Be without being really able to be. Leading another life (being a doctor) compared to what you would like to live (being a poet). Fighting, suffering, then gradually giving up an existence that is not the desired one and for which you were born, until you let yourself be die. This seems to me to be the synthesis, to reread its dramatic human events, of the existence of Lorenzo Calogero, the Italian poet born in 1910 in Melicuccà (Reggio Calabria). He had written in the collection “dream most I don’t remember” that his name could have become a “bright discrepancy that is lost and passes”. And as often happens to the greats of literature and art, it has been more recognized by dead than live (death in life and life in death, one could say …), but always with a strange circumspection, perhaps a consequence of his side (of poet and man) who still scares or scares or causes a comfortable desistance. As if we forgot the explicit appreciation of Ungaretti, Montale, Sinisgalli. It is therefore fundamental, as well as extremely right, the initiative that in Calogero reserves its native country: the wall work under gravity “Viale dei Canti – Orizzonti Lorenzo Calogero”, to the engineering of the town and near Piazza Ardenza, whose revelation on August 7 (5.30 pm) will open the “Poetry Festival” named after the great literate.
And there is a circumstance to immediately grasp which is not only that, albeit logical, to celebrate the illustrious fellow citizen. Rather, that embrace that Melicuccà had reserved for him in the last years of his life (he died in 1961), when, while appointing him to the village “the crazy doctor”, relatives, friends (including the archpriest) and financed acquaintances tried to break his irreparable loneliness, to make him feel participating in a community, to help him not to, do not let himself be consumed to be consumed to be consumed to be consumed to be consumed to be consumed, is Pills, cigarettes, a sense of inconvenience and deep disappointment.
Now the Viale dei Canti, through ten panels, gives him back his real life, that of poet, lacking in awards, but extremely productive in literary results. That road that perhaps still resonates its ailments of steps becomes a permanent and exemplary exhibition on who Calogero was and therefore is. Three poems to read on those walls that have been off so far, but ready to light up with his light, of his imagination. To unite them, a few lines, those in which Calogero had expressed his concept of art: «Art reveals the torment of life and revealing it reassembled it. Art has the task of revealing the fate of nature and the hidden meaning of things “.
Poetry, therefore, has the ability to “adjust” existence, or in any case to make it passable, makes us go beyond any appearance, allows us a wider understanding of people and things. Despite everything, Calogero lived with this belief, only at the end did he come to renunciation. His positive seed now sprouts on the walls of the Viale dei Canti in his womb, or Melicuccà. A powerful and evocative image, rich in meaning.
Everything was born on the lines of another Viale dei Canti, built in Paris in 2016 in front of the entrance of the Italian Culture Institute, where alongside the verses of Giacomo Leopardi, those of Alfonso Gatto, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Bartolo Cattafi and, in fact, Lorenzo Calogero were also included. All voices of poets of the twentieth century “famous yes, but still clandestine, that is, known to a few in spite of their greatness”, as Marina Valensise writes (which of the institute was a director in that period) in her beautiful book “Culture is like jam” (Marsilio). That avenue, going further, adds the sounds to the figurative art, but there, as now in Melicuccà, the artistic architect is Giuseppe Caccavale, professor at the Nationale Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, who thus presented the Calabrian project, created with the collaboration of Théo Etrillard: “The words of the poet Lorenzo Calogero will be a large frame of a Landscape, one by one drawn in dusting and dug on the screen of a terrestrial sky. Everything will be written with the prestigious typographical characters Alberto Tallone, donated for the occasion. The poems will pass hands in a team of four young people from the Paris ecole in Paris (Martin Bourgaux, Isaure Brunel, Matis Germain and Mia Naja, with the active participation of local workers) “. And he added: “The discipline of art chosen is the” snatch “, which follows the methods of writing the pilgrims who in the past centuries have visited the cave of Sant’Elia in Melicuccà. The materials are plaster and pigments in consonance with the environment. The colors used are all written by Calogero in its poems ». There are also some drawings from the notebooks of Calogero himself.
“Asking the dreams of the poets,” reads now, among other things, on the walls. And we are often assopitated also we readers, even more institutional ones, who have made Calogero suffer so much. And, in a certain sense, the cultural attention after the publications that followed his disappearance and even after the book “The assiduous shadow of the poet”, published by Rubbettino in 2017 and curated by Vito Teti, architect of the structured and scarfa archive of the poet’s notebooks, available to all at the University of Calabria in Arcavacata. As Teti says, it is necessary to move away from definitions such as “cursed poet”, “Calabrian rimbaud” or even “crazy genius”: it is the result of the critical evil of the labeling. Calogero is out of the classifications and must be recognized as such.
To understand the poet of Melicuccà he can serve his 1939 writing (which I draw from an essay by Teti), illuminating: “I am a man persecuted by my terror of revealing absurd feelings and to distinguish every healthiest affection of mine corrupt from any possible absurdity (…) This is the reason why the instinct to develop up to a maximum degree in the poetry has always existed in me, To compensate for love that I don’t have and I couldn’t have. ” Now, at least a little of that love can arrive in Calogero from the walls, full of soul, of Melicuccà.
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