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| ELISA BIAGINI, ANTONELLA ANEDDA, VALERIO MAGRELLI | |
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| How to translate the emotions into
language? This is what Antonella Anedda, Elisa Biagini and Valerio Magrelli
have been trying to do for several years now with a range of different approaches
and themes but always focusing on this endeavour. Poetry becomes a journey
through another’s experience that we slowly make our own, rediscovering
ourselves precisely in the description of emotions that we have also experienced.
‘Good’ poetry is in fact capable of doing just this: transporting
stories and sensations from a small ‘private’ space to a universal
dimension. As Anne Sexton wrote, ‘my kitchen, your kitchen / my face,
your face’. Poetry, not perceived as difficult and therefore distant
- which is still all too often the case - but experienced and read as a
fundamental ‘means of transport for emotional freight’: poetry,
to which we turn precisely when our lives hit peaks of emotional density.
This is how the three poets presented here transport us to this ‘elsewhere’,
initially perceived as new and extraneous but soon proving incredibly familiar. In Anedda ‘the word is split like wood’, and it is in that sound that the emotion lives again. Biagini presents a mapping of the language of incommunicability and the body, a theme also addressed by Magrelli, the inhabitant-narrator of a ‘condominium of flesh’ (from the title of one of his more successful books). Let us examine the meaning of the word ‘emotion’: a form of transport, departure, moving from one place to another, and hence the ability to create an alternative and perhaps new space. This is what good poetry does: it opens the door to the things that surround us and allows us to see the pulsating kernel, to observe the tangle of veins. Movement therefore, not the static frame of the book: bee-like words that buzz on Emily Dickinson’s blank page and paw the ground like the horses in Silvia Plath’s poetry (‘words dry and riderless, /the indefatigable hoof-taps’). Movement is the step I take towards you, from writer to reader and back again to writer, following the circular path of shared memory. Poetry becomes a journey in experience, my skin your map. Because you have already walked down that street, you have already seen that tree and its branch, although you may have forgotten. The courageous poet does what John Maxwell Coetzee wrote somewhere: he or she throws a word into the darkness and listens for the sound it sends back. This sound becomes the music of his or her text, an echo as thick as black butter. Anedda, Biagini and Magrelli and their attempt to translate emotions into language. Anedda and Biagini or the frustration of communication, a Sisyphus of the word-dialogue. Magrelli and the anxiety that hammers him like iron and changes his shape, as inevitable as a magnet. |
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