The wayfarer who, by chance or by choice, happened to cross the industrial outskirts of Perugia would probably come upon Via Sandro Penna: a long, bare thoroughfare flanked by sheds, warehouses and depots, ending in a withered meadow, no longer countryside and not yet city. Once I happened to propose, half joking but not entirely, that the centenary of Sandro Penna’s birth be worthily commemorated by gathering for a public reading of his poems in the desolation and confusion of that place (or non-place, as it is said today), rather than in the halls appointed for celebration and commemoration. Of course, in that somewhat paradoxical proposal there was also an ironic and polemical intent (is it thus, with these dedications of anonymous, random streets, that the city honours its greatest poet?). But I must say, on further reflection, that that polemical intent, and also a rather banal, rather easy one, was probably not the prevailing intent. There was rather the awareness that, deep down, it is fine this way, it is fine to confine (even symbolically) poets to the marginality of the periphery: because I think that the marginality to which poetry is confined today, in relation to the dominant system of communication, is not necessarily a calamity: it might even be a fortune, a sign of privilege, because it allows a listening to reality, external and internal, that is more intense and concentrated, less distracted by the background noise, by the din (which is not so much the din of the production and movement of goods in our industrial peripheries, but rather the din of the mass-media cultural sirens, of what today are called “events”). After all, Sandro Penna himself lends himself admirably to inhabiting these places of marginality, to frequenting the periphery of life:

Eccoli gli operai sul prato verde
a mangiare: non sono forse belli?
Corrono le automobili d’intorno,
passan le genti piene di giornali.

But are the workers not, perhaps, beautiful? If one tries to take a walk in the places around Via Sandro Penna towards lunchtime, towards the lunch break, one will find certain bars crowded with people. From outside they look like ordinary bars, even small ones, but inside they are surprisingly large: there are workers, clerks and travellers consuming their quick meal, perhaps precooked and passed through the microwave. Of course, there is no longer the “prato verde”, with the mess tin, in an image that extraordinarily anticipates (in the 1930s of the poetry) our great Neorealist cinema: they are no longer the same, they are physically different too, the anthropological mutation has taken place, but it is the same substratum of humanity that would still appeal (“non sono forse belli?”) to our poet.
Naturally, it is pointless to repeat here that in this enthusiasm of Penna’s for workers there is nothing ideological, nothing that has to do with a political-social perspective; even if it is true, and perhaps true precisely for this reason, that in few poets of our twentieth century is there, as in Penna, so acute and affectionate a sensibility towards the “humble” Italy, made of taverns, gymnasiums and suburban cinemas (“dove le porte/s’aprono e chiudono continuamente”) and waiting rooms, the lodges of working-class tenements, trams and situations of uncertain border between urban margins and a still primitive countryside… We know that in Penna’s passion for beautiful workers there is an exclusively aesthetic-desiring motivation, the poet being wholly indifferent to the ideologies of the time, and in general to an idea of reality understood as reality-history: in favour, rather, of a sense of life resembling a prolonged dream, or a half-sleep almost hypnotic in nature, the awakening from which takes shape as simply “sad”: «La vita… è ricordarsi di un risveglio/triste in un treno all’alba…», in the poem that is archetypal of Penna’s entire work. This rejection of reality-history in the name of reality-life is the rejection of the adult world, made of certainties that are mere ideological superstructures (and in this sense Penna’s workers, evidently, are “pure” like his boys) and of plots and rituals proper to homo oeconomicus: Penna lived and died olympically poor, and we cannot help thinking, in hindsight, that in the years when his very great poetry unfolds, that world of adults which he rejects was preparing the massacres of the Second World War. Faced with this attitude of repulsion, of substantial detachment, the word that comes to mind is innocence, and to this word I shall return shortly. It is certain, however, that the rejection of the adult world and the corresponding choice of the world of “boys” (but it is not easy to say what comes first and what comes after), that world of adolescents towards which his homoerotic desire irresistibly pushes him, this rejection and this choice are together cause and consequence of the exclusion, of the social discrimination, of the stigma that the poet suffers for his irregular sexuality. Here, then, is the poetry of solitude and, together, of the yearning (frustrated though it be) to be, instead, accepted:

Mi nasconda la notte e il dolce vento.
Da casa mia cacciato e a te venuto
mio romantico amico fiume lento.

Guardo il cielo e le nuvole e le luci
degli uomini laggiù così lontani
sempre da me. Ed io non so chi voglio
amare ormai se non il mio dolore.

La luna si nasconde e poi riappare
– lenta vicenda inutilmente mossa
sovra il mio capo stanco di guardare.

But what we grasp most clearly from a poem like this one (and without the aid of sophisticated interpretive apparatus: our attention as readers of poetry to the rhythm, to the timbres, is enough) is something else: it is Penna’s love of poetry, manifested at once in the first line, in which we hear the exact echo of the most beloved Leopardian line “Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento”. A love of poetry that is the same thing as love of life, in Penna: not a frigid substitute for love of life, as we sense in so much poetry contemporary with him. This is where the energetic and utterly limpid form of Penna’s poetry comes from, the grace that all his readers have perceived as unique and unrepeatable in the whole of our twentieth century. Penna goes to the heart of vital experience and lays bare, at every moment, its underlying engine, desire; and life, in this vision so transparent and radical, coincides with desire. Then the pure, crystalline, innocent form of Penna’s poetry is, perhaps, the very form of desire. I realize that with this assertion I am, unworthily, calling into question the master critical line on Penna, the one that runs from Pasolini (an enamoured reader) to our greatest critic of twentieth-century poetry, Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo: the one that sees a euphemistic, or euphemizing, process in the formal poetic construction of Penna with respect to content. Euphemism is a rhetorical figure by which one softens or sweetens an expression that is too crude or realistic, and Penna’s poetry, for Pasolini, would transfer “onto a most pure linguistic plane the most tremendous impurities”. And Mengaldo: “it may be said that the totally transgressive nature of Penna’s subject matter absolutely postulates a non-transgressive language: euphemism serves at once as a masking and an ennoblement of the vital instinct”. And so the aspiration, undeniable in Penna, to social acceptance would entrust itself precisely to formal elegance, to the classically modelled regularity of his diction, aimed, perhaps unconsciously, at compensating for and rendering socially approvable his infraction of the social rule.
And what if, instead, as I was trying to say, the innocence of the form alluded precisely to the innocence of desire? Of desire, which is perhaps innocent because it always comes “a little before” the consciousness of good and evil, is on this side of good and evil (and not, in a superman-like way, beyond)? (I say “perhaps” because I am not sure of it; what I express here is an amorous, “Pennian” feeling more than an intellectual certainty). And in any case desire is that force which saves poets from aphasia or from rhetoric, and one could call it, in Penna’s lexicon, love («“Poeta esclusivo d’amore”,/m’hanno chiamato. E forse era vero»). And so it really remains difficult to insist on discerning the sinful gaze of the pederast, perhaps “ennobled” by poetic form, in the poem that begins with the line «Ecco il fanciullo acquatico e felice», the poem that I feel as a guiding poem in every reflection of mine, in every return of mine to Sandro Penna. It may also be that poetry, when it is true poetry, endures but at the same time somehow changes over time, or with circumstances, and changes in relation to its reception, so that we readers too contribute to making it, that poetry; it may be for this reason, but, as I have already had occasion to say once, I, for my part, in those lines recognize rather the love-filled gaze of a father who sees again his own son emerging from a sea that is also, like Penna’s, «tutto fresco di colore»:

Ecco il fanciullo acquatico e felice.
Ecco il fanciullo gravido di luce
più limpido del verso che lo dice.
Dolce stagione di silenzio e sole
e questa festa di parole in me.

Walter Cremonte, born in Novi Ligure in 1947; he lives in Perugia, where he taught in a secondary school. His poems appear in Contro la dispersione (Guerra Edizioni, Perugia 1999) and in Perché ti sei voltato and Anniversario (Edizioni Era Nuova, Perugia 2007 and 2009). In A margine (Crace, Narni 2005) are gathered reflections on poetry and poets that appeared in “Micropolis”, the Umbrian supplement of the daily “Il Manifesto”.