It took half an hour for the Italians to arrive, but the auditorium of the Miller-Ward Emory Alumni house was full.
By eight p.m., lights were off, candles were lit, and after a brief piano introduction by Jessica Moore, Stefania Maggini started reciting beautiful verses of poetry in a sensuous and whispery voice – naturalmente, in Italiano. With soothing words and bucolic images of Italy seamlessly flowing on the screen… so, off went my imagination, back to places where recounting life in verses is a common practice, and where pastoral greens are not a mythical land, but a close presence. Poetry is in the food we savor, in the glance of a lover, in an aimless walk in the garden… The choice of poems was exquisite, varying from the intimate Settembre by Paola Febbraro, to the festive Trastevere, by Corrada Biazzo Curry, so reminiscent of Leopardi. Sublime the timing of those images – under the direction of Nicola Vidali, che bel lavoro! The merging of images and words was pure magic!
Suddenly the light went up, taking my mind by surprise as it was bathing naked in nostalgia – it took me a long moment to make it back to reality. A brief reception followed, where I realized how many students were present – a good sign! After the drinks, came the real punch. It came in the form of a lively young woman, Lidia Riviello, the evening’s feature poetess. Figlia d’arte, Ms. Riviello is a thoroughly articulate and experienced artist, who, in one decade, has amassed several publications plus the funding and promotion of an internationally known Italian Poetry Festival, in its tenth year. She opened her section with a brief, down to the point, presentation about the circumstances and primary undercurrents of Italian contemporary poetry, from Montale, Pasolini and Ungaretti onwards. In the fashion of a navigated scholar, she supported her overview with a text book (??), which she has donated (for those interested) to the Department of Italian Studies. With a level of rendition and performance which, unfortunately, we are not longer accustomed to, Lidia devised an amazingly caustic and provocative session. Guided by her “impertinent” poetry, which mixes patrician language with slang, she depicts the status quo provocatively. Her depiction is refreshing in its irreverence to the benpensantismo borghese – a rather inert and a-critical middle-class conservatism, which, albeit rampant in the U.S., is present in every culture. Lidia used a language that visits street and media culture, as well as it uses the spirit of criticism and alertness of the artist, proposing poetry as an instrument of existentialist awareness. Unabashed by the rather intimate tone of the first half of the program, she dished out an effervescent cascade of free flowing verses, free to rush out like a soft drink can incautiously opened, yet quick to stop and linger on new onomatopoeias – try her rhyming Italian words with Coca-Cola or McDonalds!. Masterful at handling a witty verse, impertinent at tracts, a verse presented, in-a-dada-machine-gun-like-denotation, full of accents, pre-meditated pauses, leaps and bounces, Lidia brought poetic rhythm to its summit. The performance was as enlivening as I have ever seen it, all in short verses of breathtaking emotional power. Her poems are proposed like unbroken sequences of words, running through one’s ears, like a fast commercial one cannot stop – a tight sequence of apparently unrelated vignettes that makes sense only when once the speech is over. I’ve never heard anything like this. I was flabbergasted! Evidently, a poet can make any contrast, any incident into malleable matter. I took it as an invitation to be critical and alert, but not to shut the doors to new manifestations of the human experience. Believe me, it was something else!
Elegantly hosted by the Department of Italian Studies, InVerse was made possible by the vision and courage of Judy Raggi-Moore (Emory) and Berenice Cocciolillo, from the John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. I can see that InVerse has the potential to grow into an annual appointment with the Italian avant-garde. Will we find sufficient funds? Will anyone step forward? We very much hope so, as events like this may awaken sleepy Atlanta from its provincial lethargy. If you were too busy to attend, we are here to stay. Just make sure you are part of it next year. Poetry is a missing voice in a lifestyle (our Western lifestyle) so filled with materialism, telling us what counts, constantly rushing us to the next thing. Although any step out of the ordinary needs funding, poetry does not linger on what you can touch. Poetry tells us who we are. It does it from within; it does it with a whisper. Poetry also entertains, helps us smelling the roses. And for those who wonder about titles, inverse, this time without hyphen, means: contrary to the customs we are so accustomed to. In that vein, in the vein of an evening out of the ordinary, off it goes the candlelight of such high realms of the human endeavor, but not for long. I hope that I have bugged you. If your TV is off today, I have succeeded!
I am yours truly. Giancarlo Pirrone.