A Collage of Impressions, curated by George Elliott Clarke
Among Toronto’s cold, glistening skyscrapers, Corrado Paina (1954-2024) was a transplanted Vesuvius, fuming damning smoke and flame upon everyone content with the insipidly provincial in Canuck commerce and culture. He was arrestingly contradictory; a booster of trade between Canada and his native Italy, and yet also an urbane citizen favouring the communal life of walkable neighbourhoods. A paragon of cosmopolitanism, he was charismatically expressive, presenting explosive colours in his paintings and drafting startling contrasts in his poetry, all to engage the irresolvable tensions between post-modernism and nostalgia, Renaissance heritage and multicultural fiesta. An iconic intellectual, Corrado Paina is perfectly unforgettable. Read on to understand why.
***
Printer, Painter, Publisher, Poet
by Deborah Barnett
Corrado Paina brought a unique perspective to my pursuit of art print publishing. He always appreciated my letterpress expertise and my view that letterpress would not be replaced by digital output print, though we enjoyed musing on how the two could each take their place in current and future print.
Corrado encouraged the merging of creative and business points of view, a poetic use of language, and ecstasy in all artistic expression. He and Luciano Iacobelli, Albert Moritz, Beatriz Hausner and I talked for years about how to bring this new thinking into play with traditional print, and in 2022, Corrado suggested the title of Someone Editions’ new publication series, the French Letter Society.
As this series draws together poetry and visual art in close collaborative connection with one another, I thank Corrado for his brilliant vision, his words and literary finesse, his sensitivity to visual harmonies, his support of artists everywhere, and his joy in the shared creative process.
Thank you to Corrado for welcoming me into the community of thought and art surrounding him, for being my creative collaborator, and I am proud to say, my valued friend.
Radical Civilizer
by George Elliott Clarke
On June 12, 2019, I agreed to join poets Corrado Paina and Madeline Bassnett as their interlocutor at a cancer survivors’ session which transpired at Instituto Italiano di Cultura, in Toronto. The invitation was a terrific honour; I’d share in Corrado’s august and robust art-making-as-life-enhancing.
I played MC with affable aplomb. I was the man-in-the-middle, comfy in my swivel chair, while Madeline and Corrado recited poetry detailing their shuttling between home and hospital as well as between optimism and depression. Our audience filled every seat and was Standing-Room-Only in attention.
I’d read beforehand the poetry of Madeline and Corrado, but I couldn’t see them as persons who were defying death – via chemotherapy and/or radiation – for they were savvy, witty, and sartorially splendid speakers. They both exuded so much panache, i.e., were so vividly alive, they did not seem to be imperilled mortals, but gracious, erudite, and formidable artistes.
Corrado and I were never bosom pals. No, we were allies. I could see in him someone who knew that Renaissance aspirations and aesthetics are always (also) socially revolutionary. I respected him – and I felt loved to be respected in return. He was a radical who made civilization itself feel more civilized.
Surrealism was his palette; socialism was his poetic. He is deathless wherever art is true.
The Poet of the Possible
by Beatriz Hausner
Everything about Corrado Paina spoke of possibility (read: love and generosity), and elegance (read: grace and depth). The two fused themselves perfectly in him, and manifested themselves in all that he pursued, expressed and gave of himself in the brief two years I had the good fortune of collaborating with him. He belonged to that rarest of categories: he was an aristocrat of the mind. By this I mean to say that true connoisseurship of art, of literature, and of music combined themselves with an openness to everything. Corrado’s ability to lead cultural projects as easily as he would commercial and political situations are legendary. What stays with me is his humanity. Also, his exceptional capacity for imagining (and often bring to fruition) grand things. No doubt this quality found its energy in the fact that he was truly a poet. By “poet” I mean a person who is constantly inventing the world, creating, making. Vicente Huidobro, the Cubist poet proclaimed “el poeta es un pequeño dios.” Poesis, in its purest form, is creation. Corrado created worlds, and for that I am the richer, and more grateful for our paths having crossed.
Corrado
by Robert Marra
The dust of Burri’s creta settled across your hair, was in your head
you were stained with Titian’s Venetian red
Caravaggio’s yellow ochre, with Azurite!
seeping through your clothes, their chroma penetrated your skin
membrane blood and bone… an affliction
enraptured pilgrimages to pictured rooms
you became more soiled, a worsened condition after each sojourn
incurable, ecstatic you transformed anew irrupting into vibrant colors
contagious you infected everyone, everything you touched
what else could you do? (always generous)
You walked crowded Roman streets (Pasolini’s Rome)
Giacometti figures hastening about their day going somewhere going nowhere
renderings of a shoeless Saint loomed then materialized (feet blackened by the earth)
Cimitero Acattolico, archaic walls white slabs smudged with Gramsci’s ashes
echoes of your youthful body once charged, possessed!
thoughts vying contro shadowed reminiscence…ignis fatuus
your uneasy dreams ignited your restless search for sacred chords
book stores libraries record bins symphonies Birdland street corners!
Toronto, became your prudent mistress (too prudent) Oh Canada
a new theater bordering vast wilderness, some say a noble solitude
expansive skies infinite opaque waters and swaddling green, synthesis
you found love made love created love were loved
you became poetry
For a moment magical Havana awoke and seduced you
not the Cuba of Hemingway
instead, the sweaty one that gave birth to Blanco and Arenas
the placenta still lying bloody on the burning sand
bewitched by sun fire you could not resist and were set aflame, deflowered
You, sturdy bedrock of Da Orsenigo’s arches
rising high above your head crowning you, amore Milano
across the Apennine and oceans Italia stretched out her arms, embracing you
honoring you as you honored her, Madre
Corrado
After we lost Lucio you called me weeping and said that we had become orphans, we wept
I will find you again in the places we have always met
the laughter inspired exchanges endearing insults preserved
I will find you where there is no distance or time, without borders
where there are no orphans
Corrado
Our Last Meeting: A Lasting Memory
by Albert F. Moritz
I was last with Corrado at his home on Mansfield Avenue late in his illness. We were discussing several poems in his wonderful, selected collection, Changing Residence. While we talked, Corrado was moving toward dying. I refused this knowledge because I wanted him to get better. We were in his beautiful, art-laden, slightly disheveled front room, alone, talking poetry, and he began to cough. Deborah came in from an errand, with the dog, and as conversation continued, Corrado coughed more and more violently. His concern for me – and for being a good host –became so great, he urgently excused himself, i.e., ushered me out, swearing to have me back when he could talk better. The time never came. In a couple more weeks, he’d died.
I’d go to meet Corrado at the Bar Diplomatico on College, and there he’d be, leaning back in his seat – really, sitting on the nape of his neck – elegant, always stylish, with his face of an experienced, lean Renaissance prince, his eyes vaunting a Shakespearean sparkle. As he was dying and we could rarely see him, he sent his friends a cornucopia of poems, stories, art works by himself and others, letters of great charm. Beside me sits a small cloth book he made me – his design, his art, his sewing – in Italian, with the English title on the front: A Toast to Illness.
One of the stories he sent around told how, after I visited him in Toronto General Hospital – an occasion during which we talked loudly and frankly about poetry and being poets, he was approached by patients and staff members who had overheard. They were intrigued and delighted, and he – immediately and for the next few days – before his release home, became their instructor and leader in poetry in the halls and at the bedsides. Recalling this event to me in his home, that last time, i.e., his telling me this, made him laugh contentedly. He is permanently this poet.
Brother by Choice
by Gianna Patriarca
Some people come into your life for reasons you may never know, but once they
have entered your orbit you know they’ve altered the direction of your journey.
My 40-year friendship with Corrado was both an erupting volcano and an August
sunset. Both extremes of beauty and storm that argue, inspire and challenge. He
shared his curiosity, his intellect and passion for art with such generosity I had
never experienced before. Our Italian/Canadian immigrant identity was in no way
the same, but we had in common much that came from that experience of pain,
loss, abandonment and a deep love of poetry that was born of the soul. His love
for friends, family, life, was real as was his distaste for things he understood to be
false. I have no brothers by birth but in Corrado I had one I loved. By choice.
Fratello
by Gianna Patriarca
we belonged to the last century
the one that attempted to understand
our anger our love for everything
we listened to the beat inside
freed the mangled words in exile
lunged them like stones and roses
into the days of our mortality
while pushing beauty like a drug
to save ourselves each other
the world
we were young a little naive
like our century but awake
wrestling with paper and ink
clashing with ideas and dreams
you painted life with words and brushes
drenched in the red of your blood
this season will have less colour
without you so will this century
Poet in Soulful Clothes
by Giovanna Riccio
A soulful poet, visual artist and visionary of community cultural projects, Corrado Paina often sported a “soul patch,” that slight strip of hair worn below the lower lip, also dubbed a “jazz dab.” Being partial to that look, I noticed his at our first meeting in 2009 at a literary event hosted by the Italian Cultural Institute. Handsome and debonair, his fine features, lean physique and elegant Italian suit exuded urbanity. In introducing Denis de Klerck of Mansfield Press, Corrado mused on Visconti’s film, Rocco and his Brothers, thus introducing me to his synthetic mind, wide-ranging pursuits and daunting knowledge. All featured regularly in Corrado’s unexpected, rambling emails – stream-of-consciousness poetic tracts evoking place, weaving various artists, writers and all manner of operatic personalities into novel contemplations on ideas and society.
Keeping company with fellow poets, I encountered him in various situations: at Dooney’s, at the exhibit he organized for his good friend and gifted artist, Sandro Martini, or at the recording of the CD Rewriting cities, Rewriting self, which he initiated and executed. Our final meetings occurred at The Italian Chamber of Commerce where he was executive director and where he flawlessly merged business and art. And how could it have been otherwise? His supercharged heart orbited art as it beamed vital energy.
Recently, while enjoying pizza lunches at the “Camera,” a group of us organized an evening of remembrance for a few recently deceased poets. On full display, Corrado’s cordial generosity and jazzy brio occasioned ongoing feelings of loss, gratitude, and longing. Persons of his cultural breadth, community spirit and vision – so rare and sorely necessary – leave a void that memory rounds to legacy: concrete, inspirational and aspirational…an opening echoing Camus’ insistence that the artist gives the void its colours.
You are everywhere (where are you?)
by Deborah Verginella
You are everywhere (where are you?)
“I am a simple man,” you told me.
“Love, you are far from simple, you are baroque.”
You upended my snapshot of the Italian man, smashed my notions of generosity, sliced through stereotypes of erudition, offered yourself to the world fearlessly, loved me body and soul.
You are everywhere (where are you?)
There, in the fine English teacups (from Value Village, antique stores); there in the paintings and sculptures that fill every corner (from friends, Indigenous street artists, local Cubans); you are in the books, the thousands of books that you fell hard for (decorated spines, fragile paper, handmade, antique); you are there, in your closets (shoes, ascots, bow ties, suspenders, scarves, fine leather gloves). You are a semiotician of stuff, all meaning, signs as wonder.
You are everywhere (where are you?)
There you are, the traveler (never tourist), pieces of you in Havana, in Matanzas, Milano, Coney Island, Hamilton; DNA fluttering from your body and leaving a trail of you (at galleries, flea markets, cinemas, cafés). You open cities with the precision of the oyster shucker (taxi drivers become lifelong pen-pals, chambermaids are beneficiaries of objects too big to carry home, artists become collaborators).
You are everywhere (where are you?)
There, on the sofa (battered from kids, dogs, Chinese takeaway, illness), cellphone unholstered (at the ready), computer keys on fire (two-finger typing emails, poems, gossip), piles of paper, towers of books stacked so that they fall and make noise (you are always surprised they crash down – the laws of physics are a country you don’t need to visit). You are in every DVD, cassette, CD, vinyl LP.
Where are you? In each footfall on College Street, every Lou Reed song, the breath of Andrea and Luca, my heart, your white shirts, my grief, your books and paintings and friends and past loves, my future, every paint mark on the dining table.
You are everywhere (where are you?)
About My Father
by Andrea Verginella-Paina
Writing about my father, who was not just a father but a poet, artist, and visionary, is a challenge. My father spurned falseness and pleasantries; he was kind when he wanted to be and wasn’t when he didn’t. He never did anything he didn’t want to do. A Renaissance man with a wacky and wild streak. He was both fearful and fearless, superstitious and smart, embarrassed by compliments and thriving on praise. Few fathers reveal themselves entirely, but I had the privilege of knowing him in all his beauty, flaws, quirks and secrets.
He lived and loved with intensity, calling me at 4 AM to suggest working for the UN or showering me with gifts – I never sought to have a pig collection but when I told him I loved them he’d bring me one every time he’d visit. He sought new experiences, regardless of the toll on his body, never wanting to limit my exposure to discovery on our many trips together.
He sought beauty in everything: a cologne, an ascot, a poem, a photo of our dog, our shared love of shoes. My father, a man of many words, would laugh and say I talked more than he did.
My brother Luca summed up our father in one word: “Coca Cola.” (He adored Coke.) His humour lives on in him. I don’t yet believe I’ll have to live the rest of my life without him and everyday I still wait for his call to tell me about a writer, a western, some gossip or a bid to live as vivaciously as he did.
All photos courtesy of the Paina Family
