Chimpwearingasnowsuite

2000 Interview with Valentino Campo (released to the common good)

1. starting with the title "The art of digging wells," the title that has its own unique charm. Would you explain?

The title was inspired by a lost work of Democritus; time ago reading a book on the history of Gnosticism I found that Democritus wrote a manual on technical and practical where he taught, in fact, the art of digging wells. I do not know how and in what way underground, this title has remained in my mind, as if to settle, to resurface when reading a passage from Genesis, I came across the story of Isaac, who teaches at the neighboring tribes such as digging wells. The theme of the search for water through wells in the literature is the patriarchal symbol of man's spiritual search . Certainly the title is evocative, that I have refers to the idea of \u200b\u200bliterature. I think that it should dig those wells that then a little 'time to be filled by the water of the words. I believe that the function of poetry is now more evident that, to tell the man and his relationship with the world, as Carlo Bo writes in his essay fundamental and essential, must be combined with life is - to the words of Fabio Luigi Mastropietro - the exercise of hope through language, even when preliminary despair and horror. must enact to prevent the horror. In this sense, and only in this sense, poetry is always political. Because the poet simply does not exist without the polis. Certain minimal-chic modernist poetry so popular in recent years has reduced the word to an empty ornament, often a game of charades and Calambour, and self-sterile. The word has lost its sacredness of logos the peculiarity that the forces to always be herself even when it is something else, which makes the host and unleavened bread when it feeds the other and when the other it feeds on. This is especially true today, in a period of great confusion, where many write and publish, but few people read, with the exception of that which is imposed by the circuit television and paratelevisivi. It so happens that in an uproar so amplified literature, poetry in particular, has lost the tone of voice is always more difficult pick up the threads. Just listen to Sergio Zavoli, decent man and poet decorated , said today that poetry has the task of restoring the lost hope for young people, in perfect line with the dull gargle culture of so many assessors, scattered everywhere, who argue that poetry should aim at simplicity, beauty and harmony. Digging wells, instead, the poem returns to the mud and water, the grace and uncleanness.

2. Professor Lingfield speaks of "stylistic solipsism, a kind of loneliness style (where each has in place what can be: a "private research style" as a feature of the generation of ten years "what has nourished this private research your style?

Poetry can be a voice and string, ear and silence. Figures and things stolen. Would rather private searches. Books that over the years have been stratified, and bone beds, voices with whom I talked, I try to constantly babbling to encrypt the abyss, the simplicity of saying the ineffable. The medieval mystics, the patristic, Ficino, Pico, and then Cusano Govoni, Gozzano, Saba, Testori, Luzi. The list is long but maybe the error is just what groped a list. The voices of some end up in overflow of the other so as to get a voice. Of course the debt Luzi is important not only for what concerns his search for a man but also from the point of view of style, such as the slip of my verse is talking about George Lingfield critical anthology "The new Italian modernist poetry "is a legacy Luziano.

3. The "Fourth Samnite War, the war that has never been fought is also the exile from history and leads us to reflect on another exile, to those who, while inside the world, lives in exile in a conscious and painful marginalized.

The fourth Samnite War is a work in progress. It can be considered a more conscious and lucid attempt to deal with the issue of Carmina Matris, poem published in the issue of zero AltroVerso. I was inspired by the story of the Japanese soldier was found that after nearly forty years in the jungles of a Pacific island and believed to be still war against the Americans. The transposition is present throughout the Molise, I suppose so like that Japanese soldier who lives here in California, for various reasons, one of his personal exile, surrounded by the shadows of the Romans.

The soldier who is Sunni, for example coming from the forest after a year spent in the meantime, he discovers that his city has lost thirty-one positions in the annual ranking conducted by Legambiente, and wonders why his old town has been reopened to traffic and parking while back elsewhere is considered a limited traffic zone. The soldier found the old Sunni sides to pull again, those first four years, which now call themselves alternative. He sees the sights, peering suspiciously the shapes of the poles in the wind on the ridges. And shells his litany: The Biferno is not a river and the Romans are well aware of the ... have pulled the plug removed the respirator say that within a year, the enemy will be cared for, the war does not exist for those who ignore us when we die .

As in Angelica, a poem in which the voice back to five year old girl killed by the Sacra Corona Unita because his mother had become the wife of the boss, in an attempt to describe the evil, ' unspeakable evil, in the fourth Samnite War the item back to those who live with glossy exclusion is impossible to communicate in a provincial alienated and alienating reality which is sometimes enough to pen a self-proclaimed journalists and writers and directors considered to be a camera. Everything else is the art of denial, a continuous start over without ever set in the land of the piers. Salt and clay, clay and salt.

I think this distrust, this culture of suspicion that often incarognire even the most lucid minds and open to both the anthropological limits of this land.