Besides the look, we need to jump; the radiant unreasonable, the wild turbine of the diviner, not the map of the geologist of the verses, certainly, of the philologist, philanthropist of literature. Giorgio Anelli's book, which is a poet in the essential substance, is out of time, out of the norm, anomalous, moving, odd, excessive, unsuitable, necessary. A stealthy stabbing knife with a gold blade. I mean, the book by Giorgio Anelli dedicated to Simone Cattaneo. Of cult and Orphic (Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, 2019). A book, I say, that does not try the intellect but asks for an unconditional adhesion, written in a brotherhood, ten years after the death of Cattaneo, which precedes biology: it concerns the way in which Rimbaud shakes hands with Baudelaire and Verlaine throws into the empyrean the blue-blond god; the pity with which Hawthorne, in a sand dune in the suburbs of Liverpool, in front of the brutal gray sea, touches Melville's shoulder and worries about it; Beckett's icy jargon on the face of the rhetoricians: the Nobel had to be given to Joyce. Recognition, recognition, kneeling. Giorgio Anelli makes Cattaneo the zenith of the "new" Italian poetry, the capital experience. His pamphlet - written as Dino Campana could write by Walt Whitman - has the violence of a call, is not devoid of sulphurous agnitions (on the Skies of Cattaneo, for example: "The poetry of Simone Cattaneo is full of skies. Skies desired, "Maybe. Skies evoked in the name of what? Skies devoid of hope, to which impose gatherings of rain. Everything, in return, is turned to the earth. The poet almost always looks down on the sky, without finding the graft between earth and sky "There are no mysteries, only feelings sometimes of warm air playing. The sky is his obsession"). This book has a grave and crude grace, which is neither exegesis nor homage: agitation, rather, mystical manual, rule of life. To Giorgio Anelli, in another context, I write, "being present, we need not present or be present". I would say this, by Simone Cattaneo - his presence is such, it is so superabundant, to remember the memory, even the attempt. (D.B.)
Why Cattaneo? What lethal evidence do you find in your work?
Because Cattaneo is a beacon in the storm of contemporary Italian and European poetry. I believe his work is truly the seed of a new poetic tradition. This is the lethal evidence that emerges from his verses. I have no doubt. I talk about it with good reason. No one before him has dared so much. Creating a genre, which is fully part of the Italian literary poetic canon, a genre - I said, unique and therefore original, involves the responsibility of a risk that is not at all calculated but wanted, of a visionary cursed that has no precedent in our history.
Why Cattaneo? What relationship did you have with him, and how does your literary research relate to his?
Because Cattaneo has imagined, lived and written provocative verses, just as it must always be in literature and poetry: a sudden earthquake that not only devastates the city, but that makes all your limbs feel shaken. I have never met Simone in person. He died before I learned of his existence. My relationship with him is linked to fate and an exceptional witness who, indirectly, introduced me to him; instilling in me a lot of curiosity, and then all that has been achieved, up to the writing of this last book. On September 6, 2014, at the Borgomanero Festival, Temporelli gave a lecture on Simone Cattaneo, presenting the work and reading a single poem. It was an exceptional testimony, which allowed me little by little to discover, read and learn about Simone's poems. In fact, I asked first to Giuliano Ladolfi, who gave me his name and nickname, then to Temporelli himself, who got me Made in Italy and gave me Peace & Love, a complete and posthumous work by Cattaneo. In 2017 I had another very welcome and unexpected gift. Simone's nephew, Lorenzo, gave me the now almost impossible to find plaquette The rain holds the dance. The fulcrum of Cattaneo's literary research dates back to 2004, when the poet expressed the desire for truth and the desire to represent reality in his way of writing. Precisely because I recognized immediately in the work of Simone Cattaneo a powerful voice, unique and unrepeatable, this spurs me to be myself in the influence of an echo that, as just said, will never have rivals: I think it's the sense of tradition, of every tradition.
Why Cattaneo? Extract a verse, a shred of verses from Cattaneo's work and explain to me why it is important to you, what is its value?
"Of all the things I don't know / I just want a whisper ..."
Opening the book at random, I find this verse that is important to me because it represents the true meaning of poetry. That truth and reality that can only partially reach you, from afar, in the ambush of your entire ignorance.
"... She sends me to that country and says to go to bed soon
it's up to run on the construction site. Some strange pill,
those for sleeping and those for forgetting, because they give them
only to fuckers who are worthless,
we should give them, we who work hard and
we never think of stealing "
In these verses the value is enclosed not only in the accurate description of a disappointing reality that is still present in Italy, but above all in the mocking irony of those who, in our place, that is the poet, wanted to discover and tell a certain truth.
"... I look at a woman with horrible sagging tits and I trim her
a burst of punches in the belly. I was not betrayed "
What are these verses important for? They indicate that Simon did not lie to himself as to anyone else. Live cursed, to be able to write it. Write about cursing, to unmask the visionary nature of which I leave the curious discovery to readers.
Why Cattaneo? In your opinion, in the case of Cattaneo, did death sanctify the work or did the work have a strength of its own that overcomes death?
Because Cattaneo is both the scream and the silence that each of us carries inside. The joy and the wound of a life in the making. With respect to the question, both statements are true. In the sense that, if we are to believe in clichés, his death surely makes the work of an indissoluble aura shine. What he had written and published received the imprimatur in the choice of suicide, to become a work of cult and absolute. But, in my opinion, the opposite is above all true, and I try to prove it in my essay. That is, the work of Simone Cattaneo was and is already in itself immortal, in that it possessed and, even more so, today it possesses more and more today a clairvoyant cursing never tried before by anyone else in Italy. Much less in Europe. With a style, therefore, and with very specific messages, which I read in listening to his prophetically thrown words on us.