Presentation of the collection Per chi rimangono accese le luci

I’m realizing just now that I’ve never posted, guiltily, a commentary to present my book Per chi rimangono accese le luci (For whom the lights stay on). Never too late for redemption!

The genesis
Chronologically, the collection starts from some young pieces which let themselves be read (the oldest one is however of 2000: no adolescent poems) until some new pieces which I added just to refine the project for the publication. But the collection is actually structured in 5 precisely organized sections, and the aim would be to make a book of poetry, and not a book of poems. I’m going to post the index of the book [here], in order to provide both a complete view of the project and a navigation menu for this label of the blog.
The heart of the book was conceived in Heidelberg (to this city is dedicated the homonymous section, which is also the original one), starting from my first stay there in summer 2003, as I first discovered to be able to write things which I liked, until when I left the city for the last time last year. Some effects of this possible farewell are already visible in the collection, especially in the section altre dimore (other homes), which is, as I wrote in the past, a still open section. About the other sections, maybe I’m going to post something specific next, here it is enough to repeat that there is a link between them all, with the partial exception of the section not by chance titled versi sparsi (uncollected verses).
If I had to draw some conclusion, I’d just say an obvious thing, and that is that it’s a début collection. Far from representing a disadvantage, this guarantees, in my opinion, that amount of ingenuousness-spontaneity with a limited risk to fall in the traps of these situations, as for example imitating those who were my models.

The publication
After many postponements and thousands of modifications, the book was eventually out on 7th December of the last year, printed by a young independent publisher from Palermo, Il primitivo editore. Beside the friendship with the «primitive» guys, publishing with them was a precise choice, reflecting the will to stay far from the normal publishing logics, or better completely out of them.
I could be told that, also if otherwise wanted, that I had not many other choices, but not therefore my choice was less proud and sure. The coincidence of pseudo-anarchist ideas (that means the total lack of ideas); the home-made print, which has turned the book into a very precious hand-made object; the distribution through alternative circuits, as squats, alternative publishing shops etc.; the releasing through a Creative Commons license; the use of recycled paper… they are all things which make me very proud of this choice.

The presentation
The book was then presented on the 7th of last December at the «primitivo info-shop», a little place rented just for those days, in order to celebrate the new-starting of Il primitivo editore, marked by the «evolution» passage from «all-under-desk» to official cultural association, although always «primitive».
After some short readings from the books, a special performance of a tribute-show to the bluesman Robert Johnson followed. The show was written and conceived a couple of years ago by me and by the reckless guitarist from Palermo Antonio Speciale, and, for this occasion, it was electrified by the cover-blues duo Die Megageile Küken-Farm.


Originally posted in Italian on June 5, 2008 at 19:22

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To live or to describe

Since some days I keep on repeating a question in my mind: if the so called «art» reproduces nature, or more generally reality, why do we need it?
Caution: I’m not discussing the case «art doesn’t reproduces nature/reality», which is a possibility, maybe even more interesting. What I mean, and what is strongly bounded with the content of this blog, is: if the art is «empty» (because presumed to lack of subject’s filter), why wouldn’t be better an emptiness of art?

Ok, more concretely: if I have to read a haiku (for example the last one posted) which paints an aspect taken from nature or from our cities, though precise and isolated, wouldn’t be better going out and take a walk in the wood or in the city (saving the property of letting us travel to place we never could, which is proper of the art)?

I was thinking about the haikus, or at least about a certain sort of haikus, the most merely descriptive ones (if they can be said so without mystifying them), because they don’t seem justified to exist in front of the living presence of reality.
Actually, in my mind, there were two other images, always coming from Japanese culture: Hokusai’s painting «iris and grasshopper», which you can see above, and the scene from an anime (don’t remember which one exactly, maybe Evangelion), in which the last drop of water hangs without falling from a tap, evidently closed shortly before. (I could easily recall so many such images from animes or mangas, since one of their most fascinating quality is their being always so precise in representing details of reality, which are aside from the main story).

Right this last image helped me then to understand one fundamental thing of this sort of art which I defined «empty», one thing which, as an obvious consequence of my usual thoughts about that, I should have neglected until then, and that is the attention and the interest of the one who is writing, or painting or photographing, for the object of his representation.
This selfless and instantly total devotion, which is eventually pure love, in noting an absolutely ordinary detail of reality (not insignificant, but signifier, in the sense that it lacks meaning) is something we can enjoy right through the reading of that sort of haiku.

In this case, we are no more interested in the author’s feelings or emotional states or in his thoughts, but in the little amazement that that particular vision caused him, and therefore the attention devoted to this vision, the will of giving it some place, little, but of its own. It’s not so much the object of the representation itself, the reason of the existence of this art (we keep on calling it so for convenience, trying to forget the solemnity this word evocates. It’s hard, I know!), but the observer’s devotion, which tried to reproduce it without adulterating it with rests of ego-subjectivity but the choose of the detail and the point of observation.

This has nothing to do with the coldness and the hypocrisy of realism. It’s the paradox, magic and very true, of the union, or better said the eclipse, of the dualism subject-object.

In conclusion, we could say that the subject, put out through the door, doesn’t come in at the window, but he stay looking through the keyhole, silently.


Originally posted in Italian on May 25, 2008 at 23:48

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Apocryphal zen: the project

Apocryphal koans, barbaric haikus and other zen poetry are the three sections in which the project «apocryphal zen», on which I’m working since about two years, is divided.

Zen literature, both the traditional one of koans and gathas and the one which was strongly influenced by Zen, as the writing of haikus, has surely signed an important step of my travelling along the way of poetry, and so in my inner search and in my attitude towards everything else. Writing «apocryphal» texts to be put next to the original ones in my inner reading, was an automatic reflex for me, a personal urgency; posting them here I hope they can, I won’t say help someone else in his search, but maybe take him near to this nonsensical universe which is Zen, just because I know how much it could give everyone of us.

So the project «apocryphal zen» was born, though Zen literature is all but holy writing or canon to subvert: on the contrary… The title is then the result of a kind of self-irony, which is to find in the texts, and which comes just from the awareness of the absolute absurdity of a pretended apocryphal Zen, but also from the awareness, as a consequence, of its right to be.

I don’t feel particularly to add something about Zen literature: the ignorant reader will be always regarded as a precious guest, who I’m never going to treat with paternalist didactic; on the other side, for the reader who is already bumped into the crooked ways of Zen – he lucky – it will be more than less necessary to remind him to forget. I’ve added and am still going to add – it’s true – something about the single sections – koans, haiku and other zen poetry – but that’s nothing I consider necessary to get introduced in the reading. Pure empting.

Since a little bit, the collaboration with the musician and dear friend of mine Giuseppe Rizzo from Palermo has become a central role in the development of the project. All was born in a completely casual and spontaneous way through his reading of the text which was then single, and which is now the first case of the apocryphal koans, posted here on the blog two days ago. He took inspiration for a piece which he called steel flower and which you can listen to on his homepage. For a long time nothing has followed this extemporary episode, until we had the idea, that it would be maybe interesting, in this multimedia epoch – of crossing the ways, as I say – to put music next to the texts, without necessarily setting univocal links between a precise text and a precise musical track, aware that inspiration cannot be forced and that the trap of “wanting to illustrate” is always a threat.

What the final place of the product of this project will be, is not yet clear, but surely we are very curious to see its feedback online.


Originally posted in Italian on January 29, 2008 at 14:10

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Apocryphal koans

The apocryphal koans that began to appear yesterday on the blog, are another part of the project «apocryphal zen», on which I’m working currently. I’m going to explain better what it is about in the next post, here I’m going to tell some words about the apocryphal koans.

In Zen tradition, the term koan is used for a particular problem or theme, by the study and long meditation of which, it is possible to reach the illumination. Practically, it is an anecdote, a lesson or a short dialogue between master and pupil; it looks like an inexplicable enygma, which doesn’t follow the logical categories, the consequential logic nor the non-contradiction principle, because the truth of Zen can be caught only on the other side – or maybe I should say on this side – of the intellectual categories.
Collections of these ‘cases’ were compiled by masters and scholars of Ch’an Buddhism (Chinese ancestor of Zen), who used to add also some verses (absolute not lyrical) and even a commentary of the case, often much more obscure than the case itself. In comparison with this form, I’ve kept the presence of the poem after the koan, but I’ve renounced in adding also the commentary, mainly for lightness reasons.

Now, before forgetting all that you’ve just read, remember that the koan can help only those who cultivate the «great doubt» caused by the reading till the end.


Originally posted in Italian on January 28, 2008 at 21:15

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Barbaric Haikus

This one posted down here is the first of many barbaric haikus you’re going to read in this blog. I call them «barbaric» (if there is a god of literature, I hope he will forgive the carduccian reference) because they don’t follow the traditional Japanese metric made by 5-7-5 syllables for three verses, but they are instead free metric, also if they often tend to be a short-long-short sequence.

The reason of this not following the rule (however by now renewed by others too – Japanese, if you mind the Auctoritas) is that I don’t consider useful at all following metric rules (pedantically too, like certain fanatics suddenly possessed by the new trend) which are taken from another language exactly as they are.

Following the 5-7-5 rule because «it is so in Japanese» is not interesting for me. Following it because it is believed that a fixed form is useful, could still be a more interesting choice and it gains my respect (although I still believe that it would be better to find a more suitable form for the Italian language). I have chosen instead not to follow it, but to search a different affinity with the tradition of this genre. This affinity should be all in the way of writing haikus: haiku is firstly an interior search – although so very few people seems to remember it – which is aimed to the suspension of the sense we usually attribute the subject (intellectual or emotive). This suspension is reached through an extreme and disarming imaginative simplicity, by finding, in the extremely precise detail of nature, the empty container of the inner, and outer, emptiness. It is really a practice of empting, and for this I tried to avoid the always western temptation of reintroducing the sense by those means we all well know: metaphor, symbol or also the relativism of modern allegory; (that rhetorical language which the true haiku always dismisses and never causes). I felt, however, that it was possible to handle, with extreme cure, those instruments, though always rhetorical, which go instead in the direction of the signifier, of the ‘empty sign’: onomatopoeic, alliteration, assonance, and a kind of ‘large’ analogy too. Here, but everywhere else too, it will be mainly up to the reader not to fill again what was already emptied during the writing.

A good thematic affinity with the tradition of the genre is generally maintained, if it’s true that you find these haikus grouped by season (but you are not going to find regularly the kigo, the canonical reference to the season); I’m also interested in giving space to the human world (which I don’t necessarily feel in contradiction with nature) and to modernity, and this means that a part of inspiration comes from the city, from modern metropolis, especially in a fifth section of haikus titled «Out of season».

Of course, form is the container of emptiness, and we know how important it is in the extremely ritual Japanese culture, which is permeated of Zen. But it is useless to imitate what you are not; I am still a western – a gaijin, as they would say – and if I disguise myself perfectly as an oriental man, I surely look ridiculous.

I’m sorry for the length of this post, but this clarification was necessary. For the brevity we have the haikus.


Originally posted in Italian on January 17, 2008 at 18:19

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intents

I cannot yet define precisely how the blog is going to be managed. The first idea was to offer some support for those who bump into the stuff I write or even give my work a web dimension. Then the idea of a diary came, which is actually not bad and probably will be the basis of the blog. However, thinking about it, these verses of mine are mainly meeting-points, good to give some appointments, or still better: good to let each other meet casually in them. As a consequence, I think I’m going to give space everything that can be adapted as a recognition sign for these meetings, trying to remain in the sphere of poetry (in a wide sense intended) and posting therefore also others’ works, though in minor measure, no matter if they are more or less known. Their verses will be introduced as preparatory quotations to the process of empting, also if they will be just guests of the blog, who want to contribute to this project. Except this, I haven’t got other particular ideas, at the moment everything is very unsteady and flexible: I hope it is going to remain in this way.


Originally posted in Italian on January 6, 2008 at 2:14

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zero post

That’s it: some clicks and the web compresses and crams itself a little bit more. Some clicks and another little bit of telematic blank, photonic blank – deep darkness or bright glare – is filled up. Full, massed, stuffed, filled with other words, other images, other sounds. I ask myself how much space there is in the web, where it finishes and where its contents start interrupting each other.

Everyone looks for a space especially to fill it up with themselves, I feel instead the need of an empty space, but it can’t be the space of a vague and abstract infinity. On the contrary, it must be a precise, concrete, well defined space. Defined by what? By other words, sure, other images, other sounds, but made of another concentration, another density, another specific weight: no more contents, but containers – empty words, then, but defined, ready to receive by one side and let go by the other one.

Once the filling of the meaning, or the stuffing of the sense, is melted, only an empty shell to chew remains. «till the tooth falls.»


Originally posted in Italian on January 5, 2008 at 15:56

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