Anita Piscazzi
- Italy -
Anita Piscazzi, poet, pianist and researcher. She is involved in ethnomusicological and educational- musical studies. She has published Amal (Palomar,2007), Maremàje (Campanotto, 2012), Alba che non so (CartaCanta, 2018), Ferma l’Ali, poetic-musical CD (desuonatori, 2020) and the novel Canto a silenzio. Anna Magdalena Bach (Florestano, 2022). She edited Sotto traccia, poetic anthology of various authors (Latitude 41, 2022).Translated into several languages, she is in “Ossigeno Nascente” (Atlante dei poeti contemporanei italiani - University of Bologna), in “Almanacco dei poeti e della poesia contemporanea” (Raffaelli,2018), in “Poetry Sound Library” of London, in “Voices of ItalianPoets” of the University of Turin and in Rai Poesia. Engaged in poetry and music festivals both in Italy and abroad, she was a guest at the Tblisi International Festival of Literature 2019 in Georgia, at the Music Festival “Lesvoi(x)es du desir 2020, du Baroque au jazz, 10ans la Fanfaribole” of the Cantonal Conservatory of Martigny in Switzerland, at “World Poetry Day 2021” in Peru, for “Revista Kametsa,”at “Papel y Lapiz 2021” in Colombia, at “Le Printemps Italien Festival de litterature 2021”in Bordeaux, France, and at “Sion Violin Festival” 2021 in Switzerland. She is Isabella Morra Prize 2017, InediTO Prize 2017 and third runner-up in Lorenzo Da Ponte Prize 2021 for musical novels. Her poems were performed by Lella Costa at the Turin Book Fair in 2017, on SanMarinoRTV and on Rai Radio3. She has been published in anthologies and in Italian and international journals. She has collaborated on the poetic-musical projects: Alda and the Rock Soldier with Eugenio Finardi; Ferma l’ali with Michel Godard and on the theater project: Miss Kilimanjaro in Kenya for “Avis for Children.” She edited the Music and Poetry column of “SimposioItaliano - Revue culturellefrançaise” a bilingual French cultural magazine, and collaborates with several cultural magazines.
Anita Piscazzi, a superior dream of freedom and knowledge
Now I know that life takes strange turns
to find oneself where once
it was easy to be.
Anita Piscazzi's figural quest speaks of a spiritual human adventure that has an extraordinary transitive quality: an underlying morality that coincides with personal pedagogy. That is, one learns from life by examining one's own countenance, the ability to know how life transforms us, moment by moment, and what we are today compared to what we thought, dreamed, learned yesterday. Anita Piscazzi's poetic journey, which is particularly intense, rests on a solid foundation because it draws on myths, literature, anthropology, forces recollection and a kind of overcoming of the assurances of narrative realism. It is a poetry that pushes or returns to its most immaterial, intangible, metaphysical, mysterious part. The self that manifests itself, "though exiled," is certainly unitary -- and thus the reality principle is to some extent recognizable -- but the delicate song of these poems pushes feeling, sentiments and perceptions to indefinable and fascinating places, because "my eye sees only the eternal."
This poet's journey takes place at the most extreme boundaries of silence ("in silence I exhale, I remain, I sink"), of overcoming the most usual conceptions of Space and Time, of seeing distant universes and inner abysses-where, that is, one hears "the echo of nonexistence." It is a guarded, sober, humble, and yet knowing mysticism of fine workmanship; a rigorous and stubborn "endless transhumance," because for Anita Piscazzi, poetry is not immediate feeling and confessional outburst, but calibrated and elegant walk - almost an ecstatic twilight dance - in the signs of the mysterious metaphysical passages and passages of life, to be looked at with different eyes, to catch every time, in this tense and docile saying, "the immaterial spirit" ("I am tense to the influences of the spirit").
The author's poetics reclaims its ancient vocation of "religious" song, but also of visionary and elusive "content," for each verse is "as if it had never been born," and each step is a going quietly and safely, with peaceful bewilderment, where one is not, "where I was no longer."
In its gentle delicacy, Anita Piscazzi's poetry has something extreme about it. Especially because the self that sings so elliptically here is always on the verge of vanishing ("as if I had never been born"), takes "root in the wind," goes "down into the soul."
It is a continual receding and plummeting, this wandering, but of a surprising grace, all imbued with light-so much light in these poems; and how much mystery, how much new and distant music, in this light caught at its most mystical peremptoriness. Very little contemporary poetry is so familiar with metaphysics.
Though precise in the texture of the verses, poem after poem accepts a strange icastic and musical hypnosis, and almost with voluptuous abandon one yields to the exhortation to keep searching for "the image that has no form," but always within a fraternal, humble song (like a "child's dream of never"), because Anita Piscazzi to this spiritual and poetic world of hers always remains faithful "with minor gestures."
Thus wandering and lost in the most extreme places of her refined spiritualism, dancing and crepuscular, though anchored in a yearning call of love, Anita Piscazzi tries to disengage poetry from the self, from the body, from the cages of Time and Space, to finally fly into a joyful light in which to get rid of the condemnation of the name, so that she can say, just as she does with a "superior" dream of freedom, dematerialization and therefore knowledge, "I was not in the name."
Andrea Di Consoli
