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"Luigi Serafini is an Italian graphic artist famous for his unusual and obscure works such as the Codex Seraphinianus. Born in Rome in 1949, Serafini began his career as an architect before creating the Codex Seraphinianus; he also authored the Pulcinellopedia Piccola. Serafini has also worked with the media of industrial design, film, and theater, and has also written stories for Italian magazines." (Luigi Serafini's Wikipedia entry, in full.)
The "Codex Seraphinianus" has been published in a new edition by Rizzoli. The book first appeared in the 1970s, a phantasmagoria of strange images and the artist's own made-up language, and has since created a reputation as "the most mysterious book in the world." The website Dangerous Minds has posted an interview with Rizzoli's Charles Meyers, who confirms that the author is still very much alive with homes in Rome and Milan. He also confirms that Luigi Seraphini is "absolutely a real person and he speaks very good English," and that he is still drawing his mysterious images.
Seraphini (his website is currently a blank page, whether by artful intent or mythic accident) contributed new drawings and text in the new edition, as well as a DeCodex, in which he states that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the book in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and “wrote."
"Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy"
(Thomas Lux)
For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentlessly they fall
into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long
and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown—but
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,
a reward for not loving
the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,
rats) creatures, if
you believe these things, then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.
And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors
and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up
again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld
of your socks, and that even—
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams—
they may tell the others
in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s
that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.
"Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy" by Thomas Lux appears in New and Selected Poems 1975-1995. Lux lives in Atlanta, a town that knows a thing or two about hot-rainy-weather spiders and other crawly things. He is the Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Lux also directs the Poetry at Tech program. In a recent interview he downplayed the idea of surrealism apparent in his work, but commented that "Sometimes there are lucky accidents though I think they’re more likely to happen if one has sweat a little blood." His recent collections are Child Made of Sand (2012) and God Particles (2008).
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