Arshake is pleased to publish the fourth of seven appointments of an essay on thinking, poetry and writing in the technological era by Brunella Antomarini, Professor of Aethetics and Contemporary Philosophy at the John Cabot University in Rome. The essay originally appeared on the magazine “Smerilliana. Luogo di civiltà poetiche” (Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop, in “Smerilliana”, n.17 2015, pp. 275-90), and it is here relaunched, translated into English.
Part I: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 7, 2018
Part II: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 14, 2018
Part II: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 21, 2018
From Vladimir d’Amora’s verses:
The wheat? The fields? All has already blown up,/ poet, and in the hearts poison is being /poured, for any metaphor nearby / has been dismissed with brief grace: / that is, it is just worth the time of a connection. [1]
It is as if we already knew all the stories, all the feelings, all the endings. It is a continuous remake, the saturation of knowledge. What remains to be done is to play along the endless space in between the shattered pieces. It’s a bit like in sports, where the record is decided by the millisecond. We can not get into an image, the poet shields his own words from any paraphrasing and introduces us into a system that first of all cuts off all communication, then rejects us, and eventually presents us with the gift of dismemberment.
Hannah Arendt lived at a time when the metaphor of freedom was the extension beyond limits. Now that the extended space has come closer, that the remote and the recent past are blurred together, and the paths seem to have been already beaten or exploited, or taken, freedom implodes in the metaphor of the minimal, the intensive instant when things connect and disconnect. It is here that we decide of the resilience of writing, hence of the poetic nature of thinking, in which the smallness “lights up” – and for ‘smallness’ we do not mean tiny images, but that narrow space where verbal, iconic, musical, rhythmic associations intersect, and appearance becomes apparition. The contingent no longer needs support to stand up. In fact, now it is the contingent to be the apex of the fantastic, so far as there are words to conceive it. Devoid of ideas – for, in thinking, they are empty – what remains is the full display of their free intersecting. But you are a poet not by the way in which you employ an analogy, a metaphor, or associate two incompatible elements, but by the way they meet.
The poet points at a swiftest moment, which lasts nothing. The images follow one another with such a speed that it is impossible to perceive them, to reconstruct their meaning, or to identify a narrative sequence. By recurring to expedite writing (and reading) techniques, poetic thinking, whatever type of poets are around today, aims at that space in between things. Appearances are apparitions as they disappear quickly and are short-lived, thereby the end can merely grasp them. That point of intersection is a threshold that gives us the immense pleasure of poetry and the sensation that something in fact exists – although it is not apparent to the eye (Arendt 72). Something that also hides, and that we today call the ‘virtual’.
… to be continued…
[1] I would like to thank Vladimir D’Amora, as a large part of this essay has been inspired by his unpublished poems.
This is the fourth of seven appointments of an essay on thinking, poetry and writing in the technological era by Brunella Antomarini that originally appeared on the magazine “Smerilliana. Luogo di civiltà poetiche” (Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop, in “Smerilliana”, n.17 2015, pp. 275-90).
Part I: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 7, 2018
Part II: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 14, 2018
Part II: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 21, 2018
“Smerilliana” was first published by Enrico D’Angelo in January 2003, in the Marche region.It initially came out every six months. Later every volume of «Smerilliana» became a place of poetic civilisation, with the addition of the series “Poets of Smerilliana” and “Mosaic”. When it first appeared, Giovanni Raboni cited «Smerilliana» while writing in «Corriere della Sera», calling it the most open-minded and interesting poetry publication on the Italian scene. «Smerilliana» ideally continues the work of the literary biannual magazine «Plural» (founded and directed by D’Angelo in Napoli, between 1986-91), pursuing the pluralist outlook and style of the movement, as defined by the Orientalist Rahim Raza.
images: (cover 1) Jason Nelson, «Uncontrollable Semantics», 2012, still from web work, revisited version of the original one (2002) (2) Jason Nelson, «Uncontrollable Semantics», still from web work, 2002
