by Giuseppe Panella
The reading of the bowels of animals (birds like doves, but also sheep like lambs and rams) was a common practice among the ancients in the divinatory activity of priests (masters in aruspicine or estispicina were the Etruscans and the sacred practice who saw them finding responsibility and truth in the depths of the bodies of the sacrificed animals constituted much of the relationship between the people and the Gods they worshiped. The aruspices found in the bowels and organs that make up the traces of a future that only the divinity could know and that men were revealed only for hints, allusions, fragments, suspicions: the bodies of birds or sheep contained a secret that only skilled and qualified eyes could see and punish.
Such divinatory practice, perhaps, resembles that of the poets who extract the future of the language from the enormous body of vocabulary (or spoken language) that stumble and dissociate to extract its hidden truth.
«E’ difficile dirla la verità? E’ difficile dirla la verità? / Non dico trovarla? / Meglio le reticenze / al dire che impegna, / un no vuol dire prendere / per mano, considerare / altro noi stessi. / Dirla la verità è difficile? / meglio il piglio fiero dei nonni / poche parole di sfinge / scondite sentire / a credibili scuse. // Ed ora meglio il camminare / a cuore aperto, coraggio / inattuale ai mezzi sorrisi / e parole a mezza bocca, / sgranati occhi già giudizio / accennato tosse a seppellire / gesti e parole di solo semina / a raccolta in pieno sole, / spalla e petto di uno scansare / come guerra d’altri nel paese / lontano colore per straniero vicino» (p. 61).
But the task of poetry is precisely this: to mark in the words of the lyric the deep reality of things and make them transparent and solitary in the light of what I want to communicate and pass on to those who read it. The poet should do more to obey his imperative to tell the truth but this, of course, is not easy with the words that are available.
It's hard to tell the truth without delivering to the judgment of those who do not want to hear it. You have to walk with your back straight to understand what words are to be said and what not to say and say. This is the commitment of poetry. This is his ability to empower himself with the strength of his own beliefs. But Ariemma is not (or not only) a supporter of commitment and truth (the "heart-to-heart") - he is also a lyrical poet by expansive cut and expressively strong, with his tongue crushed and urgent, sometimes jammed from his fury of saying.
His poetry seeks everywhere the rhythm of his going and stops looking for him carefully, waiting for the right word and the moment to show his most intimate feelings:
"If it is difficult to tell the truth," writes Giulio Greco in his Preface to the book, a text that gives the magical title of Reality and Prophecy - the poet, like the aruspice, can not silence, can not hide or sweeten it to please the public; he is not a publicist or novelist who seeks success by complying with the consumer's tastes, even though the journey is difficult, misunderstood, obstructed, put under silence, but those "sowing gestures" are already marked in reality and are intended to become in the future the reality. [...] It derives an authentic representation of the art of aruspicine in which the object of the search means "something else" and that "other" is what really matters. And this is precisely the sense of poetry ... "(p. 8).
Poetry, according to Ariemma, is the "flow" of the world as an inexorable flow of life, to the way its imposing vitality imposes and marks in the continuous and shocking sequence of signs and words as an infinite sea of the possibility of continuing tell and poetry:
«Per scorrere. E’ il fiume che accompagna il non essere / soli con il rumore delle acque, un portare / inevitabile dello scorrere per mare / come profumo e sorriso, corsa delle onde / senza vele nel canale delle uadi. / E’ lo scalfire secche a dispetto dei castelli / non ferma scrosci ai manufatti in odore di ferro / né basse mura orlate alte di perse libertà» (p. 32).
In this "run of waves without sails", in this "water-void", in this "flowing by the sea" lies the expressive force of the poetic design of Ariemma: transforming phrases into gems and exploded flowers for the power of desire that contain means investing in the poetry of the possible vision of a future world in which it can save men and things through its ultimate and definitive quest, celebrating its apotheosis.