Per la versione italiana:: http://leisurespotblog.blogspot.it/2014/11/intervista-pietro-roversi.html
Hi Pietro,
Thank
you for this opportunity! I was born in Novara (Italy) by accident,
in 1968, my family are from Modena, and when I was 6 we moved to
Verona, where I grew up. I went to University in Milano and after my
chemistry degree I decided I had no interest in making new molecules,
rather I wanted to look at existing ones. This, and a passion for
living cells, made me choose protein science. During my doctorate I
moved to England, where protein structural science was born in the XX
century, and here I have become a structural biologist. Mostly, I
work as a protein chemist and an X-ray crystallographer: we isolate
proteins and make them into crystals (think of these crystals as a
magnifying lenses for the proteins they contain). We then shine
X-rays on the crystals and interpret those X-ray images to obtain 3D
models of the proteins. These 3D models inform on the functions of
the proteins and assists drug design. At the moment we are trying to
understand how UGGT (the enzyme responsible for the quality control
of all proteins secreted by eukaryotic cells) can do its job at all:
imagine a single molecule in charge of checking on hundreds of
differently shaped molecules, and being able to flag them for
retention in the cell if they are incorrectly folded. A molecular
mystery! That, or the current model about UGGT needs improving. My
colleagues and I think we should find a drug to inhibit UGGT in
individuals suffering from certain genetic diseases. We hope to be
able to prove this idea right or wrong.
At what
age did you start writing poetry ? What were your favourite poets
then? How has your poetry evolved over the years?
I
started writing poetry around the age of 14. My favourite poets then
were Catullus, Ariosto, Gianni Rodari, Dino Campana and Eugenio
Montale. All I wrote till the age of 21 has either been lost or
destroyed (although I suppose a copy of some latin hexameters of mine
may survive among the records of the 1986 Certamen catullianum (a
yearly latin writing contest for schoolchildren) in their archives in
Lazise).
The
first surviving manuscript of mine is a book I wrote in 1989-1991,
still unpublished, although the poems are online – together with
the entirety of my unpublished texts to date. Whenever I publish a
book I remove the poems from the web, but the rest is all there:
individual texts online do not give a true sense of the manuscript
they belong to, but they can still be appreciated individually before
they appear in a printed book.
A
second book of poetry, also unpublished, was written during the years
1993-1994: at the time, I was serving as a conscientious objector in
a community hosting a dozen of psychiatric patients in Sesto San
Giovanni, between Monza and Milano. Earlier in 2014 I took some of
those poems out of the drawer and submitted them to a small poetry
competition in Rimini, and I have been awarded the first prize:
http://farapoesia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/vincitori-del-concorso-in-sana-mente.html
Since
moving to England, I developed a taste for American poetry (Marianne
Moore, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens), while among italian poets I
came to appreciate Aldo Palazzeschi, Giampiero Bona, Guido Gozzano,
Giorgio Caproni, Bartolo Cattafi, and Toti Scialoja. Perhaps not
surprisingly. Alongside these readings, my poetry has become
increasingly sound- and rhyme-based. Among living italian I
especially love Cristina Annino and Giuseppe Caracausi. From them I
am learning to cut out the inessential and the redundant, and to
trust my own text without worrying too much about the reception on
the part of the reader. My recent texts have benefitted from their
help and example.
How many
languages can you speak? What do you like about each one? How does
language affect your poetry?
I can
speak Italian of course, although these days I sometimes come up with
rather anglicised turns of phrase. I like Italian when it is terse
and concise, because of its simplicity. Its roots stretching back to
Latin carry for me the past into the present. My English can be good
at times: I love this language’s immense lexicon, which allows its
speakers to be very accurate if they choose to be so; and the almost
complete absence of gender in it, which in turn allows vagueness when
needed. My Spanish is basic but I find that it stirs very strong
emotions in me, the way what is familiar and yet exotic at the same
time does. My French sounds horrendous, and yet I admire its subtle
vocalic sounds I cannot reproduce, and its ability to pass for
sophisticated even when it’s rather coarse. I am fortunate enough
to have ready many great books written in one or another of these
languages, and it gives me a great joy to be able to read something
very good in the original. All these languages affect my poetry
because they remind me that a poem can only be justified if it is the
best (if not the only) way of saying what it says. So other languages
I know in the background serve as it were as a selection/control
ground for my texts in italian. Last but not least, I think that
today the future of all languages is in their coevolution and
reciprocal contamination. I am especially excited about what is
happening and will happen to italian in the wake of the more recent
waves of immigration to Italy.
Tell us a bit about the two poetry books of yours that have been published and your electronically available poems. What poetry websites do you regularly publish your poems on? Are you in touch with stimulating online communities?
“Una
crisi creativa” (Puntoacapo, 2010) is – as the title suggests –
the result of a year of furious writing, which I would liken now to
the bursting of a suppurating wound or an infected spot. It contains
rough, coarse, inflated writing, with the rage and the exhilaration
of middle age in it. Its texts went through none of the painstaking
polishing I used to carry out on my writings before. Perhaps in spite
of this, or perhaps precisely because writing the book was such a
liberating experience, when I finished it, for the first time in my
life I thought I should try and publish it. I had always taken
writing seriously but I never craved readers; with these poems I did,
and I remain very grateful to Mauro Ferrari who gave me the
opportunity to find some. I am still rather inclined to forgive the
book’s weaknesses, although now that I think I may have readers, I
have become much more strict with myself when it comes to working on
a poem.
My
second published book “Vamosaver” (Gattomerlino/Superstripes,
2014) was written during my 2012-2103 stay in the Basaue Country. It
retains the irony and the invective of the first book in places, but
it also relishes shorter, more controlled forms, and it is more
experimental in its attempt to grapple with the language, with
foreign languages darting to the foreground from time to time where
the italian needs them. I am not sure if I can continue writing like
this but I am very pleased with the editing Piera Mattei did on the
book, with the watercolour that my friend and colleague Daniel Badia
Martinez drew for it, and with the many memories that these texts
capture and I hope reverberate around.
For my
online publishing, I have chosen a low-brow, open-to-all website, http://pietroroversi.scrivere.info/.
They maintain my texts in good order and they provide space for my
readers to comment. I can link to those pages when I need it. While
the people in charge of the website hold very different views on
poetry to mine, and we have often clashed, I enjoy the company of
many other people who publish their writing in there, and I have
found as many good writers among that community as in the official
world of italian published poetry. In some sense the website is below
the radar of the professional literary critics, so I am really hiding
my texts in full view, which I enjoy: it helps me focussing on the
writing without taking myself too seriously. I regularly put my texts
on Facebook as Notes, for my friends to read. I have occasionally
published texts in online poetry magazines, poetry blogs or friend’s
webpages.
In your
poems, a scientific, supposedly objective language is used to dissect
humakind and its fallibility. The discourse is steered by witty puns
based on collocations, assonances and semantic affinities (I can't
help but think of the metaphysical poets and their notion of wit.)
Often such a semantic and thematic turn is realized in the
enjambement. Another relevant matter is the bodily dimension and the
meticulous description of acts, in short, concrete imagery realizing
poetical immateriality (a contradiction in terms!)
What do
you start with when writing poems and how long does it take you for
the polishing work?
I am
especially fond of John Donne’s poetry, so I am delighted (if
rather humbled) by the comparison with the metaphysical poets. And I
certainly strive for texts that carry or embody the complexity and
the ambiguity of the world, including human contradictions. In this
context, the language for me becomes the network that keeps things
together. Hence perhaps the interconnecting sounds and the skeleton
of connected words that often traverses the text, as you point out.
References to different parts of the same semantic field and broken
down chains of associations serve the same purpose. In a nutshell,
good poetry for me must contain hidden persuasive devices, and
anything giving cohesion to the text gives it plausibility and helps
manipulating the attention of the reader.
As to
their genesis, the poems are born in a number of ways, but two of the
most frequent ones seem to be: I hear somebody speaking a phrase or
sentence, and then I feel compelled to write it down, stealing it, I
suppose; or when a syllable presents itself repeated in a sentence,
either mine ot somebody else’s, and it triggers more instances of
itself to follow. The poem then unfolds or wraps around these germs.
A single word seldom calls for a poem and indeed I am not a great fan
of single words in isolation. I especially hate verse without verbs
and just nouns stated as if they were magical or evocative or
“poetic”. We do not speak like this in everyday life. I am more
interested in grey, neutral parts of speech, stock phrases, proverbs,
adages, the commonplace, the banal. Perhaps in my middle age so much
of my thinking is either prejudicial or stereotypical, that these
parts of the language suit me best.
As to
the work on a text after its genesis, most poems are finished in half
an hour or so. Others take longer, days perhaps, but I do not work on
them all the time. I leave them, forget them for a little while, then
go back and delete or add and fix until I do not know what to do
anymore or they look the way they should. Deep down, I almost always
know the weaker bits, but it is not always easy to find the courage
to cut them or know how to improve things. Sometimes letting somebody
else edit a text of mine or give me their opinion on it has helped me
immensely, although there are parts that I would never accept to
change, because they are what they should be (typically because of
their sound, the way they scan, or their interrelation to the rest)
and I do not care if somebody else thinks otherwise.
I'd like
to conclude this interview asking you to share two poems of yours
with me and the readers of this blog so that they can have a sample of your work.
Dates for my diary
During the Napoleonic wars
Britain
was isolated
from
mainland Europe:
people
became collectors
of
seaweed and root vegetables,
and
this tradition
seems
to have continued
well
beyond the scope
of
that need. Laver bread, sea kale, black
salsify
are just examples of near-inedibles
that
could feed the starved
in a
time of dearth. Back then,
that
kind of knack for tasteless hope could be excused.
But
what a palaver now to insist that it still be of use.
On
another matter, you teach, you would not
spell
"lose" "loose",
but I
wouldn't put past you the belief
that
the Barnacle Goose
was
born from a mussel on the beach, such
is
your virginity in all matters
exact
(microbiology, anatomy or humanist
church-going
are examples), not to mention
any
fact to do with movement in space, or with the sense
of
what makes one handsome and what does not.
Not
that it matters much. Much to my chagrin,
the
Key of Joy may be the sin of disobedience, but
I'll
stick with the dates for my diary,
with
the compere on the show, as I want his
company,
companionship, comradeship
beyond
compare. Like in the old days,
this
is a case of
kelp
for ash, and cash for kelp.
One
helps oneself to what is in one's dish.
One
learns to relish help when one is famished.
The
funny thing is though, all considered:
I am
continental. I can shop. I know better.
From
now on, I vow to reintroduce
some
of the good produce, stop being a schlepper.
[28082009]
Swag,
loot & contraband
Look
at how the shiny orange leaves
tumble
down to the floor,
carrot
cake pieces that cavort
in the
stomach! I ate my slice and more.
If
hunting pink is red,
is a
hunting pavillion
vermillion?
As if I had qualms
about
appropriating the verse in a million
that
fell off the back of a lorry.
I
stole these from you, sorry, Juliet!
And
yet and yet and yet ...
[31102009]
http://www.pietroroversi.org/
***
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