PROF DOMENICO PISANA WROTE ABOUT POETRY BETWEEN DESIGN, ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
BIODATA OF DOMENICO PISANA
DOMENICO PISANA was born in Modica in1958, is the Founding President of the Caffè Letterario Quasimodo, a literary circle, which has been promoting forten 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, 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 “personalityof the month”, and the French literary review “La Voce”published his interviewwith 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 BETWEEN DESIGN, ETHICS AND AESTHETICS by Domenico Pisana
• Dominic Pisana
• February 7, 2023
(Translated into English by Google)
The poetry between authenticity and project
The British poet Wystan Hugh Auden wrote: “ The questions that most interest me when I read a poem are two. The first is of a technical nature: 'Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?' The second is moral in the broadest sense of the word: 'What kind is he who lives in this poem? What is his idea of what is good, of what is right? And his idea of the evil one? What is he hiding from the reader? What is he hiding even from himself?” (1)
I start from this quote to say that there are contemporary critics who often try to answer above all the first question: how are poems made, how do they work? We find all this present in the myriad of theoretical writings on the subject, with particular attention to the various methods of studying literature that followed during the twentieth century. Then I read around that today there is a lack of "authentic poetry", and I ask myself: is it possible to establish the authenticity of the verse? When I hear poet-critics say that one can no longer understand where poetry is heading towards and that it has become impossible to map poetry, I think this is a real and serious claim, but what perplexes me is the idea that it must be literary criticism - with its tools, its methods and its rules - that defines its authenticity and maps. Why poetry and why poets? The question comes from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wondered what was the meaning of the poetic word in a world, that of late modernity, which seems to give little value to the word, a world full of noise, dazed by the lights of images, inebriated by speed.
This world leaves no room for what is not immediately usable and the words of the poem, slow, secluded, almost fearful, are not immediately usable or, if you like, have a different degree of utility. So why poetry? What is its place in the age of the Internet, of global information, of mass communication? Why is poetry written today and why is it read? Are they residual assets? Is it the legacy of other times? But first of all we need to ask ourselves, as did Mario Luzi, the great Italian poet, if this probably marginal exercise that is poetry is able to sing something equal to life.
It is precisely on these questions that, in my opinion, authenticity must be sought; it is on this terrain that poetry has always measured itself and must measure itself. It has certainly never been the center of the world or even a widely used language and it certainly has never changed the course of history. Yesterday, like today, since the West entered the parable of modernity, poetry collects, preserves, bears witness to the beats of human time, "the warm fugitive wave of the heart", as Reiner Maria Rilke writes in the Duine Elegies, a true monument of twentieth-century poetry.
The authenticity of poetry must therefore be sought not only in "aesthetics", but also in ethics, given that the word aesthetics also contains "ethics". It seems to me superfluous to argue about aesthetic theories in this space because there would be the risk of boring the reader, who is invited to read, if he wishes, the degree thesis by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten entitled "Philosophical meditations on topics concerning poetry"; here I'm just saying that authentic poetry has to do with reality, not conceived in the act of its mirroring, but – Magrelli would say – in its invention, in its negation, which concerns and can concern the whole realm of reality.
Since, in my opinion, authenticity must be sought above all in the real that poetry represents, I agree with Auden when he states that criticism must not only deal with aesthetics, philological and stylistic readings, but must ask itself who is, what vision of the world shows that he has the man who put together the "verbal gimmick" that we have before our eyes, and what ethical profit the reader can derive from the conversation with him.
Here then is that when we speak of "the great project of poetry", the project is not, in my humble opinion, to be understood as a "theoretical construction" which, on the legacy of the great poetry of the twentieth century, redefines the boundaries of the authenticity of contemporary poetry, its formal, rhetorical, metric, thematic characteristics, and what position it should occupy in the current art system; by project I rather mean a discourse on "what man/woman is" the one who speaks to us, today, of poetry, and on the kind of vision of the world that he conveys to readers.
Compared to this fact, a large part of our contemporary poetry fails, both in terms of poetic commitment and in terms of stylistic and linguistic code, to build a project idea that goes beyond intimacy, the private understood as an evocation of one's own feeling , beyond the description of the social, thus showing itself incapable of attracting and of interest to the large editorial groups who have the task of placing it in the circuit of great contemporary communication.
Many Italian poets of the late twentieth century and contemporaries certainly do not lack inventiveness, imagination, the ability to use even innovative stylistic registers, but rather the strength and courage to go beyond the "representation" of the current historical moment, which continues to be "guarded" with stylistic canons that refer, in several cases even slavishly, to the Italian poetic tradition of the early twentieth century, while, perhaps, it would be appropriate to "betray" it, in the sense that it would be necessary to reconsider it in a three-dimensional perspective that knows how give a European breath to opera and also know how to look at the great poets of different cultures and traditions.
The poetic tradition of the early 20th century in Spain gives us, for example, a picture characterized by very original poetic perspectives and often even extremes in the direction of reality. One of the most passionate scholars of Hispanic poetry, Oreste Macrì, points out that "the most advanced experiences – naturalism – neo-romanticism, surrealism, Marxist realism (…reach) in Spain the extreme of controversy, and at the same time of poetic validity, in the various names by Neruda, Aleixandre, Larrea, Lorca, Alberti”. To these poets we could also add Guillermo de Torre, Gerardo Diego, Miguel de Unamuno, Gongora and Antonio Machado, to go again to the great poets of the Catalan Renaissance, Verdaguer and Guimerà. In the Spanish social fabric, the poet's identity appears to be that of the "total artist",The Spanish tradition has given us the figure of the poet who is not closed in his ivory tower, in his intellectual speculations, in the magic of his alchemies, but who takes on the face of one who with his poetic word digs, tears them, lashes and lives fully involved in the social, political and cultural fabric of his time. From this perspective, Miguel de Unamuno (1864 -1936) is one of the fathers. These, defined by Guido Ceronetti "a just man and an illegible writer", was a poet-philosopher, a playwright, a novelist who today is included in the literary movement called Generation of '98, an expression of Spanish literary modernism.
I believe, then, that the architrave of a "great project of poetry" cannot fail to rest on the conviction - Mazzoni would say in one of his essays - that there are significant discontinuities between different historical periods, as well as on the idea that works can be grouped different in origin, purpose, function in unitary wholes such as styles, periods, genres.In short, a project needs a "holistic gaze" that believes in the representative value of aesthetic experiences.
The poetry between ethics and aesthetics
A project of poetry in times of crisis cannot neglect, in my opinion, some key elements that I identify: 1) in otherness, that is, openness to the other, to quote Levìnas, and to one's own time; 2) in the power of the poetic word and language; 3) in the authentic expression and transfiguration of the human existential condition. It is within this habitat that the aesthetic orientation of contemporary poetry must be sought, overcoming all the aesthetics of the second post-war period, such as those of a Marxist orientation, analytical ones, phenomenological aesthetics, just to name a few, which, beyond the obvious differences, they have in common the fact that they indicate to us that it is not possible to overlook the ethical value of poetry, of art in general, as well as the ethical aspects of the aesthetic experience and the responsibility of form.
I reiterate, once again, that we need to get out of the static and classification fixation of poets; when I speak of a "poetic project", I do not mean to refer to a project in which media-savvy poets should be placed or with a curriculum of prizes, cups, diplomas and medals that accredit their value; rather I am referring to an "ideational project" in which poetry expresses, above all, the awareness that - as Igino Giordani wrote - "civilization is a system of ideas: and ideas are put into circulation especially by books".
Every society, especially today, is, one can say, what its books make it”. A book of poems, for example, should be published, it doesn't matter if at one's own expense or by a publisher, if it is based on this vision, otherwise it becomes a sort of occasional and self-celebratory exposition of itself. Often "the poets who attract" seem to be those who bring into play formal techniques and word geometries that have a strong appeal more on an aesthetic than an ethical level; these are poets who lean on the idea that Adorno, in his "Aesthetic Theory", supports when he attributes a fundamental function to the concept of "form", because it is thanks to the form - and therefore to its irreducible autonomy and individuality - that the work can "criticize" the existing, placing itself against it as a dialectical negation.
I believe that in a time of crisis such as ours, poetry must instead "rethink" placing itself in the ethical perspective of encounter and conversation, capable of defeating the loneliness and true incommunicability that we all suffer, strangely at the time of internet, within this society of ours, in this Europe of ours, in this world of ours.And here it seems to me it is important, at this point, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that the relationship between poetry and ethics be clarified. It is a vital relationship, not in the sense that poetry should be assigned the task of dictating moral norms or stringent prescriptions to overcome a crisis, but in the sense of its communicative function, of the dialogical character of the poetic word, with its constant desire to openness to the other, as Paul Celan would also say, to lead him to reflection, to transmit to him the value of beauty as a value in itself that every true poetic feeling expresses. Sometimes one reads poets of simple dictation and attractive formal grace; other times you come across poems of great virtuosity, but sometimes, going deeper, you realize that there is an emptiness behind a certain formal virtuosity. “ And there is nothing – Igino Giordani would always say in “Pure poetry?”, “Fides”, June 1934, p. 264, – because those authors are goldsmiths without gold, virtuosists without virtues, writers without ideas: small followers of a D'Annunzianism enervated by Crocianism. Under the pretext of pure art, they detached art from life”.
I take the liberty of saying that I have perplexities towards a poem isolated from life and from the world and I believe that it is necessary to get away from literary and academic solipsism to hook onto the soul of society.Poets must be increasingly tied to the world, and their verses cannot detach themselves from life in its historical, political, sociological, philosophical, religious articulations of ideals, passions, difficulties and hopes; a cultivation of poetry as a value in its own right and the poetic delights detached from life and from its "sitz im leben" remain only "flatus vocis" destined to dissolve. It's really hard for me to think of the great poets of literature outside their world.
Is the great Dante thinkable detached from the politics of Florence, from the tensions between the Church and the Empire, from the social and cultural debates and from the facts of his era? And in order not to go far, are poets like Eliot and Auden thinkable detached from the events of their socio-political context? Is it a coincidence that Elotus' and Auden's poetics make a historical and meta-historical reflection on the suffering of the human condition? Is it a coincidence that both grasp, in order to overcome it, the problem of the relationship between art and history? When Auden in a verse of him states "That even dreadful martyrdom must run its course", isn't he making an explicit reference to the historical-political situation of his time and to the problem of fascist tyranny? And again, how do you think the French poets Claudel,In a major poetry project, the poets' verses are the "thinking conscience" that must help our society in crisis to recover from the "inhumanism" into which it is increasingly sinking; the poet's verse is not the celebration of aesthetics, it is not art for art, it is not the amusement of those who smear paper for mere inner aesthetic pleasure; the poet is not a zither player at the foot of his own self. Here it is not a question of restoring the figure of the civil poet nor the disputes of the avant-garde on the engagement of poetry, because poetry cannot be given any task: poetry is language, language of the soul, of the spirit, language which translates the condition of existence. The poet, to quote Heidegger, is the man of the threshold, the man of the frontier, of the border, in the sense that he senses a danger, the discomfort of his time, he senses what others do not sense, and when he senses he "translates" , that is, it
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