VERBA VOLANT
International poetry meetings
The choice of the title of the event must first be clarified: Verba Volant. This choice expresses the desire to overturn a consolidated cliché that contrasts the evanescence of the oral word with the solidity of the written one. By overcoming the contrast, we wanted to exalt the lightness of the words of the poets which take flight from places very distant from each other to reach the profound conscience of the listener. Italo Calvino says in the first of his "American Lessons": If I wanted to choose an auspicious symbol for approaching the new millennium, I would choose this: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who rises above the heaviness of the world, demonstrating that its gravity contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the vitality of the times, noisy, aggressive, pattering and roaring, belongs to the kingdom of death, like a cemetery of rusty cars". More point to make clear is that the selection of the invited poets is motivated by a profound conviction, which has inspired us throughout the course of our activities: poetry, the real one, the one that escapes the academy, is not and cannot be neutral; it is always on the side of those who suffer and against power, in Albania as in the United States, in the former Yugoslavia or here in Italy. The poets have known the prison of real socialism and equally real capitalism, racial discrimination and marginalization; and it is with different styles and voices that Paul Dakeyo, Jack Hirschman, Alberto Masala, Carter Revard, Izet Sarajlić, Vojo Šindolić (Croatia), Gatto, as is known, experienced fascist prison. His memory remains alive and not only here: Izet Sarajlić will certainly remind us, who was a friend of Gatto, since his prison days, and to whom he owes some of his first translations into Italian. Finally, it should be noted that this brief review plans a non-ritual homage to Allen Ginsberg, who represented a fundamental point of reference and a moment of dialectical comparison in the lives of the organizers and some of the poets present It is in this direct and non-hagiographic testimony the non-ritual element of what seemed to us a necessary act. Thanks therefore to Allen Ginsberg for his life and his poetry, and thanks also to all the poets present for the wealth of knowledge and emotions that they will want to give us in the short but, we hope, significant span of these two evenings.
Program
10/11 November 1997
Lanzalone Middle School
Salerno
Poets
Paul Dakeyo (Camerun), Jack Hirschman (Stati Uniti), Alberto Masala (Italia), Carter Revard (Stati Uniti), Izet Sarajlić (Bosnia ed Erzegovina), Xevair Spahiu (Albania), Vojo Šindolić (Croazia)., Paul Texeira (Portogallo).
Information
MUNICIPALITY OF SALERNO Department of cultural activities
