Where are the poets? 5 poems for 2021

In 1845, Elizabeth Barrett Browning he asked himself: “Where are the poets? I look everywhere for our ancestors and I don’t see any ». Things have changed. There poetry made by women – done, both because poetry comes from the Greek poieo, which means “to do”, and because producing, creating, has always been a profession for women – it is a vibration which is spreading by contagion. It comes from far away, from a time when the first woman was called Sappho. It has traveled through the millennia karst, re-emerging where he found cracks in the ground and how the blood of a saint, coagulating or dissolving for the benefit of its followers.

Over the past two hundred years, it has grown from thin a chorus. That of the “voice” is more than a metaphor: poets today go in search of a voice, their own, that can be made before testimony, then resistance and finally, Revolution.

Let’s start 2021 with the poems of five poets. Three are Italian (Chandra Livia Candiani, Viola Lo Moro e Alessandra Racca), due foreigners (Ida Vitale is the greatest living Uruguayan poet, while Aracelis Girmay comes from California).

Elegia
di Don’t Enter Aracelis

What to do with awareness
that our life is not guaranteed?
Maybe one day you will touch the young branch
of something splendid. & will grow & will grow
despite your birthdays & death certificate,
& someday it will shade the heads of something splendid
or he will make himself useful to the nest. Go out
from your home, therefore, believing it.
Nothing else matters.

Everywhere above us is the touching
of strangers & parakeets,
some of them human,
some of them non-human.

Listen to me. I tell you
a real thing. This is the only realm.
The realm of touching;
the touches of disappearing, of disappearing things.

New American Poetry 2 (BlackCoffee): the second volume of the new American poem directed by John Freeman and Damiano Abeni for the Tuscan publishing house BlackCoffee has just come out. Here are anthologized Kim Addonizio, Garrett Hongo, Lawrence Joseph, Kay Ryan, Kevin Young and the 43-year-old Aracelis Girmay, Californian author of three rather important collections (the last, in 2016, is entitled The Black Maria). His poem wears the stigmata of violence against people of color, the wounds that from the flesh still arrive open in words. Here too the body is central, as in the beautiful lyric that gives the title to one of his books, Kingdom Animalia, dedicated to his brother and which ends like this: «Oh, body, be tight now by those you love. / Whole years will be spent under these impossible stars / when mud will be the only animal that sleeps with you / & touches you / with its mouth ».

Survival

Give me night
the granted hopes,
not your peace,
give me prodigy,
finally give me a piece,
slice of heaven,
your closed garden,
your songless wings.
Give me, as soon as I close
the eyes of my face,
your dream hands
that drive and that freeze,
what I will have to find,
give me, like a sword,
that path that passes
on the edge of fear,
a moon without a shadow,
a barely heard music
and already learned,
give me, night, truth
for me alone,
and time for me alone,
survival.

Pilgrim listening by Ida Vitale (Bompiani): born in 1923, Ida Vitale is one of the most important living poets of her country, Uruguay, which at some point, in the seventies, had to abandon due to the dictatorial regime. She left him for Mexico, where she came into contact with the poet Octavio Paz, who made her join the staff of the magazine Return and, consequently, in that group of intellectuals who gave shape, in the second half of the last century, to Latin American literature. Vitale, returned to her homeland, edited the cultural pages for important newspapers and then settled in Texas. Now she is back in Montevideo, and despite her being an important and shining voice, only now she arrives in Italy in this anthology that collects the work of 70 years of poetry.

Letter to myself

I will take you where to hatch
it is delicate, like a butterfly wing
not a scalpel but hinted flights,
hesitating. There will be street lights in the evening
barely lit and fresh air
of snow in summer.
Many friends will have their windows lit,
silent and musical friends, friends.
Someone will pick you up at the station,
will bring you your suitcase and fresh water.
You will be sound and also dance step,
bandaged feet will be winged
on the warm asphalt and there will be breath
of lime trees. A midnight
will wait for you in company,
Mozart’s Allegro on the turntable,
open windows and ironed sheets,
white. It looks like death, right?
I tell you that sometimes life is like this.
Love that baptizes the drift.

The question of thirst by Chandra Livia Candiani (Einaudi): recently, the Milanese poet of 1952, one of the most important in our country (together with Gualtieri, Cavalli, Anedda, Bre, Valduga, Calandrone, Lamarque, Frabotta: this list, clearly incomplete, is put here to underline the quantity of quality female poetry we have in Italy, and the poor visibility that, instead, is reserved for it), he decided to leave his city and move to a village of his Piedmontese companion. From there, he held for the header Double zero a Notebook, the story of his choice, his life, isolation, nature, friendship with the forest and with the character Pippo Magique, which is one of the most beautiful things you can read in this period. The question of thirst, released in the second half of 2020, collects poems written since 2016 divided into 6 parts starting from the “boat body” up to the “inhabitants of wonder” teeming with life that Candiani describes as follows: “The soul of animals / spotted with stripes with scales / with spotted feathers / alive and resounding ». And she has to bow, because “you never know what the right prayer is /”.

Cheerful heart

“Keep your heart merry”
you told me

the voice albeit thread
assertive.

The cheerful heart I don’t know
how it is sprinkled.

I imagine a deer
a river
the breakdown of the sun
on the water
fire defying the dark:
the cheerful heart.

I imagine
the smell of winter mornings
burned in the dawn.

I think: how do I keep my heart there?

A fishing line in traction
ironed more than a wet hair
it would be easier to say yes
that yes, I keep it

it would be easy to lie to a dying man
but not before hearing the backlash
of the broken thread.

I keep my heart cheerful.

Cheerful heart by Viola Lo Moro (Giulio Perrone): Lo Moro, born in 1985, has just made his debut as this yellow book lined with heart. Composed of four parts (like the aforementioned organ), it carries the verses of Anedda in the exergue of the first, and this is a guarantee. They are not at all tender lyrics (after all, the poem that opens the collection begins like this: “Tender is the night I thought / but it’s not true”), but pointed and hooked, where the entrails mix with the humors to knead the human, because “we are compost”, as Donna Haraway said. Thus one enters the bedrooms, of lovers and of the sick, to await careless sleep and to pray to the rhythm of the infusions. With Cheerful heart, Lo Moro performed a small miracle of wonder and hid it in coffers which, after all, only ask to be stripped naked.

I’m forty years old
by Alessandra Racca

Forty years of mother are measured:
too many
so good
you will be tired
everyone has their own times the body does not
you should have.

What have you been doing all this time?

I collected the minutes
I loved the hours
I explored the latter
I filled the trunk
I chose the words
I waited for the right time, ours
when the time has come to tell you:
come, son, let’s start playing.

The palace of Venus (Edizioni Sartoria Utopia): the authors of this collection published by the precious Milanese artisan publishing house write in the preface: “This anthology talks about desire and is written by poets who use poetry to know the world starting from themselves”. And then they continue, poetic manifesto: «The words are arranged horizontally, vertically, undermine the syntax, escape from the metric cage, evade spelling, don’t care about punctuation. They run and stand still, exhibit and hide. They do as they please. ” This is what poets usually do, they start from their own body in order not to be mistaken, to maintain perspective, and although this minimal gaze has been exiled for millennia from the “great” poetry, which was the male one, today it reveals itself in all its power generative and universal. Starting from the poetic series by Alessandra Racca, which tells the stages of a pregnancy in verse in such a vivid way that it seems to touch this feathered child who is born, testimony of a “mammalian form of love”.

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