LYRIK-DISKURS   2

Dear Dieter, you speak about our „Gemeinsamkeiten", our common points, where our poetry meets. I would say that these common points are there for sure and come basically from an experimental background, where the term „experimental“ has to be conceived in a wide sense. When I told you once that your poetry for me is not avant-gardistic but experimental and that I think the same way when I write my texts, you reminded me of the problematic history of that concept, quoting Thomas Kling. But let's try to expand this idea and think that our poetry is originated by a desire of knowledge and relation to reality. That is what I call experimental. We are both probably not interested in Poetry as a genre, we write in creating paradigms in order to approach reality and language, to approach what I like to call the world-language we live in, since I don't think that it makes sense to distinguish „metaphysically“ these two elements anymore. World and language are two ways of giving a name to the same thing, the only space we know because we all live inside it. Do you agree with that? Jean-Marie Gleize's concept of post-poésie has to do with such an issue. Jean-Marie believes that poetry, if „classically“ conceived as a genre, is not able to respond anymore to the need of writing somehow inside reality, to see poetry as a form of reality. As you explain, contemporary art uses multiple and mixed media in order to reach its purposes, and that is concretely what Jean-Marie thinks poetry should do as well. So post-poetry is a way of writing without thinking of genres, of rhetorical procedures, of metrical schemes, of external forms given to a previous content, etc., but just trying to make the language adhere to itself while expressing itself inside reality. I deeply agree with this point of view. It has by the way a strong relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy, which has been very important for my work. As Wittgenstein writes in his Notebooks 1914-16: „So stellt der Satz den Sachverhalt gleichsam auf eigene Faust dar". It is not that far away from the following proposition Jean-Marie loves to repeat: „poetry says what it says in saying it“ (la poésie dit ce qu'elle dit en le disant). But I also have a perplexity on the definition post-poésie: this term assumes that poetry has changed, becoming something after itself, and this „something“ still has a relation to „poetry“ as a genre but is not a genre anymore. So, we can argue, poetry is nothing but a model of a writing practice. But then, why do we still need to call it differently? Why couldn't we just say „poetry“ knowing that we are referring to a certain tradition which has deeply changed at the same time, that we are referring to a model, not to an ontological layer or a heideggerian or whatever truth of language? I think that questioning literary genres is somehow a 20th century issue that might not be that important anymore. Poetry has always changed into something different than itself. Also German Romantic poetry is post-poetry if we see it as an evolution beyond previous classical poetry practices. I would like to say that great poetry is always „post-poetry", and, at the same time, it is still poetry, and that's all. Also because poetry is not only form, not only metrical schemes, not only genre. Poetry might also mean to write knowing that the language we are using has a high (and highly peculiar) semantical concentration which distinguish such a practice from other kinds of artistic and/or literary practices. When you read Jean-Marie Gleize's work, power, deepness and semantical concentration of his text go beyond every fixed definition, but at the same time his work can still be called (great) poetry, because such procedures refer to poetry's tradition while trying to change it. It is exactly the same sensation I have when I read your work. So I would go back to poetry knowing that we're using a conventional term (by the way, as Antonio Prete points out, Giacomo Leopardi told this already at the beginning of the 19th century) and call writing practices like your one, Jean-Marie's one and my own one just poetry or, if we want to highlight the research we do respectively in our works, „experimental poetry“. This doesn't mean that I don't agree with the idea behind the term post-poetry: I support this conception with firmness. Also for a political reason, that is to say against an easy and banally lyrical and sentimental conception of poetry which is nowadays unfortunately still too powerful. So let's say we can also use the term post-poetry knowing that it is a model as well. There is a last aspect I would like to point out in this first letter: you talk about a new way of conceiving poetry by not working on the single text anymore, but, I would say, on a „macro-text", on an unique text single poems belong to. And when those single poems are read and published separately they „lose“ something. I think I proceeded in the same way when I wrote my first book, Lo spostamento degli oggetti: the texts inside it belong to a „macro-textual“ conception even if they are also single entities (also written in different periods of time). Jean-Marie Gleize's procedure in that sense is something different, you certainly agree: he doesn't write single texts, but his books are non-fiction or, I would say, semi-fiction prose works in chapters, even if, as I argued, because of the language they use and the tradition they refer to, they are still poetry (ok, ok, post-poetry!). In my second book, Ridefinizione*, not finished yet and only partially published on reviews, I tried, in that sense, a third possible procedure: the book is an unique macro-text divided in three sections/chapters composed by several single „square prosepoetry texts“; some of them can also work as single poems, but not all of them, and there's anyway what I would call a non-linear narrative taking place inside the work, in which several different plots and remarks are weaved together and superposed through a series of gaps, lapses, time changes, flash-backs and flash-forwards, following precisely a non-linear logical and compositional approach. In that sense, if I basically don't have anything against poetry and I consider my own work, even when there are narrative devices, as poetry and myself as a poet, I really do agree with your doubts on maintaining the poem as the fundamental unit of poetry and I am also interested in more complex, multi-dimensional and articulated writing procedures. Let's say that for me the concept of poem is more compromised than the concept of poetry, because poetry can still embrace a very wide set of writing practices, while poem means just poem, and that's all. If we use the word poem, like I did, we have to know that we're using a conventional term even more than while using the word poetry.

* Ridefinizione / Neubestimmung. Gedichte (italienisch/deutsch) in poet nr. 5