Born in Arezzo, I currently live and work in Rome. In 1968 I published my first book Non me lo dire, non posso crederci ( don't Tell Me, I can't Believe it), published by Tèchne in Florence, the city where I obtained my university degree in modern literature. In 1977 I published Ritratto di un amico paziente (Portrait of a Patient Friend), Rome, Gabrieli and in 1979 the novel Boiter (Forum, Forl). In 1980 I published Il Cane dei Miracoli (The Miracle Dogs), Bastogi, Foggia and in 1984 "L'udito cronico" ("The Chronic Sense of Hearing") in Nuovi Poeti Italiani n 3, Turin, Einaudi. In 1987 I published Madrid (Corpo 10, Milan), which won the Russo Pozzale prize in 1989. In 2001 Gemello Carnivoro (Carnivorous Twin) came out (Faenza) and in 2002 Macrolotto (Canopo, Prato), in collaboration with the painter Ronaldo Fiesoli. I have also published numerous booklets of poetry, especially in Spain. My work appears in various anthologies and in the most important Italian literary magazines. Another volume of poetry will be published soon. The collection of short stories Una Magnifica Giovinezza (A Magnificent Youth), remains unpublished, though the critic Guido Almansi loved it and tried desperately to get it published. Some of these stories appear in anthologies and literary magazines. Since I began to write poetry as a child, I can claim the esteem of important poets such as Corrado Govoni and Giuseppe Ungaretti. Later, my work was appreciated by the protagonists of the Florentine literary scene, from Mario Luzi to Carlo Betocchi, Luigi Baldacci, and Oreste Macrì. I would meet these writers at the Paskoski literary cafè as well as the Caffè San Marco, which was the headquarters of the Gruppo 70. I recall with great affection Franco Fortini's high esteem, and I have saved all his letters and postcards. I should also mention Giovanni Giudici, Giovanni Raboni, Elio Pagliarani, Walter Siti, Remo Pagnanelli, Mario Lunetta, Donato Di Stasi, Daniela Marcheschi, etc. I almost forgot! I live with two cats that are simply amazing. What else? I have published discontinuously, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, but I never worried about it. In 1969 the volume Non me lo dire, non posso crederci was published by the Gruppo 70, a movement founded in 1960 by Eugenio Miccini together with other poets, painters, and musicians such as L. Pignotti, A. Bueno, and G. Chiari. As authors who paid close attention to the phenomena of mass communications, they aimed to write in a language that was defined "technological" at the time. This group was very important for me also because it was where my profound friendship with Eugenio began, a relationship marked by great mutual admiration. The driving emotional force behind such books as Madrid and L'udito cronico had not yet appeared. My Iberian sentiment emerged during my last years of university study, while I wrote my thesis on the Peruvian poet Cèsar Vallejo. This passion for things Spanish continues to be conscience, memory, geographical and spatial attraction, as well as overwhelming emotion. Even after I stopped working as a university lecturer, I maintained my cultural ties with various Spanish cities, especially Salamanca and the Italian departments of the universities of Madrid and Seville. At that time, Leopoldo Panera translated some of my poems for the publishing house Ediciones Libertarias; they came out in 1987 with the title La Casa del Loco. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the book, but it is available in the archives of the publisher Antonio Huerga. From 1990 to 2000, I lived through a period of forced immobility as far as my poetic activity was concerned, except for a reading for the Italian state television, a meeting with students from the University of l'Aquila, and one with students from a high school in Jesi. They were difficult years, which in any case gave rise to the poetic material published in the volume Gemello Carnivoro. If I were to ask myself questions in a hypothetical interview, I would choose just two: why have I always used the masculine as a poetic subject and why Spain? I would answer the following: I think poetry, like all art, simply represents our infinite possibilities of being. I use the male self in order to avoid being autobiographical in a way that is too direct or unsustainable or even rhetorical in some cases; it also has to do with a desire for a greater objectivity and fluidity of language, and who knows how many other reasons. But this emerged unconsciously during my childhood. This doesn't mean that the problems related to the feminine condition are foreign to me, though perhaps I delegate them to various hypothetical alter egos. Believably masculine, my poetic ego never subtracted anything from reality. What instead I tried to subtract was the idea of time: I avoided it by substituting place-time. For this reason too, in my poems and in some books I unite pieces composed at a distance of ten or twenty years. I think this temporal omission, when it works, is a sign of quality. As far as my Iberian spirit is concerned, I think it can be explained the same way as the male ego. It's a chosen elsewhere, an achieved escape, a consolation, in the same way that music can assume this role for a painter or math for a musician. The only difference with respect to the first question is that here the real is added to the poetic operation, which never unites the true with the truth. In every poetic transcription of the real, I think that it is important only to observe everything with the intention of observing poetry, in order to arrive at two conclusions: to understand that every word is worthy of a creative operation, and that poetry is accomplished only if there is a new form of writing. Our responsibility is this and nothing more. In addition, just as prose has the duty to simplify the complex, poetry has the freedom to complicate it. Needless to say, this is outside of symbolism or the cryptic nature of hermeticism, taking for granted that a metaphor must not be a comparison. Therefore, every time that we bring together two situations that are normally distant (metaphor), we perform a synthesis, but without obstructing the path intellectually, or lowering the threshold or diluting it, etc. I remember that I used to dictate to my mother poems that I had dreamed. I was five or six years old, and the funny thing is that she was never amazed that I had such dreams or that I had them so frequently. But I owe it to my mother if I got into the habit of dictating them to her and then later, of transcribing them myself. Only many years later did I understand that the verses were my way of thinking, that this was antisocial, and that what I was doing was opposing what I saw by trying to substitute it with what I felt. My poetic education was thus a solitary childhood, inside a house that was completely without books, and my contacts were with people much older than I. On those occasions, I had the feeling that I was learning life "upside down." I never worried about writing; it just came out as if I were speaking. Understandably, children my age would avoid me. Later, teachers, professors, and headmasters became interested in me. I cannot, therefore, talk of books that were important or decisive for my formation. I was actually a terrible student, though at university I was good in subjects that had nothing to do with Italian literature. The books of my youth, which I still reread occasionally, are exclusively American literature, books on natural history, or collections of letters by poets. What interests me in the latter is the translation of emotions into spoken language. I can only read prose. I have never been fond of the words verses or poem. They had, and still have for me, the taste of chamomile and weak smells. I think that the word "poetry," if it is named, becomes rhetorical; if defined by the author, it becomes an ugly tautology. It would be preferable to ask a person his idea of the world and what he intends to do with it while living. All of this has to do with a human being's first conscious perception of reality. Does he have a hostile vision of that reality? Does he express it in his own individual way? Does this way convince someone, and later many people? If this person continues throughout the years to replace other dissatisfied" worlds with his initial world, and produces books while remaining faithful to himself, then this person is an artist. This will suffice; I do not feel like exhibiting "medals," that is, critical opinions, reviews, certificates of merit, interviews, etc. I think that websites should be exclusively informational.
www.espressionidarte.it