The Italianist: Riveting Italian Books You Need to Know About
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Loading... - Claire Lavigne
- 21 Mar 2023
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The book is La poesia è un unicorno (quando arriva spacca) (‘Poetry is a unicorn – when it arrives it rocks’) by contemporary poet and discerning publisher Francesca Genti, serendipitously part of the same writing circles as Francesca Matteoni, the author of last month’s Italianist book. It is a work of non-fiction from 2018, a general introduction to poetry as a mode of writing, discussing its intentions, its audiences, its influences and its effects, while also deconstructing many of the stereotypes and assumptions made about it in Italy’s literary scenes. Several of those assumptions can easily be tracked down in some circles in the anglophone world too, especially when it comes to the reverence towards the classics, the idea of canon, and the ‘right way of writing and reading poems’.
The book also serves pretty well for a general audience dipping their toes into contemporary Italian poetry, as the author provides a substantial bibliography (four pages long), containing all the references to the poems she cites throughout the book; poems which range from Italian classics such as Dante, Angiolieri, and Boccaccio, via modern classics such as Montale, Maraini, Rodari, and Rosselli, to contemporary writers such as Catalano, Gualtieri, and Lamarque. And the way in which Genti uses them between the lines of the text, juxtaposing them with her very direct, straightforward, anecdotal prose, is a beauty to behold.
There are a few Instagram accounts that keep making the rounds among people aged 25 and older, with the explicit intention of showing how poetry is and should be accessible to all – that is precisely what Genti does with this book, repeatedly, intentionally, and masterfully. The second anecdote that opens the book, after the extract above, is an example of a real life ‘settling scores at dawn’ clash of those two ideologies. Read More…
