“Non appaio io”: Photographic Lyricism and Self-Othering in Laura Pugno's Il colore oro

Abstract

Abstract As highlighted by Andrea Cortellessa, Laura Pugno's poetry has its generative sparkle in photographic images. This is particularly relevant in Il colore oro, a poetry collection published in 2007, which sees a collaboration with the artist and photographer Elio Mazzacane. Mazzacane's photographs do not simply function as a complement to the poetic texts, as a sort of illustration of what happens within the collection nor of what the lyric subject sees or envisions, but it provides a parallel series of signifiers that own an intrinsic signifying power. This article will focus on the intermedial dialogue between Mazzacane's photography and Pugno's poetry with the aim to investigate to what extent this dialectical exchange determines the structure of the collection, both at a macrostructural and microstructural level. In particular, it will be shown how this photographic process of subjectification impacts both on the internal organization of the book and on the syntactical patterns that are employed by Pugno and Mazzacane.