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
Actually, that language, inaugurated in Italy by Valduga, and which was judged so desecrating a few decades ago, no longer amazes, (in case it could still arouse a similar reaction, considering the different cultural tradition of his native country, the 'audacity, at the same time irrepressible and delicate, of the verses of the Syrian Maram al Masri, although she has been living in Europe for years), which should confirm that sexual equality has been achieved.
And yet such an affirmation does not seem to capture reality, not least because contemporary Western society is not only characterized by an abundance of parallel languages which, in fact, highlight a close fight between different powers; but because, among the many linguistic codes, just the poetic one seems, today, the least invested with "power", while remaining of extraordinary importance that the woman-poet has dared to say in the first person those emotions and thoughts that, in the past, they had been attributed by fellow writers.
In fact, to glimpse the pages of this large anthology means, first of all, to listen to the female Voice of Love, declined in different tones and ways, and, only apparently surprising, the most courageous texts are not always those of the younger authors.
There is still in many ways a way of dealing with this feeling, which unites them to emotions, figures and styles of "romanticism" (understood, of course, as a trans-temporal category) that have gone through the love literature of all time. and place, even if now freed from the assumption of the secondary role of the beloved compared to the beloved, and, in any case, removed from the personal catastrophe thanks to a feeling of pride and uniqueness of one's own self.
It is an attitude that oscillates between desire and suffering (Caffio), between abandonment and loving nostalgia - often told with realistic details and unpredictable metaphors - (Kurti, Rosas, Tempesta); between idealization, tenderness and burning passion (Meloni, Espinoza, Fresu, Pita, Bonfiglio, Vergara Marcos); between memorial and pain subsistence (Cosma).
The abandonment of the erotic instinct is rarer, with an almost impudent attention to the details of the body, gestures, nudity, the carnality of the conjunction (Barendson, Bisutti, Mormile, Magazzeni, Andreis and, in part, Rosati) through images of the all unpublished.
In the texts of other authors, adherence to the literary tradition translates into a careful formal work that wisely monitors the contents: so the Frabotta with its metric cages and the sound hammering that characterize a bold and modern verbal warp; the Cascella Luciani, where tradition is combined with sounds and original images, often kept, together with a personal management of graphic-typographic elements; the Rosadini, whose composed and refined texts are the spy of a crossing of the eros as an instrument of recomposing harmony and emotional wholeness. Extraordinary the linguistic mixture of Petrollo, so that the obsolete and ordinary lemmas, refined and vulgar, literary and dialectal mix even within the structural scheme of the sonnet and in the wise weaving of the other metrical schemes.
There are many authors who use an innovative language in the lexical register and in the use of unusual metaphors that highlight the configuration of a different imaginary, which draws on other figures than in the past. It is a break worthy of great attention, whose frequent enigmaticity is interwoven with memorable glimmers and stammering and sudden pauses that widen between word and word thanks to the use (which recalls the Hermeticas) of the white space. They seem to want to translate certain inner suspensions and painful amazements, but also a sort of alienation from the real (Martinez, Bergna).
To this group of linguistic innovators - but with completely different outcomes - must be added: the Calandrone, whose approach to the suggested themes is kept away from any sentimental failure. The poet prefers, in fact, to proceed for strict verbose sequences, adherent as a series of frames to facts, especially in the last of the three proposed texts, as in some way also the American Leverone and the Portuguese Amaral, in which verses the eros and poetry are mixed in a single body and the description of the beloved object is filtered from memory through a pictorial suggestion, with an intriguing multiplying effect.
Even more impregnated with an "icy" realism, which, for this very reason, assumes tones of fierce pietas and denunciation, making itself an instrument of struggle against every ethical hypocrisy, is the poetry of Golisch.
Among the young authors, the Sardiscus deserves great attention, which invents a highly dramatic language, horror, to narrate the body as a used and clinically tortured territory; Insinga, which hides within an exact versification, musically constructed, allusive, nourished by culture, a painful journey of amorous suffering; the Gnazi, which, almost according to an unexpected reinterpretation of the Dolce Stil Novo, immerses the body in the fragrant fragrances of Nature, in an incessant blaze of light through imaginative and sometimes overflowing elaboration of images; the Barbato, in which the eros is cloaked in a magical fascination, from which images and metaphors of great lyric-emotional impact flow from one another, and the Vivinnetto which confronts the argument with sincerity, courageous measure and great sensitivity little explored of transsexuality.
It must be said that, although they seem to interpenetrate one another, the two themes of the anthology: the body and the eros, in reality they are not the same thing.
The body has often been for the woman an unknown territory, something to be given in exchange, to offer, to be sealed in a sort of aseptic vacuum. Becoming aware of it, revealing it first of all to itself, was the first break of modern women (roughly, from '68 onwards) compared to the generation of mothers. The female body becomes a paradigm of identity, moral freedom, aware of the pride of its diversity, and a subject capable of breaking a series of old taboos, including homosexuality (Davinio, Magazzeni); or he complains bitterly, as does Rosa, who feels and reveals the guilt, the diminutio of which the female body was (and still can be) victim.
The theme of the body, as has been dealt with by many authors, especially South America for obvious historical and social conditions, moves away from the inevitable self-referentiality of most texts to introduce very hot social issues, such as forced prostitution , the sale of girls to the sex market, incest, abortion, the difficult integration of migrants, the generation gap between the latter and children, as do Patriarca, Pinedo, Mancía, Vergas, and with stylistic outcomes to the limit surrealism, Szwarc and Bonhomme. Of clear feminist imprint is the burning defense of the woman by Naccarato, in a very long text that has the rhythm of a military march, an assault on commonplaces and the alleged inferiority of her sex, robbed, reified, subject to a series of behavioral stereotypes, as reiterated in the other two memorials.
Among the Italians, a writing of denunciation (rape, violence, the false myth of virginity, moral hypocrisy) is that of Cupertino, of Sorrentino (whose dramatically narrative poetry is orchestrated through a series of disturbing images), and of the writer.
Divergent interpretations of the theme of the body are those of the Italian Mongardi, who describes it as a living autonomous object to be listened to with its rhythms and sounds and invisible intimacy; and of the Greek Lainà with his texts nourished by culture (Japanese theater and poetry, the characters of Bronte); and the Sica, which in three short texts tells the story of a love.
Coronado and De Lisi are also outside the chorus, united by a fervid and terrifying imagination, in some ways nurtured by horror cinematography and a certain comic book production. The first gives voice to one's mental ghosts, obsessed with losing oneself, one's body in a cannibalized world that destroys and devours; the second builds histories, based on a trail that is familiar to her, on the family relationships of hatred, love, violence and rare tenderness, poised between self-analysis and visionarity. And, again, the Bre, who interprets Eros as a loving sharing of words, the body as a form that springs from "one movement" in a finite time.
There are also those who sing it through a play-melodious game of reiterations and dismemberments of words and a plot of clear and elegant rhymes-assonances (Bettarini), who, through a dreamlike vision, as an absolute force (Cruciani), who in the sensual beauty of adolescents who spread leopardian promises of happiness (Di Gregorio), who as an emblem of fertility and inexhaustible energy (Di Palma).
Who perceives eros as a drama - "bites and evil as gifts" - (Fantato); as a terrible, almost destructive daimon (Laginija); who as joy, totality, forgetfulness of self that gives place to "hearts, hearts", as the Quintavalla writes, or to a "pure all around" (Mancinelli); those with freshness of tones, dubious question marks, keep melancholy (Lamarque). Ferramosca interprets it, like the Hanxhari, as a metamorphizing deity thanks to which the loving bodies sink into everything else that lives and that is named and makes music.
Finally, in his three texts La Poster offers a variety of approaches: in the first it seems to propose a modern rewriting of the myth of Jupiter and Danae, in the second it tells, drawing on the scientific lexicon, the old age of a woman through that of a star, in third recalls their loved ones, their living bodies and their voices, their dance steps, their places, always however sewing together the existence and the time.
These 68 voices of women poets have been put together thanks to the help of many fellow writers who have suggested names and provided contacts (Rosadini, Fo, Calandrone, Cupertino, Mongardi, Balbis, Maggiani, Martinez, Nazzaro), professor Federico Italiano , the translator Colarossi, the friend Antonella Spina and others. I have reached some poets, especially foreigners, via the internet and I thank them for having responded to the invitation, even without knowing me.
Many friends, thank you very much, are offered free as translators: Lucia Cupertino, here also as a poet, the writer Antonio Nazzaro, Patrizia Sardisco, also antologized, the poet Roberto Maggiani, and Antonio Melillo, from whom this idea started and that he wanted my collaboration to make it concrete. Some poets have sent translations already in their possession, and others have been translated by me.
I thank in particular the publisher Giuliano Ladolfi, who has accepted to publish this anthology, which undoubtedly offers an interesting panorama of contemporary female poetic production, both national, from the North to the South of Italy, and international (Europe, Asia , Americas). Another important element is certainly to consider the fact that at least three generations of poets (from the most established to those not yet widely known), and all with high stylistic outcomes, have been called to face the same issues, offering, despite themselves , a historical testimony of the evolution of mentality, ethics and customs regarding the themes of eros and the role of women in society.
(The text reproduced here is the introduction of the anthology of poetic texts Il corpo, l'eros, edited by F. Alaimo and A. Melillo, Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, Borgomanero 2018. Below, three poems included in the collection.)
***
l’ombra semplice del corpo in amore
l’oscillazione
dei monili sul collo
e lo smalto dei denti
sfolgora, nudo
la tua lingua
s’impunta chiara fra le labbra scure
M. Grazia Calandrone
***
la vita delle stelle
anche per i corpi celesti
c’è un tempo lineare, ineluttabile:
la giovane stella azzurra
è tersa, scattante
attraversa poi la maturità
un bianco diamante.
ma ciò che a me interessa ora
è la vecchiaia della stella
quando, mostruosamente grande,
in rarefatto decadimento,
si adagia nel cielo, anziana signora
stravaccata in poltrona e
soddisfatta.
Brenda Poster
***
Amori a confronto
E ora dove le metto queste mani
che fanno quell’odore d’uomo?
“L’amavo tanto – mi raccontasti –
fino al giorno in cui mi si concesse.
Oh, quella poco di buono
l’avrebbe fatto con tutti!”
E gli occhi, questi due ingombranti
testimoni, io dove li getto
se al centro delle pupille ancora
c’è il chiodo del suo sguardo
che mi ha trapassato il petto?
Li getterò, padre, dietro la tua schiena,
li getterò oltre i pregiudizi.
“Però era uno schianto – aggiungesti –
Sapessi che labbra e che fianchi!”
Oh, non baciarmi, padre, stasera.
La mia bocca ha mangiato il fumo
delle sue sigarette al mentolo,
la sua saliva calda e i baci, oh quanti!,
fino al confine dello sfinimento.
All’inizio, sai, ero un po’ spaurita:
sentivo, o padre, la tua voce nella testa:
“Non ti fidare di loro, figlia mia,
giurano d’amare e vogliono fare sesso”.
Ma, dopo, non ci fu più nulla intorno.
Eravamo noi due in un mondo a parte,
un sogno che fluttuava nell’alto dei cieli,
io e lui felici ed immortali come gli dei.
E non mi stringere, padre, così forte al petto!
Mi fanno ancora male i capezzoli.
Sapessi che tenerezza mi ha fatto
quando me li ha succhiati
ad occhi chiusi, le ciglia di velluto,
che mi sembrava un bambinello
affamato di latte.
Oh, si, stasera sono diventata
la sua sposa e madre e amante,
ma a te, padre, come faccio a dirtelo?
“Poi se la sposò il mio capitano.
Ah, che cretino sono stato! – dicesti –
e sembrava la tua voce un pianto
È sempre così bella e ha due figli”.
“Ma che c’è – mi chiedi – perché non parli?
Forse non stai bene?”
“Sono un po’ stanca e non ho fame.
Scusami, padre, voglio solo dormire.”
E ho pensato, ma non gliel’ho detto:
Mi sdraierò sul letto senza lavarmi,
così mi sembrerà di averlo ancora accanto
il mio ragazzo che in cambio di una rosa
ha fatto del mio corpo un roseto ardente.