By Davide Morelli
Certainly, today, in contemporary Italian poetry 'maps are no longer possible', as Giulio Ferroni has written. Moreover, perhaps today the relationship between commitment and poetry, between religion and poetry, is unlikely. However, it can be said that the link between philosophy and poetry is strong.
Sanguineti maintained, however, that poetry is a virgin's gaze on the world. So it would be the human soul that makes the world poetic. But we could also think that poetry is found both in the mind and in reality, or that it is born from an interaction between the two. If we consider poetry as mimesis, then the poetic is in the world. If we consider poetry as revelation, then the merit lies in the artist or in God. If we see poetry as transfiguration or as a set of 'correspondences' (as Baudelaire understood them, thus creating 'a forest of symbols'), then the poetic lies both in the world and in the self.
Angela Greco: poetry encodes the world
In this sense, the poet Angela Greco not only knows how to look for poetry in every corner of the world, but also how to poetically encode the world. She knows how to reflect deeply on the world as well as filtering the voices and suggestions of the great poets. This is what counts and it is by no means little. Being a poet must therefore be understood if not as a job (since very few manage to earn anything with verse. In the past it was said "ut pictura poesis", but today painting, unlike poetry, still manages to be profitable) at least as a continuous and uninterrupted work: always listening, choosing words, revising everything, tuning the time of life to that of poetry.
Angela Greco's new collection is entitled Ananke, which means 'force of destiny' in Greek, but get it out of your head that it is fatalistic: rather, it continually emphasises the eternal struggle between freedom and necessity. This book is published by Giuliano Ladolfi editore, which, as poetry insiders and enthusiasts know, is selective and rewards quality.
As the poet Fabrizio Bregoli points out in his beautiful preface, Greco's poetry must be understood as a testimony of our time, of our epoch, which, however, never falls into "cronachismo", which never points with the finger and never turns tragic or even apocalyptic, given that the atmosphere of the work is always rarefied.
The poetic thought
Angela Greco proves herself to be a significant poet on the literary scene and this work is an unmistakable sign of the maturity she has achieved. The author has the disposition of mind, the education in taste and the technique to translate the opportunities, which life gives her, into authentic poetry.
It is a poetry, partly marked by a colloquial style, which at the same time is an expression of her own experience (questioning change and identity) without falling into egocentrism (the poems are not confessional, the egoic datum does not prevail) and is "poetical thought": a poetry that therefore addresses existential and metaphysical ruins and always seeks the access code to being, without ever being consolatory. Poetry in this sense must also be understood as psychism between the poetess and her dearest affections.
The author always succeeds in being neither long-winded nor too linear, and in being rightfully literary. She always succeeds in limiting, not losing herself in intellectualism and avoiding simplification. His language is always direct. His cadences are intelligible. He never plays with terms, he does not use circumlocutions, which would end up mystifying reality. His words are as essential as in "Satura", but unlike the last Montale, his epigrammicism is never totally negative, pessimistic.
As Andrea Afribo wrote in Magrelli's "Ora serrata retinae", in poetry "it is no longer forbidden to make oneself understood". It is true that, as the poet Lello Voce recently declared, poetry should be considered a state of exception of the language.
A collection that proceeds by subtraction
Greco's poetry is neither poetry of the unconscious nor hyper-literary. It does not strip the word bare, it does not strip it down to the point of aphasia, as some do, nor does it turn its meaning inside out, as others do. The poet sometimes proceeds by subtraction, but never overdoes it. Not only that, but - and this applies to everyone - it is always difficult to establish a distinction between accumulation and subtraction, between beating and raising.
In this connection, we should remember the paradox of sorting, which is a paradox generally attributed to the philosopher Eubilides, according to which we can never define a pile of sand, since by removing or adding one grain at a time we always have a pile of sand.
According to this paradox, even a grain of sand is a pile of sand. Similarly, by dint of subtracting or adding, we will never know exactly what poetry is. We might paradoxically think that the Divine Comedy is equivalent to a poem of three words. However, the author always enters in medias res, she does not lose herself in preambles.
She knows how to be expressive without falling into eloquence or counter-eloquence. She knows that words have a weight and a precise meaning: this may seem obvious, but it is not because many people today lose the authentic relationship between words and things. He always doses his forces, he does not overdo it, he sometimes starts quietly and then deals the final blow with his clauses, to give the reader the final blow, lavishing his epiphanies, which are never evasions but gnomic revelations.
Wittgenstein's fly is trapped in the bottle, but it could also get caught in the spider's web. Perhaps no one knows how to show it the way out. The important thing is to try, as Greco does. Language also serves this purpose. Rimbaud searched all his life in vain for the place and the formula. The poetess has found the place: Massafra, in the province of Taranto.
Amidst fragments of dialogue and sentences, expressed with a certain formal composure (without being part of the neo-metrical current), her gait and diction prove to be autonomous and her stylistic code is original:
"... When hunger / has a different meaning and / the night is a stomach that / remembers every detail", "...one proceeds / by subtraction, distant operations / of the notebooks of when we were small hands, / coloured flakes to stand out in the crowd, / stumbling words and wounded knees", "The cold makes hands stupid; I think back then to your chest, / at night, resting against the intermittence of events", "One must return to falling in love / with one's eyes. Here, where winter / smells of burnt resins in the fireplaces, domestic thuribles / for the daily sacredness, angels keep watch / on the crossroads of stone days", "This day remains suspended / between ananke and unspeakable; a way / unknown to pen and reason, / where to walk before the last darkness, / without stars, if not hidden thoughts. / Your sky, fate and shears / ready to cut the last word. Waiting keeps knocking on this mouth".
Angela Greco succeeds in skilfully balancing between inside and outside, between inside and outside, between the subject and the world. She does not lose herself in stratifications, nor in rhizomes. Her dictation is never alienating, nor excessive, even though it shows the contradictions of love, the incommunicability, the alienation of us contemporaries. The transcendent in this collection is an implicit common denominator, an undercurrent, just as the presence of evil and the probable presence of a deus absconditus is implied: three pervasive aspects in those who have a true Christian faith today.
Can poetry save?
Poetry may not save the soul, but as the poetess Donatella Bisutti has written, it can save life. We need a poem like this in an era in which we are all citizens of the web and the virtual detaches us from reality; we are in an era in which Big Brother has become reality and we live in a technological panoptic; we are in an era in which we have moved quickly from the metaphor of the brain as a computer to bracelets and wristbands.
We are in an era where we have moved quickly from the metaphor of the brain as a computer to neural bracelets, which read the brain, and to some computer geniuses, who want to implant a microchip in the brain.
In our day and age, when social media are increasingly dominated by an artificial imagery, it is right and sacrosanct to be stimulated by the poetic imagery, which is authentic. We need poetry in this prevailing massification, with this spirit of the times that denies subjectivity. UNESCO celebrates 21 March each year as Poetry Day because it has 'a privileged role in promoting intercultural dialogue and understanding, linguistic and cultural diversity, communication and peace'. We should remember these words often. Finally, it should be remembered that, according to Junger, nihilism has no access to the gardens of art.