Mariangela Gualtieri: 'Poetry? More music than literature'

In fact, in Phonic Enchantment you write 'from mind to athletic body'... Should the vocalisation of poetry be taught in school?

Eh, poor school, it can't do it all. I think it would already be important to have poems learnt by heart - something that the children quite detest - but it is a fundamental act because in this way poems become perennial companions. I learnt Carducci's Davanti a San Guido when I could not yet read and write, an aunt had taught it to me, and I have remembered it all my life. It is truly an art to say poetry, and a teacher who wants to transmit it to girls and boys should practise it in some way. Technological equipment is also very important. Perhaps activating workshops, setting up the necessary equipment, amplification, microphone, etc., would already be a stimulus.

Imagining a poet who wants to read his poem to someone, but without having any special instrumentation, how should he read it?

It is a bit complex to answer... First of all, the poem must be learnt by heart, the eye must be freed from its anchorage to the paper. And already this simple act exposes, opens, the body to what lies before me. When one goes by heart, it almost seems as if another type of memory is activated, a more musical memory, and one feels that pleasure, that joy, of singing. One has to free the eye, not be bound to the paper. Also the attention to the present in which one gives poetry orally is activated a great deal when one goes to memory: one is free to pause in listening with the present. Every audience, every present, has its own underlying silence. Poetry dialogues with that silence, and with the silence of the bystanders. It is never a predetermined saying, it is always a saying that is partly modified by the present in which it happens.

In the Phonic Enchantment she indeed recommends 'releasing the verse into the air'....

Yes, this is it. The eye is really a leash, also because those who read in public are terrified of losing the line, and you are strongly anchored to that paper. When you go memoir you are free and you can 'let loose in the air of the verse'.

If you look behind you at your poetic journey - recent is your self-anthology Bello mondo (Einaudi, 2024) - what do you see?

In no field do I have an orderly historical vision, it is as if the past was piled up behind me in a big mess, I always feel like a beginner. Certainly my language has simplified itself, it has had to simplify itself because forty years of theatre with a director who called me to a frontal, direct word have forced me to simplify myself or, as Borges says, it is not simplicity but a 'modest and secret complexity'. Here I hope I have learnt that secret and modest complexity. My past is a very fortunate one: I grew up in the theatre, with Cesare Ronconi as director and other companions whom I somehow chose and who also happened, certainly, to be taken in, I grew up in such an inspiring environment, if I may say so. I always wrote for actors and actresses who were there, I wrote for bodies, for specific faces. It has been a past, a path, that I consider very generous, very fortunate, very rich.

How do you place this latest collection, Human Rough, in your path?

With Ruvido umano I am doing work with Lemmo, who composes electronic music. I have found that electronic music is very welcoming if you get rid of its will to power, which is often so cumbersome and irritating, and sharpen your hearing. It is a world that seems to me very suitable for poetry. It has in it the voices of animals, of nature, all the sounds of the earth.