PROF DOMENICO PISANA TALKS ABOUT POETRY, INSPIRATION AND CRITICAL READING
BIODATA OF DOMENICO PISANA
DOMENICO PISANA was born in Modica in 1958, is the Founding President of the Caffè Letterario Quasimodo, a literary circle, which has been promoting for ten years the cultural, poetical and literary valorization of the Iblean territory.
After having finished his degree in Theology, he obtained a Ph.d in
Moral Theology at the Accademia Alfonsiana dell’Università Lateranense and the
II level Master in School Leadership. He has been a journalist since 1985 and
is the Director of the online newspaper www.radiortm.it.
He published: 10 poetry books, 11 volumes about literary criticism,
among which there is the essay on Quasimodo Quel
Nobel venuto dal Sud – Salvatore Quasimodo tra gloria ed oblio (2006), 11
theological and ethical texts, among which the book Sulla tua parola getterò le reti (1999), published by Edizioni San
Paolo, stands out and were fully translated in Polish and Spanish language, 3
historical and political volumes.
Domenico Pisana’s poetry is a matter of international interest. “Il
Giornale Italiano de España” wrote about him; the online
London newspaper “L’ItaloEuropeo Independent” interviewed him as the “personality
of the month”, and the French literary review “La Voce” published his interview
with Daniela Cecchini. His poems, articles, and prefaces to books by Italian
authors were translated in English, Greek, French, Macedonian, Arab, Spanish,
Polish, and Romanian language.
POETRY, INSPIRATION AND CRITICAL READING / 4… by Domenico Pisana
Domenico Pisana
July 18, 2022
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THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN ITALIAN AND PUBLISHED IN RTMNEWS, MODICA
Where does the value of poetry begin and how, in such a vast poetic production, do you see true talent? And what role does the Muse's inspiration play in poetry? Is it the poet who seeks poetry or the poem who seeks the poet? It is paradigmatic what, in this regard, Pablo Neruda says in one of his poetic texts:
The poem
came for me. I don't know where
it came from, winter or river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they weren't voices, they weren't
words or silence,
but from a street he called me,
from the branches of the night,
abruptly among the others,
amidst violent flames
or returning alone,
he was there without a face
and touching me.
(The poem came looking for me)
According to when he says the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is poetry that assumes the man-poet with all his characteristics, with his nature, with his personality and freedom, with his intelligence and his expressive abilities, and acting in him he makes him speak, he makes him write. To whom and for what purpose? It's a kind of mystery!
A poem is born while it dies, if there is no one who reads it, and while it dies it rises again, if someone makes it their own. Neruda captures an essential and fundamental aspect in the life of a poet, that of inspiration, of electrocution - I would dare to say; like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, the poet experiences a moment in which he falls from the gray horse of everyday life and senses something inside that leads him to write, to withdraw, to give the word its expressive power to interpret a feeling that is his, but which becomes collective, of all and which becomes the epiphany of a universal metaphysical essence.
Personally I feel poetry as an expansion of the soul that gives birth to a word that becomes language; the verb dilate is allusive: we could grasp an analogy between the dilation of the mother's uterus just when she gives birth to a child and the dilation of the self of the poet who gives birth to a poetic text.
In both cases there is the suffering of childbirth: physical that of the mother, metaphysical that of the poet.
Here, it is the poetic inspiration, first of all, that plays an important role in the revelation of talent. Today there are many beautiful poems in circulation, well done, stylistically and formally captivating and which often assert themselves, rightly, in competitions, but it is felt to the skin that there is a weakness of inspiration and that the distance between the alchemical exercise- literary, between the fiction of the mind that creates images, metaphors, sounds, colors and rhetorical figures and the illumination that pushes us to translate true states of the thinking soul into verse, it is truly remarkable.
Inspiration, of course, is not to be understood as a special revelation or as a writing straight away almost under dictation, but it is the intervention of "thinking thought", of feeling, of a state of mind, which are present in extraordinary way to the poet, whose intelligence is made capable of conceiving ideas, images, figures, symbols and of formulating contents, particularly relevant, within a metric structure and a lexical code, for the identity of a civil community .
In the poetic inspiration, therefore, three orders of faculties interact simultaneously: the conception of contents, which can be intimate, affective, social, idyllic, landscape, political, satirical, memorial, existential, personal or collective; the will to express them in a given stylistic form and the concrete act of expressing these contents. Secondly there is the labor file, which each artist performs after having sketched the work, the minutiae in the choice of words at the center of the poetic creation.
Given the necessary inspiration, the problem that seems to me not to be neglected is to establish the canon, that is, the instrument of measurement of the poetic act, of poetry, an instrument that tends to become foundational because it is capable of revealing a tense force of influence to incorporate the creation of subsequent works. In 1525, for example, when Pietro Bembo presented Petrarch's Canzoniere, he did nothing but identify in it a linguistic model for the Italian poetic tradition.
Today the world of publishing that counts, has difficulty in identifying, given the fragmentation and the vast poetic production, a "re-founding" canon of poetry on which it is worth betting. Still in the third millennium we find many authors who move between the classical and the romantic, between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, between realism and poetic prose, between experimentalism and neo-futurism, and who are united by formal rules and specific literary traits; but we also find authors who make disruptive “unpoetic choices” taking into account the taste, values and negative values that are affirming themselves in a given community and at a given historical moment.
In this last case, the founding canon becomes society, the cultural policy of governments, the aesthetic sense and taste of the majority of society conveyed by mass media communication.
Here, however, I believe that in our time a selective canon of contemporary poetry cannot break with classical humanism (no one, for example, could think of classics as useless as the Iliad and the Odyssey), but not even limit itself to privileging the simple relocation in the present of the classical tradition almost as in a perspective of continuity; I believe we must take into account the cultural, social and moral identity of contemporary society and the globalized world, its crisis, its complexity and evolution, declining the poetic word within the conflicts of the person and within the fall of the interpretative values of existence , since the poet is a child of his time.
And in the context of the European time in which we live, plural, multicultural, multireligious, liquid, centered on the exaggerated enjoyment of the moment, on money, on the desire to be there, on visibility as ostentation and self-referentiality, on self-identification, on today without a past and without memory, on the liquefaction of truth, moral and value certainties, poetry is a “ space for questioning meaning ” where life is the undisputed protagonist. Within this space, the profession of poet does not exist, but the man who is sought by poetry; there is a "speaker" (the poet who writes poetry , "an absolutely useless product , - says Montale - but almost never harmful and this is one of his titles of nobility”) (1) who does not intend to speak out or moralize or convert anyone; his is a word of knowledge that falls on deaf ears, but that knows how to "intus-ire" (mind the etymology) that is to "enter into" what is stirred in the heart of a society and of people both ad intra and ad extra .
And if every person is, constitutively and not in a dualistic sense, good and evil, angel and beast, dream and desire, creation and destruction, beauty and ugliness, spirituality and corporeality, immanence and transcendence, and liquidity and fading reigns over everything. and nihilism, the poet is a man with a vocation, in the sense that he is called to "intus-legere", to interpret, with his word, what time says and in it the person lives, certainly not to found a doctrine ideological or a current.
If the poems do not become "this space of question" causing crises, doubts, questions for the man of the micro and macrocosm in his deepest interior dimension, every motivation for attention and need of poetry for a civil community falls.
Poetic talent begins to be seen when poetry begins to walk on its own legs, progressively disengaging itself from reference masters and making itself the bearer of its own epistemology and an autonomous ethical-aesthetic cognitivism without pretending to give answers. The "space of question" of poetry is an open space, where the reader, as in an agora, can enter and exit, allow himself to be contaminated or remain indifferent; and where the poets - Montale would say - "they can write classically traditional prose and pseudo verses devoid of any sense "(2), or write verses to be shouted in a park or - as Montale always maintains - " in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This is especially the case in countries where authoritarian regimes exist. And such athletes of poetic vocalism are not always without talent ” (3).
Poetry and its critical reading
There is no poet who does not ask himself: what will happen to my poem? Will it be liked, understood, accepted, rejected, exalted, denigrated? It is a question that raises another: who has the competence to say whether my poem is valid or not? First of all the reader! But what he says is often dictated by the taste and immediate understanding of the text, and not being in possession of specific tools, his considerations have a relative value. Here then arises the problem of literary criticism, which presents different connotations on the basis of the sitz im leben (situational context) and traditions; however, there is also a trait that unites conflicting critical approaches and positions, that trait that Montale calls “ the refusal of value judgments ”.
In fact, Montale, who had neither a degree nor a degree in literary criticism (which does not exist), based this consideration on a conviction, which I share, namely that "the work of art itself - apart from obiecti - does not exist". (4) In fact, as Benedetto Croce also taught, every poet, as well as the musician, the painter, in the moment in which he brings something from non-being to being, it happens that already the object of his birth, that is the work of art, it is perfect in its heart and, therefore, its practical externalization, certainly useful and necessary, cannot add anything to it.
A literary critic does not have the task of expressing "value judgments" by stating here there is poetry, here no, here there is fiction here no, because he will never be able to enter the intuitive and inspirational dimension of a work of poetry, but it can make explicit the nature of the text in terms of its content, semantic and formal effectiveness with respect to the time in which the work is located.
Today there are critics with a formalist extraction, others with an idealist imprint, still others with a psychological, social, historicalist and ideological imprint. “ I would put aside - and it is Montale who speaks and the thought of him is still valid- the hired, the intruppati, the antiautonomists of art. For them, art must serve something, and so far nothing wrong even if the assertion is contestable; the trouble is that this servitude is the price that the artist has to pay for certain political ideologies ”. (5)
Finally, in my opinion, there are also "self-referential critics" or, better said, "autoerotic", whose language is made up of "isms", esotericisms, exasperated philological speculations, baroqueisms of alleged literary science, and who with their minds build criticisms "without a center and without a purpose" that not even the insiders themselves understand.
And yes, because the auterotic critic does not have an addressee to whom to deliver an understandable thought, not even to the poet who reviews, but he is worried about speaking to himself with a truly artificial speculative criticism and without a suggestion capable of inviting the reading of the reviewed poet and object. of his attention. I wonder how he can fascinate the reader, and young people in particular, to poetry. These critics, whom I respect but do not share their noumenal system, in reality it is not that they are not bearers of erudition, preparation, charm and genius, they are often also good poets and writers of a certain weight, writers of vast culture , except that by pretending to give "value judgments" they end up expressing more a sense of personal taste than an objective service to poetic culture.
In any case, it remains understood that critical judgments are always relative, given that - as the English satirical writer and poet Alexander Pope would say, "our judgments are like our watches, which never agree, but each of us we believe in his ".
A confirmation, in this sense, comes to us from great masters of literary criticism, such as Natalino Sapegno and Francesco De Sanctis, who, for example, speaking of Alfieri trace critical judgments that move in different directions. Sapegno writes: "Pure poet, outside and above all literary reasons and concerns was Alfieri: the most sincere and greatest poetic voice of the entire century" (6)
De Sanctis, on the other hand, judges Alfieri's tragic poetics "'cold and monotonous ' because in so much fictitious exaltation you feel in the void and because among so many memorable mottos and sentences you do not remember a single character " (7)
What then is the critic's task, at least according to my questionable vision, towards poetry? Clearly those who want can try their hand at the study of the history of criticism to deepen the subject; this is not the place where this can be done. So, I will limit myself to just a few observations.
I believe that the critic's attention must first of all focus on the poetic word, since a literary, poetic work is essentially made up of words and with words images are built, metaphors are activated, tropes are created, symbols, signs are generated. and even phonic-rhythmic combinations, forms, styles, rhetorical figures intertwine with which grammar and literature manuals are rich. A poem, to be such, cannot do without these elementary rules.
A second glance of the critic should dwell, in my opinion, on the innovative capacity of language by the poet, on the carrying and overall coordinates of the work or poems, trying to identify its teleological structure in order to a declaration of congruence to a together with a cognitive, philosophical, anthropological, ethical and aesthetic perspective which, legitimately, the critic must identify and whose existence the poet can totally ignore.
In any case, to those who produce a work of poetry I say, in the words of Francesco De Sanctis, that “ the critic is similar to the actor; both do not simply reproduce the poetic world, but integrate it "and that - as Henry James argues -"to criticize is to evaluate, to take possession of, to take intellectual possession, in short to establish a relationship with the criticized thing and to make it one's own " . (8)
A critic, in conclusion, when reading a poem can behave as the writer Luigi Settembrini said in 1866 , in his work Lessons of Italian literature:
“There are two kinds of criticisms, one that tries harder to see the defects, the other to reveal the beauties. I like the latter more, which is born from love, and wants to arouse love that is the father of art; while the other seems to me that it resembles pride, and under the color of seeking the truth it destroys everything, and leaves the soul sterile ” . (9)
The second is the one that also pleases the writer, as a passionate reader of poetry aware that poetry, beyond its results and judgments, will always remain - Montale would say - " one of the peaks of the human soul" / Continue
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(1) See Eugenio Montale, Poetry, prose, translations, UTET, Rizzoli Editore, 1975, pp.421-433.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
(6) See Compendium of the History of Italian Literature , Vol. II, Ed. La Nuova Italia, p.569.
(7) See History of Italian Literature , Vol. II, Ed. Feltrinelli, 1978, p.820).
(8) https://aforisticamente.com/frasi-cizioni-e-aforismi-su-critica-letteraria/
(9) Ibid.
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