Both works required a different set of skills. GC: There is an enchantment in the writing of both. Which one did you find easier to write, the novel or the libretto? The possibilities, like the experience of marrying into a new culture, are enchanting. The audience can then interact with the work and take it to a different dimension and self-meaning. It is called a libretto to separate it from our traditional notion of novel and to allow the form to fuse with performance art and incidental music. I began to think of octaves in music and saw the “urban opera” as a new sub-form in literature, capable of replications by others. The evolution was quite beautiful, and I saw the work now as an “opera rusticana,” for the people, of the people, by the people. I brought the characters to the fore, gave them dimension, added “chorus,” and saw that a two-dimensional piece of literature could be given so much more dimension. It meant stripping the original work down to its bare bones and reconstructing it as a multi-dimensional piece. The next step became a kinetic re-working of what was to become Il Vagabondo: An Urban Opera. At the end of the conversation, Michael pulled me aside and, having looked at the frescos said to the effect, “It is all well and good to speak from an idea but you need to get something written down.” I was able to share my vision of the preferred future for the performance of the work and not a soul in the room threw tomatoes at the artistic idea. This led me to conversations with Michael Mirolla at Guernica and he helped create a meeting with a few good people to generate ideas on funding/sponsorship. On one occasion, he brought an old libretto for me to look at that helped me understand the fusion of self, character, scene, music, and setting in a raw form. He was so gracious in sharing his journey. I designed a series of “frescos” to speak from, considered who the target audience might be, and had several coffees with a baritone opera star on the Canadian scene. The mediate step was to see Polenta performed as an urban opera by a professional troupe. At the time of writing that piece I listened to a lot of hard bop and free jazz as well. ![]() I grew up listening to classical music, and both of my parents loved opera. From there, I began to think about dimension in literature, of performance art, of “the garage door as a threshold of stage,” how so many of our narratives are operatic and installations for how we live. The form allowed me to explore deeper relationship aspects of narrative and experience, and there lay the gem of Polenta. ![]() The form of acts, scenes, intermissions, curtain calls and surtitles created a beautiful frame and the book practically wrote itself over three months. At the third week mark of writing, it dawned on me that all life is an opera rusticana, and that living is a dialect of love. The basic theme was this notion of a Canadian man marrying into a south-central Italian-Canadian family and slowly becoming immersed into a completely new cultural experience. GC: When I started writing Polenta, I had not conceived of the form. Can you tell us about how you arrived at the idea for this project and how it relates to the form of the work? But it is also installation art, an “urban opera.” You’re asking the reader to enter the opera and become a participant. Il Vagabondo is a libretto based on your novel Polenta at Midnight. Anna van Valkenburg interviewed Glenn Carley for Accenti. Written in libretto form meant to be read as operatic recitative in a style called sing/speak, the book also brings a unique perspective to the Italian-Canadian immigrant experience. ![]() In his new book, Il Vagabondo: An Urban Opera (Guernica 2021), Glenn Carley introduces a new avant-garde genre – literature as installation art.
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