activity. I assigned the first group of my own late-’98-freestyle portmanteaus to an unrelated piece, “Constellation N.Praxis,” here electronically realised but originally drawn by hand. “Constellation N.Praxis” was an attempt to fuse the mopey and bedoomed sensibility of my then very James-Wright-influenced lyrics with the more visual thinkerly and formal imaginativity of visual poetry and of certain Fluxus-related text-art. Soon afterwards the concept metastasised into what became “Ligature,” growing from momentary gimmickry of the isolated double one-worder into a kind of linguistic mycelium. The process I mistook at the time for an alchemy produced a poem that I also (proudly) mistook as illegible. Each of the eight times or so I revisited, revised, rewrote, re-executed (40 hours + each time) what became “Ligature,” the rules became more stringent. I required myself to (1) make it more legible, (2) reduce the labour of the writer—who was no longer “Donato Mancini, poet” but now clearly “the writer”—to something like the digging of a ditch in increasingly frozen ground. “Ligature” shouldn’t be mistaken for so-called “constraint-based” writing, which implies by name that the rules of play are gaming obstacles to what the writer is trying to do. In “Ligature” the writer is trying to do no more or less than what’s being done: there’s no metatextual aim, such as telling a story or creating a pattern. The only artsy aspect of the process, I think, was in the pre-production decision-making. The writing itself was brute procedure. It’s labour lost to boot: the banality of the alphabetic device, and linearity of its use in Ligature, means that the poem retains few marks of that effort, and so it can’t easily be redeemed at the company store. (Arguably, of course, “cheat” phrases like “monicagate agateware” are signs of strain in the poem and are therefore signs of effort/work.) I did think as I wrote it about boring-to-execute, unchosen works like Cage’s “Music of Changes” but thought just as much about the talk of fingers-to-the-bone hard work required of Poets Who Mean It that I so often heard whilst eavesdropping on Uvic’s creative wriggling department. Teachers’ one-liners on hard work were, no doubt, pedagogical war-tactics to wipe out arrogant, adolescent lazinesses in the better students and to thereby help them get on with serious writing. In the less-better students, however, it seemed to naturalise a correlation between an abstracted idea of hard work and the even more abstract idea of quality. Many seemed to reach the conclusion that the literary workman’s sedentary toil imparts “quality” to poems, like energy to rechargeable batteries. By extrapolation, “Ligature” should be jam-packed with quality, because “Ligature” is not virtuosity, not eloquence, not mean machine: it’s heavy dictionary-lifting. The sparky quality it’s so full of comes from the language itself, not from my expert performance.
Sample Work
"Ligature" (at Eclipse)
External Link
Test Recording
24 August 2006
Jesse Huisken (Coming Soon)
Donato Mancini (29:37, 28.5 MB, info.)
Question and answer session (14:56, 14.4 MB, info. Apologies for the air conditioner. It was hot.)