The project Hylica more geometrico is based on the fragmentation of selected books and unpublished texts at the level of verses or words, akin to the scattered ruins left after a Molotov cocktail explosion. These fragments are then reassembled to align with the thematic focus of Versopolis Poetry Expo 2025: Re-imagining identity through poetry.
The process of fragmentation involved creating an inventory of syntagmas, turns of phrase, or entire sentences that resonated with the chosen themes and associated imagery (such as eggs or Cartesian geometry). Once the inventory was established, the most visually and syntactically similar fragments were connected, forming conceptual and discursive nodes—the skeleton of the poem. This framework became the gravitational center of the writing. For each node, additional fragments were selected and fused together to create a dynamic interplay of communication, contradiction, and coherence, all while maintaining the necessary length and internal structure.
The title Hylica more geometrico [demonstrata] reflects a dialectic between material and biological dimensions and explores the material construction of identities as mergers. It references the Gnostic doctrine in which Hylica (the neuter plural of the Latin hylicus) are those fully bound to the material cycle of life, unaware of transcendence. It also alludes to Ethica more geometrico demonstrata (1677), Baruch Spinoza’s seminal work, where transcendence is demonstrated geometrically, emphasizing personal identity and collective eternal memory. Additionally, Hylics is a multimedia franchise created in 2015 by Mason Lindroth, centered on a manually crafted clay world and dialogue generated from a limited set of keywords.
The project is based on the poetry of:
— Nicola Barbato, I cani del cervello (Eretica, 2024)
— Francesco Ciuffoli, Nel segno delle camere oscure (to be published)
— Giovanna Frene, Eredità ed estinzione (Donzelli, 2024)
— Gabriele Galloni, Bestiario dei giorni di festa (Il Camaleonte, Ensemble, 2020)
— Rebecca Garbin, Male minore (Vallecchi Firenze, 2024)
— Julia Gianferri, D’impareggiabile pigrizia è il mio amore (poesiainverso.com, 26.6.2019)
— Ilaria Palomba, Scisma (Les Flâneurs, 2024); Nella patria di nessuno (leparoledifedro.com, 9.4.2024)
— Lorenzo Pataro, Amuleti (Ensemble, 2022)
— Antonio Perozzi, On land (Prufrock SPA, 2024)
— Luigi Riccio, Ovologio (to be published)
— Gloria Riggio, Ave Maria (poesiadelnostrotempo.it, 02.10.2023)
— Mattia Tarantino, Se giuri sull’arca (Fallone, 2024)
— Francesco Terracciano, Eserciziario di formule brevi (Ensemble, 2022); #10 Dream (internopoesia.com, 15.7.2021)
Author
INVERSO — Giornale di poesia
Maybe it was because we needed to pass the time and everything around us didn't seem to satisfy us, or maybe it was because the high school years aren't easy and the poets' books keep us company, but we told ourselves that we had to try our hand at editing a magazine, at doing what we like, without discounting, perhaps having fun. So after a long chat about San Cono – who:
“levitated all day long.
He fell exhausted in the evening in the stillness
of a rose garden; he dreamt of what centuries
later would have been a refrigerator.
An open refrigerator in Erebo”
—basically about the hallucination of an Algida croissant, with Gabriele Galloni we decided to write to some people, gather a crew in Tortuga, and see what would happen.
Inveso—Giornale di Poesia, then (2018), like A l'envers, à l'endroit, which Noir Désir sang. After choosing the site's password —which is beautiful, but we won't tell you—, after bothering our friends to help us imagine a logo and understand how the internet worked, after writing to the people we thought it would be nice to involve, without taking a breath we thought it would be good to see what happened to poetry outside Italy. So Tortuga became Greece, Greece the Balkans, the Balkans Spain and then Europe.
Over the years, we have had the opportunity to collaborate with many realities around the world and others have crossed our path: the Academy of American Poets, Buenos Aires Poetry, Exitirion, Prăvălia culturală and count several publications under the patronage of institutions such as the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic or the Presidency of the Republic of Greece, or participate in initiatives such as Poetry Expo 2023, organised by Versopolis.
Poets who have collaborated with the magazine have had the opportunity to represent Italy abroad, for the Larnaka International Poetry Festival or the Patras World Poetry Festival, as well as the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Bogotà or the Festival de Poesía de la Habana.
A little less than a year after the magazine was founded, we held our first festival. Every two years, by sheer coincidence, at irregular intervals, at the whim of nerves, over the years we have met in Aversa (2019), Rome (2021) and Salerno (2023). On this occasion, for the first time, the magazine festival became international, hosting poets from different European countries:
Clearly, we needed opportunities to party. The first time (2019) was in Aversa (CE), the town where Mattia Tarantino lived, where he studied, the land of fires. Poets and artists from all over Italy came to Palazzo Parente. Days of readings, presentations, music, dance, painting, photography. Artists from the territory for Italian poets, Italian poets for the territory.
Gabriele had been dead for a few months. This time (2021) we were in Rome, at the Lettere Caffè, gathered to pay homage to him in the place where he had begun to read his poems in public a few years earlier. What we staged was a liturgy, a public chant, and once again Italian poetry responded, with recollection and emotion. A weekend-long prayer.
In recent years, Mattia Tarantino and Lorenzo Pataro had had the opportunity to represent Italian poetry at European festivals and around the world. Meanwhile, war had returned to Europe for the first time since the last century. The poets known from the festivals in Cyprus and Greece were called to Italy, to Salerno (2023), thanks to the efforts of the Alfonso Gatto Foundation, to bear witness to the last months of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and to recount the political and civil experiences of the Balkans, Greece, Poland and Eastern Europe. In the months preceding the festival, in Naples and Salerno, Mattia Tarantino, Nicola Barbato and Francesco Terracciano held workshops to prepare young poets, local poets and the curious for the meeting with the poets who would arrive in Italy in the spring. On this occasion, the festival was called Parole Contro | International Poetry Festival.
The next festival of INVERSO - Giornale di poesia, whose theme will be INFESTATION, will be held in Rome, from 4 to 6 July 2025, at the former market of Torre Spaccata. We have chosen to work in the suburbs, with the social realities and associations that, day after day, try to give dignity to the capital's most difficult neighbourhoods.
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