Poetry for Sinking Places and Sinking People

Venice is sinking. Venice is always sinking. It has been sinking for a long, long time, and it will continue to do so; such is the nature of this changeling city, an experiment in coaxing solid ground from the waters of a lagoon. Since its inception, Venice has been characterized by its dualism—half in and half out, partly dry and partly wet—and it is this quality that has long lent it an air of mystery. It is a place of obsession, as seen in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion. It is a place of half-truths and spying, of the kind practiced by Sophie Calle in her Suite Vénitienne. It is beset by ghosts and phantoms, as per Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. It is a city that, always, manages to draw even its prodigal sons back in: “Every time I describe a city,” claims Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “I am saying something about Venice.”