Throughout Beppe Cavatorta’s lecture on “Nature and the Literature of the Italian Neo-Avante-Garde,” I was struck by the similarities between the poems he discussed and poems my “Emily Dickinson and English Poetry” class has analyzed. Although Dickinson wrote most of her poems over a century before the Italian neo-avant-garde movement began, there are numerous similarities between her works and those of the poets Cavatorta discussed in his lecture. One primary similarity is the efforts to break the typical poetic structure and syntax. Dickinson’s manuscripts are notorious for eschewing standard punctuation in favor of dashes to offset certain words, end lines, and create caesura (a break in the middle of a line of poetry). Likewise, the poem that Cavatorta analyzed with the class: “A fragmented wor(l)d,” by Giorgio Celli, has no punctuation, and uses spacing and gaps between words to create poetic rhythm. Also, like the Italian neo-avant-garde poets, Dickinson incorporated scientific terms, including numerous phrases taken from human anatomy and biological textbooks she had in her library. For example, in her poem “With Pinions of Disdain,” Dickinson uses ornithological terms to cement the allusions to birds and flight that are present throughout the piece. In “A fragmented wor(l)d,” Celli uses geological terms that fall outside of the typical poetic parlance, which create a content/form relationship as the choppy layers of the poem reinforce the geology and rock-based language that makes up the content of the poem. Although Dickinson and the Italian neo-avant-garde poets from this week’s lecture created their works in dramatically different time periods, the similarities between their works point to a shared desire to break free of the constraints of poetic and literary conventions.