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“Poetry is an individual wound that becomes collective music”, is the passionate image with which Maria Grazia Calandrone characterized the Strega Poesia award ceremony at the Tempio di Venere, defining the poetic situation in Italy as a “radiant resistance”. Of the five finalists announced last May at the Book Fair, the first edition of the straw yellow prize was won by the favorite from the beginning, Vivian Lamarque, author of “L’amore da nuova” (Mondadori), with 33 votes out of 98 cast . Next in the ranking were: Umberto Fiori, “Autoportrait” (Garzanti), with 24 votes; Silvia Bre, “The bells” (Einaudi), with 17 votes; Stefano Simoncelli, “Under a false name” (Pequod) with 14 votes; finally Christian Sinicco, “Ballad di Lagosta” (Donzelli), with 10 votes.
Friends of Poetry
The winning collection was chosen by the Friends of Poetry, around a hundred women and men of culture who deal with poetry in various capacities, while the scientific committee, made up of Maria Grazia Calandrone, Andrea Cortellessa, Mario Desiati, Elisa Donzelli, Roberto Galaverni, Valerio Magrelli, Melania G. Mazzucco, Stefano Petrocchi, Laura Pugno, Antonio Riccardi, Enrico Testa and Gian Mario Villalta, had chosen the finalists among one hundred and thirty-five much debated candidates.
“Love as an old woman”
Lamarque’s polite attitude to enchantment and his vivifying personal mythology won over the kids: with 54 votes out of 167 cast, “Love as an Old Woman” also won the Young Poetry Witch Prize, voted by the high school students distributed in Italy and abroad. “That she too / the scar / even she / the scar / can / one day / become / almost / happy?”, the third poem read into the microphone by Lamarque seemed to respond to Calandrone’s opening considerations.
The winner, who recently also won the ninety-fourth edition of the Viareggio-Rèpaci Prize, received a work specially created by Emilio Isgrò, entitled “L’ interno Strega Prize”, whose deletions depict poetry both as a form of current expression almost completely erased from public debate is, positively, the art of the word that works by removing the encrustations and automatisms of clichés from the language. From Isgrò’s thick erasures we can read without hermeneutic escape only what remains: a warning in the face of excessive authorial and, consequently, editorial production.
A political gesture
The conceptual artist intervened on “The Infinite”, spreading a hedge of pure gold next to Leopardi’s rhymes, but not to dazzle the poets, rather to ideally protect their imagination with a more noble substance than ink, that imaginative quality that allows the reader to access the “endless spaces” today troubled by the incessant noise of communication flows. If Fosse’s Nobel Prize recognized a modest pen capable of “giving voice to the unspeakable”, Strega’s entourage reminds us to silence the superfluous, or at least to stem the advance of commercial vacuity. “Always like this, only like this does love go, / first only joys and then only pain, / always like this, only like this does love go / first you rise again and then suddenly you die”: on the spectacularization of the word that flattens it with illusion to spread it, on the editorial controversies that arose as a result of an asphyxiated market and on the hordes of pseudo-pierres in bright jackets who rushed to occupy the emblazoned parterre, it is hoped that the extreme gesture of freedom that the verses represent remains imprinted, formal and substantial, so the last unreleased songs by Patrizia Cavalli, sung by Chiara Civello.