My Guest on Jan 6, 2009 at 5PM Lo Galluccio:
With Lo Galluccio it is a "coup de foudre". You're reading something like:
"...Accept kisses of water in light" and there's no help because she's hit
the mark and you wish what she writes again would reveal everything
else. Yet you don't know how much that fight will can be dangerous to you,
really like a boxer until fatal k.o.: Lo, the girl from Boston, hides other
concentric fires which your unbridled imagination already foresaw by certain
words caught in a poem entitled Bloom the River. Words like islands of
introspection, densities, intimates: "Oh sky. Shadows of these days cut
looping my hair against his wall. My profile's smoke." (from Blasphemy).
Pulsating, vibrant, throbbing verses included in a collection of poems called
Hot Rain, published by Singing Bone/Ibbetson Street Press in 2004 that first
emerged from the soul of a woman with multiple qualities of actress, poet,
singer and musician.
Roy Nathanson, already saxophone player in the legendary Lounge Lizards
and then leader of the Jazz Passengers, indeed targeted her through those
poems beginning a fruitful collaboration (she appeared in 1994 on their
In Love) until exordium in 1997 - under her own name - on renowned
Knitting Factory label, she produced the astonishing Being Visited followed
(2003) by a self-release production entitled Spell on You, further nine tracks
of uncommon and burning intensity.
Poetry can be "possession" and Lo seems "possessed by Poetry: strenght,
urgency, fury of written word. She breaks her mirror and you try to gather
some fragment of yourself into them, discovering, little by little, the soul who
those verses of flesh and blood has embodied.
Tortuoses, dramatics and also obscure verses, disseminated by pitfalls and
precipices. Words chosen with care by her, sometimes hard and pointed inside
a sensual and ethereal texture at the same time, modern and antique, part of
the world and yet distant from it, unforeseen, surprising, sounding like an
unusual gesture during a meeting with someone.
Lo Galluccio' s poetry is authentic passion, sincere, true,on the path traced by
Robert Lowell and John Berryman, voices of the "confessional poetry" and as
two symbols of womanly American poetry named Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton
(or the less know - at least in Italy - Diane Di Prima, Diane Wakoski and Denise
Levertov) but also elegant and intriguing like an Antonia S. Byatt's page.
While you're writing about this, her voice has already contaminated you like a
virus, with no help of healing, her mesmerizing voice-presence blending sounds
in your mind evoking different atmospheres between the subliminal jazz of
Ctramsplit, Back Porch or Let Em Think My Wings Iz Broke with obliquity, sinuose
recitatives, transparencies, harshness, melancholy, that you have loved in Rickie
Lee Jones or Patti Smith and maybe in that Lydia Lunch noir's touch but Lo rebuild
"ex novo", shaped to herself , to her own soul, soaked by genuine pathos, splendidly
unveiled in the shadings of These Diamonds Are My Very.
Yes, jazz above all, but also blues and also a charming cover of Sinatra's Fly Me to
the Moon or an unexpected Que Sera Sera, from a groove to the other, giving us
whole herself.
But a simple sigh could be sufficient to her, ever singing - one more time - :
Will you love me like Leda's Swan ? Can you love me like Leda's Swan ?
* Lo has a new memoir out "Sarasota Vll" ( Cervena Barva Press. )