THIS KNOT – A NEW VERSION OF DANTE’S COMMEDIA WITH THE POET K

My versioning of Dante’s Commedia is at once highly personal and ‘universal’ in Dante’s visionary sense of ‘la forma universal di questo nodo / the universal shape of this knot’. I trace the knotted threads of my birthplace in Elkhart, Indiana, traditional lands of the Pokégnek Bodéwadmik (Pokagon Potawatomi), My family origins in Volturara Appula (Puglia, Italy), and my experience of young onset Parkinson’s disease.

I approach my version of Dante with procedures, rituals, maps, and other voices, in and out of time. The archive is vast, and it is made of skins of long-dead animals and trees and traces of hands copying, commenting, annotating, redacting, falsifying, digitising.

Just as a fifteenth century folio of the Commedia is described in the British Library catalogue, I begin imperfectly, and I am wanting the desired (not side) effect of translation – or is it my Parkinson’s medication – in the face of degeneration.

The pain lifts when I carry Dante’s words over, a knot with many threads, still attached to the loom.

PUBLICATIONS

‘Circling Dante’, in Firmament, Sublunary Editions magazine, summer 2024

Canto I Inferno with accompanying essay ‘Three Beginnings: Versioning Dante’s Commedia’, Poetry Ireland Review, issue 144 winter 2024

Inferno 4 & 5, Purgatorio 3, Paradiso 3: Still Point, 2025

Inferno 6, Purgatorio 4, Blackbox Manifold, 2025

Inferno 3, Notre Dame Review, forthcoming Fall 2025

2 limited edition (of 40) DIY Pamphlets – Purgatorio 2 (with translation by Nicoletta Asciuto) and Purgatorio 6 (with cover painting by Philip Heubeck).


SUPPORT FROM

  • William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies, University of Notre Dame

  • Society of Authors Strachey Trust Grant to examine the Gladstone Library materials on Dante

  • International Mobility Fund, University of Leeds (returning to the University of Notre Dame and institutions in New York and New Jersey)

  • Awarded full year of sabbatical for academic year 2024-25

  • Practice Research Diaries project (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts and the Brotherton Libraries)