[translated by Google]
La poesia, “una gemma nell’irrisolto”
GABRIELLA MONGARDI
I confess: Trial of the nine by Giuseppe Carracchia (Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, 2017) has conquered me from the first pages, because I found the words that I love the most, "scientific" and "alpinistic" words: mine will not be a review cold and detached, but a reading that will hunt for gems, that is, precious words in themselves or made such by the connection with the others, from those callidae iuncturae that - Horace teaches - create dazzling metaphors.
And here - I repeat - such gems abound from the opening poetry, in which it is instinctive to see in those "furious or botanical mathematicians" the counter-poems of the poets, who live in situations of marginality ("the suburbs of Russian frost", "literally dead starvation of hardship "), but sometimes manage to dictate, with an obsolete communication tool such as the" handset ", their solutions to" problems / that most do not imagine / but live day after day ". Like those cornets, poetry is a communication tool of other times, out of fashion and out of place - the poet seems to tell us that he can not renounce it. Poetry is a form of resistance - or resilience - to the senselessness of the world, to the tapestry of the times, in the name of "a fifth dimension, longed for / salvation", "in search of the point that vanishes history / and rips or time or put ears to the pages ".
The poet's task is "to trace unknown maps from evil to good", "to learn how to fly, climb over, look / patiently doors / scattered here and there, hidden" and how does the mountaineer - another expert on overhangs - recognize "on walls of granite [...] cracks and faults "where to cling to" push our history up ".
When we arrive at the end of the book, we understand that the first texts already contain everything in nuce, they are the primordial nebula from which everything is born, and that in the subsequent lyrics will constantly return the key words ("scientific" and "mountaineering", in fact) here agglutinate like particles waiting for the creative Big Bang. In this way a network of "hypertextual" paths is woven, from one precious word to another, and each reader constructs, so to speak, his "book": he adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides and then makes his own " test of the nine ", to see if the accounts come back. But perhaps, believing to do it to the book, he ends up doing it to himself ...
For example, the theme of unresolved, enunciated in the poem-manifesto, then disappears like a river carsico to resurface only in closing, in A turn of boa from your contradictions, the last part of Prova del nove, where "the light / devia, svirgola / originating a new path / in space, a new star "and" The return of unresolved claims / suspension, requires / that everything is accepted ". This is precisely what aspires to make Carracchia's book, precisely for this reason the scientific vocabulary innervates so widely its vocabulary, not for "staging", not for baroque research of "wonder", but because it is the language of science that knows how to name the things as accurately as possible, and it is from the maximum possible adherence to things that even poetry must start, in order not to be reduced to empty meaningless verbalism.
Prova del Nine is a composite, complex book: it is not a simple collection of "all the poems so far written by the poet", but precisely a universe with its own precise structure and internal articulation, and every poem could not be alone, linked as it is, from a plot of references and references, to the preceding and the following and to the others of this "organism". The book consists of eight sections, like eight songs of a poem, each of which derives its title from a composition, which is never open. The introductory section, "C14", and the concluding one, "Spegnendo il lumen", include only four and five compositions respectively, while the others, "Moti and revolutions", "Appunti dall'orto", "Presocratica", "Dall ' one to the other "," Geography of research "," Genealogy of distractions ", are very broad and subdivided into sub-sections (except" Presocratic "); sometimes, even the individual compositions (poems) are subdivided into parts. "Presocratic" marks a turning point: starting from here the dialogic tension grows, poetry becomes a mosaic of tiles to be put back together, a crossover of voices to be harmonized.
Carracchia is a poet with a long breath, his poetry has negotiation ambitions, or rather a classical-style didactic poem, of pre-Socratic philosophers-scientists. But if for the ancients the choice of verse instead of prose was, so to say, an obligatory choice, as in a culture dominated by orality the verse with its rhythm facilitates memorization and sumptuous images that distinguish the poetic language from the standard one they translate concretely, make the intuition of the philosopher visible, here poetry is a choice of freedom, of anarchy, a form of rebellion against the language itself. I would define the style of Carracchia as expressionistic, because of its tension to de-formation, to go beyond the form - word that actually appears in a title Around the titanium. Or "Della forma", to which he replies, a little further forward Franco shooter. Or "To deform". The first text of this diptych focuses on "the doubt of form / its evolution" and cites three instruments of artistic activity, intended as a form: "a chisel, a pen, a brush": an exact hendecasyllable with rhyme internal. But apart from some isolated hendecasyllable, and the strophic structure of the song as recognizable reminiscence behind the three long strophes followed by a "leave" of three verses, this lyric is without form: the syntax tends to fall apart, the images follow each other without apparent logic and the strength of titanium in bones seems to derive, paradoxically, from the "history of innumerable fractures". The theme is resumed, in an ironic register, in Franco shooter. Or "Deformarsi", which opens with the image of a man running along the Po to "keep fit" and closes with the observation that "the form is not / a problem; indeed it is "- and looking for it at any cost means" deforming ".
Both these lyrics are part of the "Genealogy of distractions", to be precise they belong to the subtitle "Prova del nove", which gives the title to the entire work and is derived from the eponymous composition, Prova del nove: a lyric reminiscent of Piccolo testament of Montale or Farewell of the ceremonious traveler of Caproni, and surprising, because it impresses an unexpected turn to the collection - perhaps it is this poem the "point that revolves the story / and rips or turns or puts ears to the pages" of which it was said all ' beginning. The Testament has the tendency towards the other, the will to leave a message, an inheritance, to announce the "validity" of an "inexplicable force"; of Caproni has the situation of the train journey, evoked in the first two parts, with the image of "this cheek resting on the window" during the journey and that of kneeling on arrival "(whether it is a wood or the station / central)". Di Carracchia has the conclusion, disarming and profound together:
La nostra prova del nove
eccola qua, la più autentica
benedizione: aderire pienamente,
nient’altro che una questione
di grammatica primitiva,
di sintassi del reale.
Just learn to speak, with the poet, the language of life: “la prima persona incontra / la seconda e insieme / declinano la prima plurale”…