Neruda, Merini but there is also Vuong Poetry teaches us freedom – Corriere.it

You should always go around with a poem in your pocket. To dream or recapture lost certainties and utopias, or perhaps to declaim verses imitating the Poets’ Corner of the past. With the duty to undermine the corporate rules of editorial conditioning, aimed at relating usually almost exclusively with specialists and insiders. It would be necessary to deliberately structure the extension of recipients towards a circulation of poetry books so wide as to involve everyone without any limitation. As the Milanese poet Giancarlo Majorino wished, when in 1984 he founded the magazine Incognita. A poem in your pocket would be a clever natural stratagem to protect us from daily stress and from the inhuman slavery of the omnivorous globalizing digitization, which we passively undergo while remaining constantly interconnected. Or an expedient to allow some space for reflection and the possibility for the reader to imagine independently.

Therefore, the imminent release (Tuesday 21 March, World Poetry Day) of the first book of the series Everyone’s poetry, edited by Daniele Piccini and produced by Corriere della Sera, 25 volumes dedicated to the most original voices of the last 150 years, from modern and contemporary classics to those who are now entering the international literary scene with impetus and linguistic innovation. A skilful fusion, which has traditionally been repeated for decades, between poetry and Corriere, starting from a text in verse or an aphorism offered for a long time at the opening of the cultural pages, to the numerous editorial initiatives between the newspaper and poets of all times, to the creation of Danted based on the idea of ​​Paolo Di Stefano, a columnist for Corriere della Sera, who was the first to launch it in one of his articles in June 2017: thus March 25 has become in Italy, officially starting from 2020, the day of celebration of the supreme poet.

A combination that is now deservedly repeated: the possibility of accessing a new poetry paperback every week can mean getting hold of a variegated key to try to understand the meaning of existence, an irrational refuge of beauty and song in the face of the perpetual brutalities of war, exile, migration. Dante was a clear example of this as was Pablo Neruda, the author who opens the new series on Tuesday 21st. Packing together realism and romantic-intimate verses, surrealism and civil poems, the Chilean author alternates verses of love for Latin females (and not only) and of anger against dictatorships.

For this initiative Daniele Piccini has chosen world-famous authors: the Polish Wisława Szymborska, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, Alda Merini, the Soviet Anna Achmatova, openly aligned against Stalinism, and the American Emily Dickinson, considered one of the greatest modern lyricists. A yearning to finally conquer a fullness of life inspires Alda Merini, after the terrible experience of internment in a mental hospital. Oscillating between the impulses of the senses and the mystical tension, her condition of repression is transformed into extraordinary creative energy, making Merini the voice of the excluded, outcasts, marginalized and the symbol of the reaction to social unease.

Poet of eros and nostalgia, he continually struggled to assert his nonconformism the Greek Constantine Cavafis, skilfully translated into Italy by Nicola Crocetti. In his verses the memory of the ancient classics, the celebration of homoerotic love, the disenchantment, the self-irony, the pain for the life that flees converge.

The further novelty of the series is the successful combination of famous authors such as Montale, Luzi, Caproni, Saba, Campana, Sereni, Lorca, Salinas, Pessoa, Auden, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Ritsos, Novalis, Pasternak, Rilke, Baudelaire, Rimbaud , to emerging poets such as the African American Jericho Brown (1976), Pulitzer Prize winner in 2020, with hard and marked rhythms similar to rap, and the Vietnamese naturalized American Ocean Vuong (1988), openly gay, which deals with the themes of abandonment, pain, identity, in which the suffering for the death of the mother constantly emerges.

At this point a consideration seems to be in order. During the twentieth century the ars poetica often represented one of the rare and uncontaminated responses to the tragedies of history. Landing place of salvation before the most bestial instincts of the human being. Moral shield in the face of the crisis of different societies. In every era, therefore, poetry has offered itself as a nectar, the saving medicine to recover the meaning of things, re-appropriate memory and preserve it, play a role in the existential dimension. Unquestionably today, having now reached the threshold of the third world war, as or more than yesterday, writing and reading poetry still means freedom, ethics, knowledge.

The series on newsstands from 21 March

The series in 25 volumes, edited by Daniele Piccini, is entitled La Poesia di tutti, and will be on newsstands with Corriere della Sera every Tuesday starting from 21 March, World Poetry Day (each book costs €3.90 plus the price of the newspaper). The first issue offers a selection of poems by the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). The second dedicated to the Polish Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012), Nobel in 1996. Among the other protagonists of the series: Costantino Kavafis (1863-1933), Alda Merini (1931-2009), but also new voices such as Jericho Brown (1976) and Ocean Vuong (1988)