Artikel
Do poets dream of electric sheep?
18 januari 2006
Elaborating a strong poetics is the only acceptable (and possible) sign of discernment. Elaborating a strong poetics means giving an interpretation of the world, providing if not a kind of metaphysics then a kind of physics. Recognising every atom of the world and making it orbit in a new cloud of meaning.
Unlike our predecessors, we run with feet that are definitively twisted, with heels outstretched. In reality every race ahead is a slipping back: this explains the indiscriminate reflux of the trace. Each of our poems is the revival, with that personal touch that is not denied to anyone of good will, of past poetics: the Lombard line, expressionism, hermetism, neo-orphism. These are, in fact, strong poetics that have a lasting influence, even to this day. (Fernando Baldini wrote: “The young poets of these years . . . all resemble each other like the Chinese”).
I demand a poetry that realises that it has entered the 21st century, the third millennium.
I demand a poetry that looks ahead, and no longer looks back.
I demand a poetry that knows how to go beyond modernism, the usual medicine that crops up when we talk about facing the problems of being people of today.
I demand that we become fully aware that our most intimate friends are called computer, television, cinema and internet. Why are the legends of film not found in our poetry: Charlie Chaplin (I remember a striking poem by O’Neill, ‘Charlotarde’), James Dean, or even the more Italian Totò, Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani? Why do we linger with obsolete and far away mythologies? So-called mytho-modernism is the latest disaster of this type. The reign of Montezuma for a frame of Marilyn Monroe?
I demand a poetry that talks about refuse, which is the highest architectonic profile of an urban center.
These are the true épaves of our times, statues of glass and plastic. A poetry that talks about the drama of machines, humble servants of man, and the drama of man, deluded master of machines. A poetry that finally deals critically and sensitively with multi-ethnicity, with the thousands of immigrants that have redefined human morphology in Italy.
Let’s look at the Americans: Ammons, William Carlos Williams, O’Hara. Enough of continental poets (the French, German, Spanish). At most, let’s look at the English: Tony Harrison’s A Cold Coming is a dizzying mixture of ethics, politics, language, and battle. Making poetry about and against McDonald’s, but with lightness, without ideological proclamations. But I don’t want the results to be the little poems of Aldo Nove, so poor and insistent, and non-existent, because they lack a true replenishing outlook.
There is probably a turning point: that imagination has been burned out by internet: every cell, every fragment of reality has been filmed and stored there. Connecting to sites like rotten.com means experiencing the most aberrant corporal deformations and humiliations. We no longer need to imagine the horror; we are constantly connected to it.
We don’t talk about Internet by naming it, it’s a trap; we don’t talk about cybernetics if not just alluding to it. Realising a poetics starting from these places (Marc Augé would say non-places, upside-down utopias) is not going to be easy or immediate. It will require rather long periods of reflection, the verification of the degree of assimilation that certain realities have reached, as well as new work on the concept of myth. A new scheme of metaphors. We can do nothing else; we have reached the last stop, ladies and gentlemen.
Heidegger, in The Question of Technics: “the essence of Technics is not at all something technical, since the heart of Technics is not technical, it is necessary that meditation on the essence of Technics and the decisive confrontation with it take place in a sphere that is on the one hand akin to the essence of Technics and on the other is fundamentally distinct from it. Such a sphere is art.”
Uniting the pulsations of a circuit to those of the human heart.
Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo
From Atelier 24 (2001), p. 8.
Unlike our predecessors, we run with feet that are definitively twisted, with heels outstretched. In reality every race ahead is a slipping back: this explains the indiscriminate reflux of the trace. Each of our poems is the revival, with that personal touch that is not denied to anyone of good will, of past poetics: the Lombard line, expressionism, hermetism, neo-orphism. These are, in fact, strong poetics that have a lasting influence, even to this day. (Fernando Baldini wrote: “The young poets of these years . . . all resemble each other like the Chinese”).
I demand a poetry that realises that it has entered the 21st century, the third millennium.
I demand a poetry that looks ahead, and no longer looks back.
I demand a poetry that knows how to go beyond modernism, the usual medicine that crops up when we talk about facing the problems of being people of today.
I demand that we become fully aware that our most intimate friends are called computer, television, cinema and internet. Why are the legends of film not found in our poetry: Charlie Chaplin (I remember a striking poem by O’Neill, ‘Charlotarde’), James Dean, or even the more Italian Totò, Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani? Why do we linger with obsolete and far away mythologies? So-called mytho-modernism is the latest disaster of this type. The reign of Montezuma for a frame of Marilyn Monroe?
I demand a poetry that talks about refuse, which is the highest architectonic profile of an urban center.
These are the true épaves of our times, statues of glass and plastic. A poetry that talks about the drama of machines, humble servants of man, and the drama of man, deluded master of machines. A poetry that finally deals critically and sensitively with multi-ethnicity, with the thousands of immigrants that have redefined human morphology in Italy.
Let’s look at the Americans: Ammons, William Carlos Williams, O’Hara. Enough of continental poets (the French, German, Spanish). At most, let’s look at the English: Tony Harrison’s A Cold Coming is a dizzying mixture of ethics, politics, language, and battle. Making poetry about and against McDonald’s, but with lightness, without ideological proclamations. But I don’t want the results to be the little poems of Aldo Nove, so poor and insistent, and non-existent, because they lack a true replenishing outlook.
There is probably a turning point: that imagination has been burned out by internet: every cell, every fragment of reality has been filmed and stored there. Connecting to sites like rotten.com means experiencing the most aberrant corporal deformations and humiliations. We no longer need to imagine the horror; we are constantly connected to it.
We don’t talk about Internet by naming it, it’s a trap; we don’t talk about cybernetics if not just alluding to it. Realising a poetics starting from these places (Marc Augé would say non-places, upside-down utopias) is not going to be easy or immediate. It will require rather long periods of reflection, the verification of the degree of assimilation that certain realities have reached, as well as new work on the concept of myth. A new scheme of metaphors. We can do nothing else; we have reached the last stop, ladies and gentlemen.
Heidegger, in The Question of Technics: “the essence of Technics is not at all something technical, since the heart of Technics is not technical, it is necessary that meditation on the essence of Technics and the decisive confrontation with it take place in a sphere that is on the one hand akin to the essence of Technics and on the other is fundamentally distinct from it. Such a sphere is art.”
Uniting the pulsations of a circuit to those of the human heart.
Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo
From Atelier 24 (2001), p. 8.
© Flavio Santi
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère