La poetry it is a sublime art form. He knows how to put us in contact with the not always visible universe that we have inside. Thanks to her we learn to observe the world through the prism of beauty, making peace with what we struggle to accept.
Is called poetry to heal that of the poet, writer and blogger Paolo Gambi, since February 2019 collaborator of italiani.it and former winner of the Guidarello Prize for Author Journalism (2012), the Rimini Europa Prize (2016) and the Loris Malaguzzi Prize for Poetry (2019). He wrote 28 books and collaborated with Cardinal Tonini, Gustavo Raffi, Alessandro Cecchi Paone, Alessandro Meluzzi, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and even Raoul Casadei. He recently published the collection of poems The enigma of the hermit crab, The memory of the magnolia, The landing of the salmon.
It is not just a collection but a journey of exploration, towards the most hidden landings of the soul. Reading Gambi's poems is a journey. But also an opportunity to see that pure idea of Bellezza who is capable of moving the world.
There are many themes caressed by Gambi's pen. It will be easy and beautiful to move between puzzles and moods. An invitation to live according to a personal ideal, without fear of andare counter-current. Above all, without ever interrupting our personal search for nice. The vivifying antidote toliquid hell that hides the essence of things and life from us. Paolo Gambi talks about the role of the poet and the key concept of Beauty in this exclusive interview.
Where do you find inspiration for your verses?
They are looking for me, not the other way around. Anyone who has known art knows that this is how it works: it is she who decides everything. When it shows up to you then you can only give in to it or spend the rest of your life regretting not doing it. This is why I gave up everything: journalism, work, the thought of a normal life. To let art follow me. And the verses flow by themselves.
What value does poetry have for you?
Poetry is my way of translating the mystery of Beauty into a human language. It is, like any form of art, a bridge that unites distant worlds, the here with what is beyond, beyond, in an elsewhere. I would say that for me today poetry is everything. And I truly believe it can save the world. In fact, I believe it is already doing it.
What is the role of the poet today?
There are poets, convinced that they are masters and custodians of poetry, who are perched in an “esoteric” knowledge, in very small and closed circles, certain that only they can handle poetry. On the contrary, I am convinced that no one can be called "master" of the Art but at most its servant. And as servants of the Art, poets must bring poetry everywhere. Poets today, in a historical moment in which the word - spoken or written - has returned to have a central role also thanks to technology, have an immense responsibility: to bring Poetry, and therefore salvation, into the new collective unconscious, into the mind on which one mirrors the entire global village. It is not a trivial matter and can only be done by dusting your feet. And the fingers.
From your collection we notice a careful knowledge of the human soul. How did so much interest arise?
It was born at the precise moment when I realized that I belong to the "human being" category. For years I have pursued human interest as a journalist, telling people's stories. Then I started making up stories in my novels. Then I did it by being a "mental coach" entering the depths of the human mind. But in its fullness the answer comes only with the languages of Art, which better than anything else explain to men the mystery of the human.
Your collection is a journey into the Beauty that will save the world. What is your idea of the nice?
For me, beauty is one of the absolutes, it is a mystical concept. Yes, of course, Beauty emerges in little things, it is reflected, even if only for a moment, in a face, in a body, in a landscape. But it is much more. Beauty, Well, God, in a sense they are synonyms, they are words that human beings use to tell something that their mind alone cannot embrace. Beauty is what lies in that mysterious dimension in which the laws of the heart are in force. But it won't save the world in the future. It is already saving him here and now.
The hermit crab looks for a foothold to save itself from existential hell. What holds will bring us to safety?
I do not feel I am the bearer of many answers, it is better for me to ask myself questions. I know that we live in a "liquid hell" that I tell in the first part of the book, that of Zygmunt Bauman in which everything - identity, institutions, ideologies - is liquefied. To be able to save ourselves we need wood, wrecks to cling to. And if this wood finds the earth it comes to life and becomes a tree. And the tree keeps the memory of the universe. It is the second part of the book, the "arboreal purgatory". So perhaps the first word to tear us away from the liquid logic of hell is “memory”.
One of your poems is dedicated to the art of forgiveness. Without forgiveness there is only hell. How can we learn to forgive, and how much can it change us?
Whoever does not know how to forgive always ends up having a very illustrious condemned man as the victim of his own sentences: himself. In order to forgive others, we must first learn to forgive ourselves. With an embrace that humbly accepts everything that we don't like about us, everything that is not as our mind would like. To renounce what logically would be right - that is, the condemnation of the guilty - whoever wants to forgive must therefore find two small seeds: humility and embrace.
Is there a poem within the collection that you are most fond of?
There are some verses that even today always make me move, in a literal sense, when I read them. Like these:
and only what matters will remain:
what is small
and that goes slowly.
But I really don't know why. Maybe they won't tell the others anything. Poetry is like this: it speaks intimately to people, and each is a world unto itself.
Salmon manages to save itself from hell because, different from others, it goes beyond what the mass does. What does it mean for you to go against the grain?
Do not accept uncritically what is imposed as "normal". Today the politically correct has rewritten new dogmas to guide the new ideology that aspires to become unique. Here, swimming against the current today means, for example, fighting for freedom, against the tyranny of the politically correct. But it also means going against yourself. To really be ourselves we must be able to abandon so many things that we believe are part of us. Like a nut: to go to the heart you have to crack the shell.
The time of the pandemic has favored introspection. As well as your lines that lead the reader to immerse himself in himself. How important is inner dialogue for creative purposes?
I have lost the contours of the interior and exterior. The dialogue is between inside and outside, me and others, me and myself, in an almost indistinct way. “Dialogare” is an extraordinary term: from the Greek dia-logos, a word that crosses. Here I believe that our challenge, the challenge of each one, is precisely that of being able to open ourselves to the word, to this "dialogue" that embraces the entire universe, from the farthest star to the garden of our neighbor. And it is from the meeting of different things that something new is born. The creative process is all there.
Poetry is an art form that struggles to establish itself, what do you think?
I think this is not really true. I am pleased to see that social media have awakened a whole new generation attracted to poetry. There are millions and millions of young and very young people - a few hundred thousand in Italy alone - who use instagram as the horizon of even a simple poetic research. In my own small way, during the quarantine, I made direct daily poetics. Every day at 21 pm we read poets large and small. At the beginning we were about twenty, then fifty, then a few hundred. We have reached 2400. I think it is true that in recent generations those poets who have wanted to make poetry a business for literary critics and esoteric circles have distanced people from this art. But that period is over. The doors reopened and the air returned to circulate.
We unconsciously carry our inspiring masters within us. What are yours?
You know that to the guys who write to me on social networks to read their poems I always say: "to write a poem you have to read a hundred" ... The list would therefore be very long. However, I want to mention the three sacred monsters that you cannot but know by heart if you want to deal with poetry: Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. One of my particular reference numbers is Jorge Luis Borges, who in my opinion had understood everything. Then there is the Szymborska, because it was one of the first readings that dragged me into the universe of poetry. But also Pessoa, who despite his pessimism that would make him humanly so far away, pulsates close to me. Much less the Italians: at the moment (and it changes daily) I feel a little more distant from the Italian poetry of the twentieth century. Apart from D'Annunzio, who never ceases to fascinate me, and Pascoli, who even yesterday gave me a tear.
