Every time a poet dies, a dream dies. His poetry remains, however, to help us in our daily resistance, a capital of beauty and goodness, proof of which is the fact that it itself is a formidable multiplier of ideas. This is fully demonstrated by «An orchid now shines in the hand. Selected poems 1932-1960» by Lorenzo Calogero (Lyriks editions, with a preface by Aldo Nove, English translation by John Taylor, and, on the cover, an original “cancellation” by the artist Emilio Isgro dedicated to the poet who creates a “visual dialogue” with the verses). Already in 2020 the Calabrian director and set designer Nino Cannatà had made the great Calabrian intellectual and poet Lorenzo Calogero famous, 110 years after his birth (Melicuccà, 28 May 1910-25 March 1961), with the publication, again by Lyriks editions, of an anthology containing, together with the most significant verses of Calogero’s poetic corpus, other contributions, including the critical interventions of John Taylor, poet and translator of Calogero into English in the USA. Cannatà, curator of the “Progetto Calogero”, in collaboration with the Gruppo Sperimentale Villa Nuccia, had celebrated the great poet in 2010/2011 (for the centenary of his birth and 50 years after his death) with “Città fantastico, il lungo canto di Lorenzo Calogero”, a video-theatrical work, with a dramaturgical adaptation of the poet’s texts, the reciting voice of Roberto Herlitzka, the voice-off of Carlo Emilio Lerici and the participation of Lydia Mancinelli.
But we must start from the Reggio municipality of Melicuccà, with its ancient history that dates back to Byzantine Greece, which from today to Sunday will celebrate Calogero with a great “Festival of Poetry” – an authentic celebration of art and beauty – to find the auroral source of his poetry. Perhaps, precisely from there Calogero was able to aim, as he wrote, “beyond the mountains, the seas, a sublime infinity, a kingdom that never ends”: the “fantastic city” in which poetry is nourished that finds its own material in itself, in the existential story of Calogero, beloved son of a family of intellectuals and third of six brothers, who despite his degree in medicine (obtained in Naples in 1937) wanted to give meaning to life by bringing his songs to light and letting them go into the world. But it was precisely in the opaque space of reality that Calogero came up against the impossibility of being part of the “laureate poets”: although he followed the literary community that gathered around the literary magazine “Il Frontespizio” of Peter Bargellini And Carlo Betocchito whom he sent his first poems in the hope that they would be published, he encountered inattention if not rejection, so in 1936 he published, at his own expense, with Centauro Editore, his first collection, «Poco suono».
Aware of his marginality, not only geographically, but above all literary, compared to the canonical poetics of those years, he experienced the “immovable pain” of living with precarious health, which was followed by a long period of restlessness and distance from writing, filled with deep readings. But the poet’s internal lyrical diary did not cease. He wrote: “I sent love letters / to the skies, to the winds, to the seas, / to all the flooded / forms of the universe, / they answered me / in a dewy / slowness of love / for which I rested / on their scorched jagged peaks / as on a forest of wind”, therefore from 1946 to 1952 he began to sing the enigma of the world again with verses rooted in the reflection on the very meaning of poetry in human experience.
An imaginative dance, between light and darkness, which was “discovered” by Leonardo Sinisgalli to whom Calogero, after disappointing attempts with Einaudi, delivered in the 1950s two anthologies, «Ma Questo» and «Parole del Tempo», for a preface, which Sinisgalli would do, for the volume «Come in dittici»: luxuriant verses that flow from clear springs but with sudden, bold juxtapositions/derailments and elegant phonic-lexical architectures. Sinisgalli said he was «happy to have traveled and discovered first the wonders of this new continent that comes to broaden the domain of poetry» and at the same time hopeful that Calogero’s books would restore «our most authoritative critics’ faith in poets».
A wish that seemed to come true when in 1957 Calogero won the literary prize “Villa San Giovanni”, awarded to him by the jury presided over by Falqui, and composed of Selvaggi, Angioletti, Doria, Solmi, in the presence of Sinisgalli himself (in the meantime between 1956 and 1958 he had written the ninety-nine poems of the collection «Sogno più non ricordo»), but the prestige of the prize received was not followed by any editorial proposal. Disappointments that accentuated Lorenzo’s state of neurosis. And yet, even in pain, his word-vision lit up in front of a nest, the clouds, a full moon, remaining in the here of the world but abandoning itself, trembling, to the night, to the shadow: the verses that in his last writings he defined as «poor miraculous things» he thought could belong to everyone, as Poetry should be: «If something of it, scattered/ fragment,/ will return/ let it be like a white wing,/ a lily flower/ born in a dream/ on a blue ribbon». This is how the «35 Quaderni di Villa Nuccia» were born, as he would have titled them, in 1962, after the poet’s death, Roberto Lericieditor of the two volumes of «Opere Poetiche», with an introduction by Joseph Germans.
Ungaretti said of Calogero: «With his poetry he diminished us all», Carmelo Good he defined him as “the greatest lyric poet of the Italian twentieth century”, he was appreciated by Montale, Luzi, Amelia Rosselli, Caproni, Repaci, Sereni, Vigorelli, Piromalli, and yet, despite the conferences and studies that have been dedicated to him, we still need to dig into the very rich deposit of his writings. “He had an encyclopedic culture – his granddaughter recalls Luisa Calogerodaughter of Francesco, one of Lorenzo’s brothers, and who lives in Messina with her brother Mario – and although I was still little I remember him leaning against the door jamb, with his face turned upwards, thoughtful. Perhaps he was working on those verses and reflections that he wrote in the old black notebooks, with thin lines and squares».
Those over eight hundred manuscript notebooks now kept at the University of Calabria, thanks to the recovery work of Vito Teti, who opened a new season of Calogerian studies with a conference, «Lorenzo Calogero. 1910-2010. The ‘assiduous shadow’ of poetry» organized in 2014 with the University of Calabria and the publication of the unpublished work «Avaro nel tuo pensiero» (Donzelli, edited by M. Sechi and C. Verbaro) and «Parole del tempo» (Donzelli, 2011, edited by M. Sechi, introduction by V. Teti). A «treasure of poetry», recalls Teti, «that deserves much more to keep alive one of the highest poetic voices of the twentieth century».