written by Gabriella Mongardi
That of Fabiano Spessi is a poem that gets dirty hands. With full warning and deliberate consent. This character, already evident in the previous collection, A promise of happiness, Ladolfi publisher 2016, is even more pronounced in The Second Birth, always released by Ladolfi in December 2017.
The long liminal poetry of The second birth, A liar way of telling the truth, is a real manifesto of poetics, starting from the oxymoric title which is a splendid definition of the Literature, a definition in which the echo of the dickinsonian imperative "Tell the whole truth, but give it oblique". In the case of Emily Dickinson, the "obliquity" is given by the daring metaphors, the broken syntax that make her hermetic, obscure diction; in Spessi, on the other hand, he seems to feel almost an intolerance precisely because of poetry understood as "writing in verse", as a high register of the language; and in fact his verses tend to prose both for lexical choices, both for the absence of rhymes, and above all for a "going to the end" that seems casual, careless, sometimes even wrong.
This text also gives us the coordinates of the urban and human space in which the poet moves: "buildings from the flaked / facades, churches / buildings in a hurry, libraries / municipal in which / the hours of / students, the elderly of the houses are unfolded / popular and immigrants ", to which will be added during the collection of bars, gambling halls, restaurants, shopping centers, stations, restaurants" all you can eat "- all the non-places of the" liquid society "that seem so" impoetico "And instead become a" pretext / good to write / even if the fire / inspiration is off and the / mind is constantly taken / assaulted by thoughts / that have / to do with everyday life / more small "; it also shows us the point of observation and the attitude of the poet: "views not / from above / but at the level of / sidewalks", in a "fruitful / confrontation with the lives of others". And here is the miracle, emerge in the so pro-poetic trend of the poem-manifest some endecasyllable, some rhyme to the medium, some enjambement that expands the breath, and the making poetry returns to be "an insensate insensata / source of happiness just when / the days run or drag on slow tracks ", just when the poem seems endangered, threatened as it is by the void of the mass media chatter ... If we want, Spessi continues on the way already indicated by the lyric of Montale, in his lowering from the "sublime" of the first three collections to the "prosastico" of the following ones, from Satura to Quaderno of four years to Diario of '71 and '72, obviously updating themes and vocabulary to the new millennium. And introducing a keyword: "comparison".
His is not the poetry of the "poet with the black turtleneck", which "writes to probe the mystery / of life and death / and is so hermetic / that only those / of his court understand it; it is a poem that wants to "put itself in communication" with the observed reality and with the reader, and for this reason uses a seemingly simple language, colloquial, obvious - except for some lightning-fast, fulminating "waste", to throw "a smear" a bundle of light in the dark ...
A transcription of some of the titles of these poems is almost the index of a book of sociology: Social network, Letter of Vincent the electrician Ludovica the eternal intern, The resignation of Patrizia, Movers of pianos, Rent, In front of the station , Ortomercato, The swimming pool, The 40-year-old intern, The lesser evil, The last day of summer, Boy band, The Sunday of the car stop, Liposuction, All you can eat, Pasolini 1975-2015, The eternal return of the equal, At the mercy of events, Rimini, Five-year plan, The index of liking ... And interspersed with these, other more allusive and intimistic titles: The sky above Berlin, Intermediate body, Song of the city, Arrivals and departures, L ' Appearance, Renewing, The End of Questions, The Lesser Evil, The Imaginary, There Must be Something, Everything Here, The Last Day of Summer, September, Our Need for Transcendence, Unpredictable, The Art of Encounters ; and then three years-title, years of "breakthrough": 1987 (the passage of the personal "shadow line"), 1994 (the year of the Right to the Government), 2002 (the turning point in the cinephile's tastes: never more film "committed").
The collection is therefore extremely composite, also because in the individual compositions, regardless of the title, almost always mix "public" issues, social denunciation (precarious work, school dropout, drugs ...) and "private", existential (love, loneliness, time ...). On the sociological level, these "frameworks of the whole" cast a glance on realities that many insist on not seeing; they are leavened by irony and poetry, which plays with words mixing Italian and English and pursues its own secret rhythm; on the existential level, the message that the poet entrusts to us is that of believing in life, in his "infinite other possibility" (The last day of summer) - and in poetry, "a most alienating and useless act" (Sunday) stop to the car): not useless because it is alienating, because it enriches us with a different look on the world and on ourselves.
IL CIELO SOPRA BERLINO
Le prime luci dell’alba
strappano al sonno gli angeli che
scendono dalle panchine del parco
non visti da anima viva, giusto qualche
cane a passeggio ne percepisce la presenza,
avverte lo spostamento d’aria. Entrano nei
bar per ascoltare i discorsi delle infermiere
e degli autisti d’autobus e poi montano in
servizio con la grazia innaturale del volo.
***
SOCIAL NETWORK
Per evitare errori madornali
nell’uso delle reti sociali
sarà il caso di presentarsi
per come si è veramente
o per come ci si comporta
di solito in mezzo alla ggente?
Meglio postare
foto dei propri piedi in riva al mare
oppure un primo piano
di un primo piatto succulento?
Più giusto
un proprio ritratto sorridente
con i capelli al vento
o un autoscatto
con la mano sotto il mento
da intellettuale tormentato per contratto?
Condividere o no
l’annuncio della gravidanza
e i momenti migliori
dell’ennesima vacanza?
E se la propria vita
assomiglia a una bicicletta senza sellino
meglio dirlo urbi et orbi
o fingere che ci si diverta
un casino?
La verità, vi prego, sui social network.