written by Franca Alaimo

Until a few decades ago few Italian poets had the courage to clear the sex from reticence and deliver it to a bold, if not obscene, vocabulary.
I am reminded of only Maria Grazia Lenisa, now disappeared, and Patrizia Valduga, although so distant and for intent and for stylistic yield: the first, in fact, sings God through the human language of eros, and the body through the stylistic features of sacred, with the intention of overcoming every fracture between flesh and spirit, both wishing; the second, instead, mixing together the composure of the formal structure, so widely drawn from tradition, with a "dirty" lexicon often from the crudest obscenity and a clear rejection of all metaphysical shelter, underlines the fracture between the masculine psyche and the feminine one that also marks the gestural and libidinous one, leaving, all in all, on the scene of literature its nakedness without shelter.
Lenisa has found few followers in Italian literature, in general (and not only, as I suppose, for the difficulty of the challenge). Among the authors of this anthology, we can approach only the Narimi, the Monachino (with their happy grafting and shedding of mystical fervor within the vital-erotic rhythm of the Universe) and the Cerniglia that draws widely from the myth to halo of ideal beauty. intimate and real.
Many Italian authors, however, have set foot in the footsteps of Valduga, claiming full freedom of expression in the field of erotic matter, which Rimbaud already wished as an index of a future, achieved equality between men and women (not for nothing Lenisa he called himself "the girl of Rimbaud"), aware of the assumption that the written language has always coincided with the interests of the ruling class