Davide Rondoni. Life, Heartbeat That Keeps the Rhythm

January 18, 2006 In Davide Rondoni’s poetry, it is the vitality, rather than the vitalism that has impressed me for a decade by now.

I recall that his writing, which was still confined to a small local publisher from his native Forlì, came to me in my university years with the resolution and clarity of a gesture that begins an adventure. After Il bar del tempo (The Bar of Time, 1999), admirers as well as sceptics multiplied. The new book published by Guanda was therefore eagerly awaited as the crucial test for a young author already in competition. After some uncertainty regarding the title (originally Magnesium Eyes), the book came out in mid-2003 with a sympathetic cover blurb by Ezio Raimondi (Avrebbe Amato Chiunque, He Would Have Loved Anyone). Immediately Rondoni’s muse appears in the title and then in the beginning of the book with “To Love a Person”: it is about the claim to love, to embrace all. It is a type of virile, strong yearning for the will (in perpetual tension) to not let anyone get away, to not permit anything to get lost.

For better or for worse, one cannot understand this work without starting from here:

To love one, one thousand, all
is like holding the map in the wind.
One cannot manage but my heart
they’ve put it at the centre of my chest
for this high, marvellous failure.

To love everyone also means complying with every thing, detail, accident:

he who
follows the lines on the hands of the birch
and perceives the loosening of molecules,
the tiny news item
like something that concerns his love?

In poetry, it means bringing to the page the light and yet convulsive flow of days and slight encounters, the drinks and pauses between a highway, an airplane, and a train, for in these verses all is travel and movement, with the unstoppable propulsion of mystery at the centre.

Bringing life to the page: the fact is that Rondoni does it or tries to do it in ways that are quite different from those of the ‘Lombardi’, from someone like Giudici, or, to mention someone closer to his generation, Cucchi. He is not interested in the fact itself, the anecdote, the trifle, and the objectivity but in opening wide the sense that is implied in every banal instant in a life. On the other hand, the revelation is not (as is true for certain poets with an aesthetic pose) drawn out of the flux of existence, but planted in its centre, a diamond that shines in the fire, a flash of lightning in the tempest of living. In this grasping of life and its substance, he is actually closer to Pasolini, Luzi, a certain Testori (the playwright rather than the poet) and goes back in time to Michelangelo Buonarroti, who represents for Rondoni a vigour of stile that shatters every manner, a plastic energy that keeps fury in balance and placates it.

Rondoni’s language is the ‘dirtiest’ that can be found today in poetry: bar, video, cell phones, newspapers, Eurostar trains are the things, the ingredients that make it up. Naturalness and antiliterariness are its sirens. The point is that in the bulk of his work (or at least in the best part of it) he manages to take the everyday, natural language of news and reality and make it come alive in a music reinvented by the force of rhyme, accents, of heartbeats within verses that become frayed:

Caress wind these roofs,
plates, tiles and children on the terraces, my
glass, tell me
something of love
don’t omit anything
leave behind only the laments, but
truly all the rest of life,
songs, noise of enjoying, silence and majesty,
long sighs and cut off breath
propose, wind, propose!
(from ‘Blues Tonight of the Wind’)

There is a vein of ease, an eloquence in this writing from inside the sound and the motion of days, from the inside of highway voyages and the fury of living all just to manage to see the motion of the resurrection in things (Rondoni is a reverse mystic, someone who immerses himself in life and experiences every nuance in order to reach beyond). So it is not surprising that almost at the same time that the Guanda book came out, Rondoni published a basically private edition of a collection of 99 poems (Cuore di mattina, Heart of Morning, Edisai Edizioni) written on the occasion of the birth of a baby girl from Bologna.

To say that these poems are occasional is both correct (there are echoes of themes and attitudes of the ‘major’ poems) and limiting: the birth is the observatory for feeling all the danger, the fire, the starting up of life. It’s the beginning of something that has no end, no bottom, and no centre but for the mystery of Christ who dies with arms outstretched to welcome us; this is what is sung here, in verses punctuated by rhymes in the manner of Caproni, in the sense that they are like probes, magnets, and musical traps that are less superficial than musically essential:

And occasionally stop in front of that large extra large hospital
where you were born
and where for many life stopped –

you are in that instant of strange contemplation
in that high station
of existence, and watch

watch carefully to whom everything belongs
that which comes and that which goes
watch to see if in your heart smiles
a veil of terror or a profound Reality.

I would not bet the stakes on perfection, on such poetry’s absence of faults, which brings together the vital anxiety of Pasolini (for the world, for things, for Italy’s beautiful landscape) with that of Luzi (strained to the incandescence of the divine): I would gamble, however (and as a critic I do so) on the power that shines in the poetry, on the life that passes through it, in spite of the repetitions, the literary suggestions, and the loss of tension. Rondoni is a poet whom you can love or detest: he is someone who forces you to take him or leave him. It is a good idea to reckon with Rondoni, even for those who are distant from him. It is what we owe his claim and the harsh bet that he has forced himself to place, in life even before on the page.