Can the Muse Sing Again?
Poetry, as is well known, has now been the Cinderella of literature for several decades. The art of verse is essentially alien to the mindset of the contemporary reader, and poetry books have a completely negligible impact on the book market. Apparently, therefore, poetry seems confined to a narrow circle of insiders, or to a crowd of reckless amateurs who believe they are poets simply because they occasionally break lines when they write…
But there are also those who wonder whether alternative horizons might exist for what was once the queen of literary expression.
Among the voices proposing new ways of approaching the public, Ivan Pozzoni stands out for his originality. He has drafted an “Anti-Manifesto” of the “Neon-avant-garde” that offers plenty of stimuli for those who aspire to speak to the audience through renewed expressive modes.
The key points of Pozzoni’s Manifesto are the following:
– challenging nomadic capitalisms and multinational authorities
– placing trust in dialogue between cultural worlds, even profoundly different ones, that can give rise to fertile syntheses
– encouraging the production of collective and anonymous artistic forms that escape market logic
– learning to carry out “cultural terrorism” as a reaction to the nihilistic ontology that permeates our time
– betting on a renewed appreciation of irony as a means of overturning dominant narratives
– thinking of the figure of the intellectual in terms of militancy
– acknowledging the exhaustion of the function that literary criticism held during the 20th century
These programmatic points appear decidedly intriguing to anyone who senses the suffocating climate of conformism that poisons the contemporary scene: the intellectuals of the last thirty years have managed nothing better than to pose as court poets of globalist power!
The world of poetry seems particularly detached from cultural debate. Contemporary poetry, an insignificant sector in the book market, is characterized by the fragmentation of writing experiences, with authors gathered in catacomb-like cliques or isolated in pathetic literary narcissisms.
Some of Pozzoni’s proposals could certainly give a much-needed jolt to a literary world stuck in immobility. In particular, the call for dialogue between languages, besides being ethically important, distances itself from elitist closures and fertilizes terrains that might have seemed barren from certain perspectives.
The overcoming of the artist’s ego-dimension is a particularly stimulating theme in Pozzoni’s reflections. While abandoning the ego risks undermining the originality of works, it can nonetheless open the way to a new/ancient conception of the literary work. Indeed, the frontier of the internet favors practices of dissemination and enjoyment of literature that open up to forms of collective sharing, recalling the idea of the creative work as an expression of shared feelings through an impersonal voice: a conception that evokes the shared enjoyment of art typical of past centuries, particularly Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Moreover, Pozzoni traces the beginning of the literary ego back to Dante and the transition from the Middle Ages to Humanism: the father of Italian literature represents the culmination of medieval literary expression, but also the beginning of a new era—an era whose conceptions of creative work still influence contemporary practices.
Another interesting aspect is the emphasis on irony, an attitude more necessary than ever in a time when the grip of political correctness has strangled free expression and the spontaneity of social behavior. This is undoubtedly the most problematic point, since current ethics have been reshaped on the basis of austere moral codes that have profoundly altered mass psychology. Irony, mockery, humor, and sarcasm today risk being relegated to the all-encompassing category of “discrimination” or, even worse, they are not even perceived…
By now we have reached forms of self-censorship that have brought us back to the time of the Inquisition or that project us into the dystopian future of Orwellian thoughtcrime!
Finally, Pozzoni insists on the importance of a militant attitude. In the age of globalization, most intellectuals have done nothing but shut themselves up in an ivory tower to carve out a media-visibility niche that is entirely fruitless for broadening public awareness. Militancy, of course, is not understood by Pozzoni in the sense of partisan commitment, but as a call to ethics and responsibility toward a reality that, day by day, lends itself more and more to questioning established positions.
Pozzoni, like many other intellectuals, deplores the proliferation of publishing houses and the practice of self-publishing, which have given rise to the phenomenon of mass amateurism. However, it must also be noted that this widespread opportunity to publish offers a chance to original, counter-current voices that are cut off from the circuit of major publishing. In short: never before has so much poetry been written. The real problem, rather, is to stimulate the public’s sensitivity toward poetic expression, restoring moral strength and vigor to a language that—trivialized by mass media—has been emptied of energy and of its capacity to move consciences. On this front, the web offers great possibilities, but it would be appropriate to ask how to integrate internet resources with other tools: artistic performances, places of public sharing, initiatives capable of engaging an audience not accustomed to consuming poetic texts.
Pozzoni’s guiding ideas seem a useful provocation to stir the muddy waters of the current cultural scene. Starting from these premises, one can express the desire to give life to a movement capable of attracting media attention to a cultural phenomenon that may prove surprisingly innovative.
AD MAIORA
The blog curated by Ivan Pozzoni
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