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Simpatico 283of a central magazine, the increasing affiliations with establishedcultural and academic institutions, and, most tellingly, a theoreticaland practical redirection (Wagstaff 1984:37).The second experimentalist phase avoided explicit politicalengagement to develop more speculative projects with distinctphilosophical roots (existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis,poststructuralism), exploring the conditions of humanconsciousness and action in powerfully indeterminate texts. Therenewed emphasis on textuality was sometimes given a politicalinflection in theoretical statements, particularly by members of thefirst experimentalist phase. In an anthology that surveys Italianpoetry during the 1970s, Porta argued that “the reaffirmation of thelinguistic force of the I resolves the problem of the interactionsbetween poetry and society, between poetry and reality, because thepoetic I is never merely ‘personal’ but, just like the author, is alinguistic-collective event” (Porta 1979:27). In general, however, thepost-1968 experimentalism didn’t resort to the left-wingtheorizations of the neoavantgarde, but rather pursued the“enamored word,” as the title of one important anthology indicates,turning it into a site of uncontrollable polysemy, exposing anddestabilizing the multiple determinations of subjectivity—linguistic,cultural, social (Pontiggia and DiMauro 1978). In doing this, somepoets returned to the formal and thematic innovations ofhermeticism, its oblique means of signification, its penchant forclimactic moments. This is clear in Milo De Angelis’s case: drawingnot merely on hermeticism, but on such other European poets asRené Char and Paul Celan, he pushes modernist fragmentation to anextreme that threatens intelligibility even while proliferatingmeaning.Perhaps a poem by De Angelis, “Lettera da Vignole” (“Letter fromVignole”), can indicate how he at once resembles and differs from theearly Montale. It too issues from a friendship between the poet and awoman engaged in literary activity, although not a Dantista. This isMarta Bertamini, who collaborated with De Angelis on theexperimentalist magazine he founded, niebo (1977–1984), and on atranslation from the Latin (Claudian, The Rape of Proserpine). Vignole isthe Italian town near the Austrian border where she was born.Udimmo la pioggia e quelliche ritornavano: ogni cosanella calma di parlare