The Wind is a Clown in Your Closet: Selected Poems of Venice Written at the Pensione Accademia, 2018-2024
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback: March 2024.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
246 pages, with a hardback cover reproducing a watercolor image by Sandro Chia, an introduction by the author, an Italian translation by Benedicta Froelich, 12 mixed media works by Sandro Chia, and biographical notes about the author and the artist with a black and white photographs of the writer and the artist by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
8.5 x 6 x 1 in., 300 copies, printed, sewn and bound in Savignano sul Panaro, Italy.
ISBN-10: 1-893207-59-5.
ISBN-13: 978-1-89-320759-2.
Published by Edizioni Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, Italy: 2025.

RETAIL PRICE: $75.00 (includes postage and handling)

[…] Each and every one of the poems in this selection was written in the portion of the hotel located before the fireplace in the Pensione Accademia in Dorsoduro, Venice, at least the ones excerpted from the last five volumes of the sixteen books of poetry containing, in part, poems written in and about Venice. The five volumes being What is the Tongue If Not a Piece of Driftwood? Poems of Venice and Japan, 2018-2019; Only the Shadows Remain: Poems of Venice and Japan, 2019-2020; Cold Child: Poems, 2021-2022; Where the Moon Favors the Sea and the Mountains Favor the Gods: Poems of Venice and Japan, 2022-2023; The Leaves Fall and We Fail with Little Difference: Poems of Paris, Auvers-sur-Oise, Aix-en-Provence, Venice, Japan, 2023-2024, which I have subdivided, for convenience’s sake, into five sections. Parenthetically, it cannot be lost on the reader that most of the other poems in these books were written either in Japan, or at another hotel very close to my heart, the Hotel Continental in Saigon, Vietnam. Needless to say, I’m waiting with bated breath for the opportunity to publish, as well, all of the poems written in Japan in a single volume […]

[…] Sandro Chia’s extraordinary drawings function analogically almost as sideshows – which part of the circus I personally always favored over the three rings at the center of the extravaganza. Think of the sword swallowers and fire-eaters at one end of the spectrum and the trapeze artists and tightrope walkers at the other end – perfect analogues or tropes for the aforementioned bridge linking reality to a working dialectic. The poems, too, rarely move beyond sideshow entertainment, never being shorter than twelve lines, comprised of three four-line stanzas, invoking the antiquated (anti-postmodern) idea of the beginning, middle and end of a story. And, more often than not, full of sound and fury and being recounted by an idiot, whether Dostoevsky or Faulkner’s, which just happens to be your author, a juggler of words or a harlequin at best […]

[…] “Both Adorno and Scholem blamed Berolt Brecht’s ‘disastrous influence’ (Scholem) for Walter Benjamin’s clearly undialectic usage of Marxian categories and his determined break with all metaphysics; and the trouble was that Benjamin, usually quite inclined to compromise albeit mostly unnecessary ones, knew and maintained that his friendship with Brecht constituted an absolute limit not only to docility but even to diplomacy, for ‘my agreeing with Brecht’s production is one of the most important and more strategic points in my entire position.’

“In Brecht he found a poet of rare intellectual powers and, almost as important for him at the time, someone on the Left who, despite all talk about dialectics, was no more of a dialectical thinker than he was, but whose intelligence was uncommonly close to reality. With Brecht he could practice what Brecht himself called ‘crude thinking’ (das plumpe Denken): ‘The main thing is to learn how to think crudely. Crude thinking, that is the thinking of the great,’ said Brecht, and Benjamin added by way of elucidation: ‘There are many people whose idea of a dialectician is a lover of subtleties… Crude thoughts, on the contrary, should be part and parcel of dialectical thinking, because they are nothing but the referral of theory to practice…a thought must be crude to come into its own in action.’ Well, what attracted Benjamin to crude thinking was probably not so much a referral to practice as to reality, and to him this reality manifested itself most directly in the proverbs and idioms of everyday language.”

[…] So, now we have the despicable legacy of such developments, crude poetry, which is not at all afraid to communicate the brutal realities of this disenfranchised world of the weak, the unnecessary, and even the dialectically unthinking. What could be more expressive of Adorno’s negative dialectics than these circus performers and performances (in the figure of our author and his poems here) obtaining in the Pensione Accademia and in these drawings by the ringmaster, Sandro Chia, in the context of the ultimate circus maximus of his vision of the world that has obtained for the last half century? Sideshow entertainers, one and all. And in the audience, in the parlor before the fireplace: Brecht and Benjamin, Pasolini and Brodsky” […]