In the Beginning of the World. An interview with Davide Rondoni

January 18, 2006 G.F. In the first poem of your book Il bar del tempo you declare: “I don’t want to become old/ because I have been that already a thousand times”. This affirmation of yours seems to contradict two successive texts in which there is almost a ‘hymn to seeing’: you write “it would be enough to see . . . it would be enough to see . . . ” My question is, how is it possible to keep together this kind of ‘old age wisdom’, with your invitation to see, which as Pascoli said, is the special quality of children, and therefore of youth, who are curious about the world and know how to watch it?

D.R. As you noted, in my text old age is understood as wisdom and therefore can refer to any age, regardless of chronology. Therefore, old age means “he who already knows everything”, but at the same time is also immobile in this state. On the other hand, youth, in my opinion, has nothing to do with age, but is an intrinsic condition of life; it is part of the structure of reality, of its birth, death and rebirth. In this sense, even youth belongs to everyone, in every moment of life. Old age and youth are not just different biological conditions, but represent diverse attitudes toward life: one is immobility and the condition of possession while the other is discovery, curiosity, movement.

G.F. Even the verbs that you use indicate a difficult condition. Does the conditional tense “it would be enough to see that it is evening…”, serve to indicate that it is a quality that must be acquired and is difficult to obtain?

D.R. More than anything, what is difficult is the condition that is at the base: freedom. The free man is someone who stays in contact with life, who feels it; the slave lets himself be ‘transported’ by others or by something that is already predetermined in him. He is not in direct contact with the world; he does not belong to it. It is a sharp blade, a slight but fundamental difference. Therefore, I write in the conditional to say that “it would be enough”, after all… and yet … this is someone who prefers not to belong but keeps to himself, and is a prisoner. He seems to be comfortable, but it is the condition of slavery.

Everyone is full of prejudices and preconceptions and for this reason they forget things, they don’t see the world around them, nor their true present. But it would take very little, to be in the world . . .

G.F. I find your choice of a verb to indicate ambivalence interesting: that which is easy is at the same time difficult, not in and of itself, but because of everything that culture, habits and our conventions have placed between us and reality.

D.R. Yes, it’s true. On the other hand, reason itself, like knowledge, if not born from experience, from contact with the world, is just abstract knowledge, which is after all useless for understanding ourselves and the world.

G.F. Another text of yours comes to mind, in which you assail certain poets and a certain type of poetry: “too many inspections have bent the back of writing, it’s time for a new writing”. Further, in another text: “the poet of this post-pasolinian era is not lacking in breath, but the poetry is a sharp blow . . . ” I wonder if you feel a sort of fatigue and limit in the poetry that circulates and is read today and if so, why this happens in your opinion?

D.R. We are children of an epoch that has seen the prevalent figure of the intellectual and the poet as a disappointed man, someone who has been disappointed by life beforehand. All this has given rise to great poetry and great reflections, but now I think it’s time to stop thinking of the poet as someone who has been disappointed by life and experience and therefore writes about it. And I am thinking of so many who have conveyed to us the idea that literature is born when, let’s say, the game with the world is already over. At most, you arrive at a cold truce, as in Sereni. On the other hand, only rarely do you find a poetry that contains the will to live, the need for a voyage of understanding, of confronting oneself with the world. I’m thinking of Mario Luzi, a master who has formed me profoundly, and who already in 1938 wrote in a critical way of this condition of “preventive disappointment” of the poet and how it has damaged the relationship between poetry and the public.

G.F. I’m thinking of the title of a very beautiful book by Luzi, Al fuoco della controversia (At the Fire of Controversy), which emphasizes the actual act of being in the centre of poetry, where life burns and you fight . . . something very different from giving up! Perhaps what you say could be one of the reasons for the distance between many young people and poetry; perhaps they are aware of the position “of defeat”, precisely, “of giving up”, which does not coincide with the relationship with life that youth demands.

D.R. I understand the position of a man disappointed by life . . . I understand it, of course. I don’t understand how this condition can become a topic of literature, something like the only one . . . it seems to me a bit much. The beginning of Calvino’s Six Lessons for the Next Millennium is striking: the author says, and I’m quoting from memory, that the world is turning into stone and the only possibility for the person of letters is the famous “leap of Cavalcanti”, that is, the ‘lightness’ of literature. I do not at all agree with this invitation by Calvino, I do not believe that the world is becoming petrified, nor do I accept the consequent position of gloomy lightness in literature.

G.F. Getting back to your book, I want to ask you why, what is the meaning of the fact that in several of your poems you refer to singers, sometimes to singer-songwriters – I’m thinking of Vasco Rossi, but you also quote Tina Turner and others. The relationship between poetry and song is controversial and has often been discussed. What do you think?

D.R. I think that for a generation like yours, like ours, songs and especially some songwriters have had an importance that cannot be underestimated. Music is part of daily life, for this reason it seems forced not to quote songwriters in poetry. In addition, it must be said that even our language and feelings have been influenced by songs. Of course, the great differences in language remain, as well as the difficulty of writing. Then there are also differences in how the works are received by the public. Therefore, I do not at all want to say that the two things are comparable, but music is part of our lives and thus makes its way into my poetry.

G.F. It is also evident that when you recite your texts you use a very precise rhythm of reading, a rhythm that comes close to rap. Why? Perhaps because rap is the music that tells of everyday life, everyone’s life, and young people like it because of its immediacy? Or are there other reasons?

D.R. I think there are also reasons that cannot be grasped or explained perhaps . . . aside from factors of sheer personal taste or personal experience. I certainly have a desire to bring to light, on the communicative level, the value of poetry which I feel to be against time, as opposed to small talk, to common, everyday speech. In this sense, for me poetry can have rap as a reference, since it is a kind of music that takes into account oppositions. However, I must say that I don’t even know if my way of reading is close to rap: I don’t listen to very much rap. I have to say that I read my poems the way I heard them and hear them dictate their progression inside of me.

G.F. What I want to stress about your way of reading the texts is that one grasps your texts as lyrical and even metaphysical while reading them. But the way you read them . . . lowers their tone, brings them closer to the spoken word, underscores the fractures of rhyme and hardens the meaning. Listening to you, it really seems that you want to impart a new way of making poetry and make it reach the public, even young people. This way is different from the poetic tradition, which, while elevating tones sometimes to the point of rhetoric, distances poetry from everyday life.

D.R. Sure . . . it could be.

G.F. I want to talk to you about another aspect of your poetry: the theme of night, which is found so often in this collection. I quote your verses: “there are nights that are as grievous as massacres, others that are light. They are dreams that pass quickly, like shock in feminine glances”. The night seems to reveal something and is not frightening; then as a mirror image, there is the value of discovery represented by dawn. It’s as if darkness and light existed as indissoluble states of opening up to experience and life. There are poems that take place in the middle of the day, it’s true, but the poetry tells of these topical moments. Why?

D.R. You’re right. Night. First of all, because I have a pretty nocturnal life, for various reasons and because of commitments. Instead, dawn is for me a call that I would define as biological; in fact, even if I have slept too little or not at all, I often wake up while the sun is rising, or before, in anticipation of it. Maybe I’m photosensitive, I don’t know. Dawn, on the other hand, is really the moment in which everything begins again, in while everything can be done, in which things really return to light. For me, night and dawn are moments that highlight the senses.

G.F. There are also many female figures in your texts: young women, little girls, your daughter, your wife, faces and bodies of women. Of course, we know that woman has always been central in literature and the meaning that you give to the female figure emerges pretty clearly in your texts. But I would like you to tell me something more about the meaning that woman has for you and for your writing. I’m thinking of the “angel-like woman” of tradition, of sublime women, of absent bodies . . .

D.R. I think the most synthetic thing I could say is that the female figure has to do with birth, which is always a miracle, with the beginning, which is the fire that attracts in an encounter with beauty, with love . . . We are made to begin always . . . A lot of people must have said this much better than me, but that’s really the way it is . . . And then I want to say that a certain restrictive idea of the “angel-like” woman does not correspond to the truth, in the sense that it was superimposed afterwards. This is because it’s not true that women did not exist, with their physical presence and their bodies, in the poetry of those centuries by now distant a millennium and from which we also descend. Let’s think of the gesture of greeting, of the glance . . . placed at the centre of poetry, for example Dante in La vita nuova (The New Life), gestures that were very loaded, they signified the presence and therefore not the absence of women and their bodies.

G.F. Sure, you’re right, but it’s undeniable that in the poetic tradition the female figure has always had the role of intermediary, of bringing man – thanks to the joy and suffering of love – to a spiritual elevation. In this sense woman was a bit like the figure of the angel who exists, of course, but in so far as mediator toward the perfection of the divine, and therefore represents the elevation from the life of the body. In your texts, on the other hand, women are surrounded by a mysterious aura, moreover not very idealized: they are present with their reality and this makes them beautiful of course, but also human, imperfect . . . and perhaps for this reason worthy of love. Am I mistaken?

D.R. For me the female figure is not a mere pretext, but a “weekday miracle”, something that activates meaning and is significant in and of itself. Women remain, however, mysterious presences, which are not to be revealed. On the other hand, time and love go together, they are made of two different “materials”, I would say, but they have the same “honour” as I say in a poem. On a different level, the experience that a man has of time and love proves to be totally different from that of a woman. Or at least it is for the most part, even if times change. For man there’s the going, but woman remains. She guards, sustains life, the home, she is the tie . . .

G.F. Even with respect to women, therefore, you situate yourself in two places, balanced between lived/livable experience and yet always in a mysterious dimension of life. I have to say, however, that your women are always present with gestures that are often of protection, like that of the “hand on the breast”, which appears in one of your texts. Gestures that rescue from pain, from solitude. I ask you if there is a possible relationship, therefore, between women – since they guard – and poetry, given that you often say that “poetry guards”?

D.R. Poetry has inside itself the custody of language, of memory, of life that is lived. The custody should not, however, be that of a museum which puts life under glass! In addition, poetry has nothing to do with science, which puts things “under formaldehyde”; poetry on the other hand, “guards the cut”, that is, life in its fragments, in pain, in precariousness.

G.F. Another central element, evident even in the title, is time. In your The Bar of Time there are grandparents, children, ourselves. What kind of relationship do you have with time?

D.R. To tell the truth, I don’t think about it much, at least in the sense of oppression and fear, actually I have a positive idea: the time that I have lived, with all that it means. Even with death. The question of the relationship with time in poetry is another story, beyond that of the biographical relationship. I am not interested in poetry that is a philosophical reflection on time, but in the relationship with existential time.

G.F. I’d like to quote the verses that refer to your grandfather: “you were the first to show me the horizon/ the escape and the natural union of sky and earth”. It seems important to me that you underline here both the escape of things and their staying put, the fact that they remain and make sense. And it seems to me that this once again puts the accent on your sentiment as a poet, which I would say is capable of showing the “double”: you see that everything flows and is lost, and yet everything has a sense . . . a sense that contains and surpasses man. Nature and poetry, again, are in a close relationship.

D.R. It is important for me to grasp the link between the particular and the absolute, between the individual and the whole. Time, if grasped in its most formal aspect, flows. But that’s not all. It’s about not thinking of literature as a library that preserves and immobilizes life.

G.F. I’m thinking about a philosopher I love very much, who I did my thesis on, George Simmel. He wrote about the piercing contrast between life and form, reaffirming that form crystallizes and kills life and its movement. And you, as a poet, what relationship do you see between form and living language, between feeling and its expression in a form?

D.R. I continue to look for a form for my poems. I don’t have a rule, I look for the form that can express what I want to say. Even if these days there is a return to form, to neo-formalism like in every epoch of Hellenism and neo-classicism, I don’t believe in the retrieval of closed forms as a system, as a definitive rule. I don’t think it’s impossible to use them, if one believes that they are useful for a certain feeling of poetry.

G.F. You’re a believer, aren’t you? As a Christian, what is your vision of time and death?

D.R. Of course, since I’m a Christian, I feel the questions of form and time in a decisive way. Christianity is not only a religion, or a particular idea of time and death, which would not be very interesting. It’s something different. In fact, at the centre there is the aspiration to a truly human form of life, in the sense that life has a dramatic tension to discover its destiny, the meaning of its form. If God, the Mystery who does everything, has taken a human form, if He has become flesh, then it means that for human form, destiny and meaning are Great, Absolute. There is no longer anything that is not valid in this meaning.

Christianity has always valued the non-sceptical relationship with form, it’s enough to think that Christ is a living form in history, the Church. And think of the fortune that we have all had, believers and non, for the anti-iconoclastic defence of the Church . . . We would not have our great artistic masterpieces . . .

G.F. The Christ figure is without a doubt extraordinary, not only in a religious sense. I have always been struck by the fact that Christ is the divine presence in man, God’s “becoming flesh”, the fact of God being present in life. On the other hand, I don’t understand very much in what sense Christ is connected – as you say – to form: why is the incarnation connected to form?

D.R. If it is true, the incarnation of Christ is without a doubt the most important event in history. Even the great Dostoyevski said so. The incarnation means that the divine takes a human form, it’s life in its entirety, it’s humanity full of the divine. And, with the resurrection, it’s the breaking through the gloomy horizon of death. Every human form is seen in its dignity, even in the midst of signs of its flaws, or its horror . . .

G.F. The religious theme, in your texts, emerges in a powerful yet always very personal way, which is interesting even for me, not a believer in a strict sense. I’m thinking of the beautiful text of the book in which you write that God has a “tiger’s snout” and the “glance of a woman who gave birth”. A God, therefore, who is power, force, and even love, according to the Christian tradition, but you find intense images that are not from the usual iconography. Further, I’m thinking of the text in which you write about Christ – after excluding in a list everywhere that Christ could not be (“you are not . . . ”) – you end up saying that Christ is “among the bottles”, in the “bread broken up into pieces”, on the table. In conclusion, God/Christ is a daily presence: the God you write about is here, close to humans?

D.R. If it weren’t so, it wouldn’t make sense and one could not make poetry out of it. Seeing him present in my days . . .

G.F. I also wanted to ask you about the theme of adolescence. There are many old people and children, but also many adolescents in your texts. How do you feel about adolescence and young people nowadays? Also, how do you think that they can approach poetry?

D.R. I speak from my own experience, from going and reading to young people. It seems to me that on the one hand today’s society feels the need to really take risks. There is such a richness of life in adolescence, a sort of total risk between losing or winning the battle with life. For this reason it is worth the trouble to stay in touch with adolescents, who have the force of life inside them. Besides, since the figures of Euryalus and Nisus, sung by Virgil, or even earlier in the young warriors of Homer, there is a sense of all this in poetry . . . Today, there is a great “war”, I would say, over the bodies and minds of young people, who can be overwhelmed by cynicism and scepticism. Today the word education is fundamental, but it seems to be used too lightly these days. At times, youth is used by unscrupulous adults, only to make money off the lives of young people. On the other hand, there are possibilities that young people can look to adults to find “windows” on the world, contacts with the world that can give meaning to their lives.

G.F. Do you pose yourself the problem of reaching young people with your poetry? Do you ask yourself what kind of language to use in order to be understood, in order to touch them, or not?

D.R. I don’t pose myself the problem, but I certainly do care about reaching them. When I write I do it in the way that I am capable and it seems to me, the way that works best, but I do not have the reader in mind as someone who influences my writing. I see that there are many young people who respond to poetry . . .

G.F. I’m curious about something: when you write, are you a poet who corrects himself thousands of times, whose texts have infinite variations, or do you write a poem and – you could say, it stays that way, with the first draft being definitive or almost? Do you take notes and then put them to together to build a text?

D.R. There are no rules, not even for this: some poems come to me in a flash, but in the majority of cases, I have to change them, to check them. It’s work that’s long, painstaking, terrible. At times it can become an obsession. Like painters who sleep at the foot of their frescoes. As far as writing is concerned, I have to say that in order to write, it is fundamental for me to manage to get into the movement of a scene, the story that stirs inside a life, in a face or in a gesture.

G.F. I want to ask you if it is only my impression or if it is something exact: it seems to me that there is something of the poetic choice of Pavese inn your poetry – I’m thinking of Lavorare stanca (Hard Labour) and not only! There’s an attention to places and people, but also long verses, the spoken word that enters the text. And then, there is the symbolic dimension, even with the realism of the scenes. Did Pavese count for you, for your formation?

D.R. I really can’t say, I have very little memory. Maybe he acted inside me, but I’m not conscious of it. Someone told me that there is a lot of Ungaretti, even Montale. But I haven’t asked myself how much. Pavese: well, I have to say that rereading him really struck me, there’s an aspect- maybe you’re actually right- and I feel I have something in common with him, with the poetic quest that is also Pavese’s and . . . I’m referring to what he calls “story-image”. Yes, in this expression that he uses, I see something that is very similar to my work.

G.F. Exactly, that’s want I wanted to say: you don’t just see an element in and of itself, isolated from the context, you don’t see it in a symbolic or emblematic sense. You look for its history, you look for the voice that can tell us what we don’t see, that was there before and that will be there later. It’s really similar to Pavese’s idea of the“story-image”. It seems interesting, isn’t it? Then there’s also the theme of women, which is similar to Pavese: women guard and rescue and – at the same time – they are incomprehensible; there is also the theme of nature, the natural elements that make up the overall sense of the world. Of course, Pavese was not a believer! But it seems to me that you fit into that poetic tradition – if one can speak of tradition, given Pavese’s isolated reputation as a poet – rather than into the hermetic tradition.

D.R. I have to think about it.

G.F. I’m also interested in the way you write about places, the way you grasp both their spatiality and temporality. There’s Milan, Naples, Bologna. What is the importance of places and lived life?

D.R. Like all people from Romagna, I have a very strong relationship with my land, with Forlì. Even if I’ve been living in Bologna for 15 years, I do not feel Bolognese. I’ve never been interested in travel literature, and yet places for me have something “numinous” about them, in which the essence is revealed: I’m thinking especially about cities, where there are strong divisions between classes, between rich and poor, where there are hardships . . . I take great pleasure in seeing the differences between cities. I use names of places in order to seize the differences, even the physical ones, I don’t like them to disappear inside the “neutral place” of words, so I mention piazzas, bars, streets . . .

G.F. But you are different from other poets who mention only some places. I’m thinking of the Milan poets, who use the names of streets and piazzas, but only of Milan . . . as if the poetry were almost a “prisoner” inside this city.

D.R. Yes, it’s true, but I travel so much in my life, I’m kind of always travelling and then, I like to move, even just around the streets of my neighbourhood, in unlikely hours.

G.F. It’s interesting to hear your version of how you see, for example, Milan or Naples, which are foreign to you, but with which you like to compare yourself. One last thing I want to ask: besides Luzi, whom you already mentioned, what other “fathers” do you feel like remembering? That character you mention in the book comes to mind . . .

D.R. Of course, Father Giussani, for my human and religious formation. And in poetry I think of Luzi, Testori, then Professor Ezio Raimondi, these are the three figures I recognise the most for my formation. After all, life and literature are inseparable, otherwise literature ends. If I forget life and people, then poetry becomes sterile, you withdraw into your own world. I think, beyond rhetoric, that it’s important to deal with civil coexistence, which really calls into question one’s own work. Not in the sense that it’s a topic, but that certain experiences really cast doubt, they test us and they are the verification of literature itself.

G.F. Lastly, with respect to your 2001 book Non sei morto amore (You Are Not Dead, Love) – a book that has a kind of “poematic” structure – was it born all at once, or text after text? How was it constructed? And why did you want to do it?

D.R. From the formal point of view, I was very impressed by a book by an American poet, (right now I don’t remember her name, nor the name of the book), where she tries to tell a story in poetic form, without writing an actual poem, but through the combination of autonomous texts that are related to each other. I found something similar in Dorothy Porter, the Australian author of The Monkey’s Mask, I believe it’s called . . . A book that I liked less than the American one, but with similar formal questions. Then circumstances went their own way . . . and this book was born. There are many cities in this book, but above all: New York, Bologna, Genoa.

G.F. Apart from Luzi’s critical note, where he reaffirms that here “love divides itself in two, it’s true, but it remains one and its parousia and recognition are the offering of a nocturnal incursion.” He then goes on to emphasize the polysemous nature of the figure of love and the numerous meanings that can be read between your lines, I ask if the love you write about is a symbol of the poet, of life itself and Christ. Or is it something else for you?

D.R. The reader will see what is visible in this odd vision. I wouldn’t say that the diverse hypotheses are mutually exclusive. In my opinion, there is a portrait that is central, and I say this after having written the entire book – in which I write “Don’t cry, says love . . . ” In this text the reference to Christ is explicit (“you are the one who died and rose again”) as is the reference to the episode in which Christ says to Nain’s widow who is accompanying her only child who has died “Don’t cry” . . . A strange madness . . . Love is real love only if it is capable of consoling with firmness the pain of a mother who has lost her child; otherwise it is useless, it is too simple . . . Christ is the bearer of an existential message and it can be addressed to all. After all, if this kind of love exists, then everything makes sense . . .

G.F. In your book is there also a desire to talk again about love that has been too used up, in cinema and television in addition to literature?

D.R. Certainly, it’s fundamental for me to ask questions about love and it makes sense because love is at the centre of life. I also want to tell you something that took place after the text: a musician read it and wrote a blues piece that went well with the flow of the text . . . And we performed it this way in many cities, like a blues poem . . .

G.F. I really like the fact that the entire text has been left, as if you wanted to allow your poetry to be reflective, but also simple or close to the people. And then what I would call your “poetics of the glance” emerges again clearly: your invitation to see, your creating poetry that starts by wanting to see, which completely overturns the weight of the images that seem to look at us today, more than ever it seems to me. Your writing, instead, pushes us, invites us to look again at the world and at things in order to see them or see them again, in order to understand them. Lastly, I’d like to ask: is the poet here acting as Virgil to love or not?

D.R. No, he is not acting as Virgil . . . Not intentionally at least. He’s more of a taxi driver, someone who gives a ride . . . You talked about looking . . . I think you always learn by watching and you always learn from others. There is therefore the use of glances, from inside the car, beyond the glass, through the city that is being crossed, creating a relationship between the two that is almost educational and changes who is watching. Neither of the two knows everything from the beginning . . .

G.F. If no one is a guide, but both learn, then, we repeat, the relationship with others, with the world is fundamental for you.

D.R. Yes, poetry is never born of solitude. Solitude can only give rise to narcissism, the logic of puns and of form in and of itself. You write a text in solitude, but true poetry is born of life that is lived, of its relationships, not from being closed off from the world, as we said in the beginning.

G.F. Even this book takes place between night and dawn. And I read from the final part of your text, which seems to me full of hope: “It is dawn but it is not this faint fever/ that puts life in hearts:/ but the calls of love/ in the territory that we thought / plundered,/ it’s things, their blues, the sons and daughters/ asleep, the door/ rusty, the young girl’s bike ride,/ their low voice, that/ clear voice.” You turn your careful attention to the details of the things of life and then there’s also a glance of hope. I don’t want to be rhetorical. Am I mistaken?

D.R. Hope is not at all rhetoric, because it makes the world and life go around . . . Hope is tied to life, it’s the beginning of life every day, it’s being in the world. It’s about asking yourself what to hope for, that’s the problem. Rhetoric happens when real hopes don’t coincide with what you declare, just for the sake of making an ideological or moralistic statement. You say that you hope for values that in reality have never been seen, that have no home and don’t move life. But life is, in and of itself, hope, for this reason I don’t think this theme should be avoided in poetry . . . unless it’s a pretence, a mere external declaration. Hope for me is always hope in fertility, in infinity, both in life and in poetry.