VERBA VOLANT International poetry meetings It is no coincidence that this year too, to highlight continuity with previous editions, the subtitle of this event is "international poetry meetings". In fact, it aims to be an opportunity, we might say a place, for different people and cultures to meet. A multilingual laboratory in which the miracle of recognition occurs: he is my brother/she is my sister, even if he speaks another language and we have never met before, because he brings with him the other half of the symbol, the one that matches mine perfectly. Thus the tension towards a "poetic" unity is reconstructed, where the formal aspect is only one of the data, albeit relevant, of the research. In fact, what we pursue is the utopia of a necessary poetry, something that has to do with bread and water, with wind, with sun and with rain, with love and with struggle; to put it very briefly: a poem that has intimately to do with life. For this reason it seemed to us that the choice of the poem "Like you" by Roque Dalton for the brochure was emblematic. And it matters little if some understand poetry as evil and others as cure, if in some the sense of the tragic prevails and in others that of play; what matters is the labor that results in the urgency of saying that very word, that verse. And it is probable that it arises from the awareness that it is not only, or above all, for oneself that one speaks, but also, or above all, for a vast part of the world, material or immaterial, which otherwise would not have the word, that world which Francis Ponge called "the silent world", going so far as to say that it is our only homeland. And it is also in the name of this universal homeland, all the more dear in these times of exasperated localism and rekindled racial hatred, that we would like to thank the poets gathered here from three different continents for having chosen, to counter the leaden violence that corrupts and destroys living beings and our own environment throughout the world, the fragile and light weapon of the word. But in our era which seems increasingly flattened on the present as the only dimension of temporality, one of the duties that poetry wants to take on is that of the persistence of memory understood as an indispensable foundation for any planning. We cannot escape the pain that this memory entails, we cannot ignore the wounds still open in the world, the torment that has tormented our province is still too recent not to remember it here. But once again, a fleeting memory is not enough, it is necessary for the pain to persist and be the foundation of a future of peace between men and respect for nature. And it is in the context of this complex dimension, in which memory represents something much more complex and profound than a simple memory, that we are moved and proud by the choice made by the graphic designer Giuseppe De Marco to pay homage here to the recently deceased artist Peter Willburger, to his international art and to his love for our land which became his adopted homeland. * * * LIKE YOU I, like you, love love, life, the sweet enchantment of things, the celestial landscape of January days. Even my blood boils and I laugh with eyes that have known the buds of tears. I believe that the world is beautiful, that poetry is like bread, for everyone. And that my veins do not end in me but in the common blood of all those who fight for life, love, things, the landscape and bread, the poetry of all. Roque Dalton
Program
VERBA VOLANT
12/18 May 1998
Poets
Jorge Arbeleche (Uruguay) Tarik Aziz (Kurtistan-Iraq) Gladys Basagoitia Dazza (Peru/Italy) Martha Canfield (Uruguay/Italy) Bruno Coppola (Italy) Bernardine Evaristo (Great Britain) Agneta Falk (Sweden / Great Britain) Fassli Haliti (Albania) Jack Hirschman (United States United States) Alberto Masala (Italy) Luis Carlos Patraquim (Mozambique) Visar Zhiti (Albania)
Information
NAPLES
