Breathe better | Alessandro D’Avenia

His unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty universalizes individual existence. This is why Swedish academics awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to the 77-year-old American poet Louise Glck.

What does a universal life mean? Universe, as the word says, one whose parts are united in unity: all things co-expire, that is, they breathe together, in harmony. Poetry intercepts this breath that unifies life dispersed in thousands of fragments. In fact in his Song, poetry that inaugurates literature in our language, Francis of Assisi He calls everything brother and sister, even death, because everything is a child of Life.

Poets, believers or not, have faith in this Life with a capital letter, so much so that it Leopardi wrote in his diary: from reading a piece of true poetry, in verse or prose, we can tell what Sterne said of a smile: it adds a thread to the very short canvas of our life (Zibaldone).

For poets, life is based on Life, the first in a short breath, the second in an inexhaustible breath, from which we can draw when we lack oxygen. In fact, we say of the poets that they are inspired, because they give us that encouragement. And can we be inspired?

I trust the answer to Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel in 1996. Upon receiving the award, the Polish poet said: Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There has been and always will be a group of people visited by inspiration. They are all those who consciously choose a job and do it with passion and imagination. There are doctors, teachers, gardeners as well, not to mention many other professions. Despite the difficulties and defeats, his curiosity does not fail. Inspiration comes from an incessant “I don’t know”. There aren’t many people like that. Most work for a living, because they have to. They do not choose their work out of passion, it is the circumstances that do it for them. A boring and loveless job is one of the greatest human misfortunes.

All of us when we arrive at the seashore or on the top of a mountain breathe strongly, we want to transform the beauty that is in our breath. Our body wants to be inhaling, receiving the spirit that gives Life. For this reason, during the summer, I ask my students to bring a notebook, in which to stop the moments of inspiration. When one of them notices a thought, an appointment, a fact, a pain, a joy … it opens a passage in life that repeats itself, boring and ephemeral, to let in a greater Life, which heals us from nonsense and dispersion, and transforms chaos into a universe, as when Dante in Paradise claims to have seen: tied with love in a volume / that which unravels for the universe.

And so, from those fragmentary notes, from those moments in which it is still rude, I ask my boys to build a poem, no, as Leopardi says, necessarily in verse, because the important thing is that the words make the inspiration, there is the eternity of the moment, the moment of being, and then, at any other time, relive it and make it relive, that is why it is good to memorize poems: a well-being from which you always draw. Thus the only breath becomes universal, ceases to be ephemeral, individual, solitary …

It is not a didactic trick that deceives them to be poets, but a formidable exercise in reality as another Nobel laureate said: Leafing through the notes of a poet we find crosses and signs, many doubts: what happened? The poet corrected his initial impulses. In the compositional process, he fuses the rational with the intuitive. The poet is the healthiest animal: he combines analysis and intuition – analysis and synthesis – to arrive at revelation. For this poetry is the most effective mental accelerator. Reading and writing it offers the fastest and cheapest tool of knowledge I know (Iosif Brodskij, Conversations).

However, poetry books take up negligible shelf space. Many complain that they do not understand her and they are right because she has to understand (drink semen: hug) us, who are often not available for silence, patience and still believe in Life.

I had confirmation of this by reading, at random, some poems by the neo-Nobel, an author previously unknown to me. The first of a collection titled, in homage to Dante, attracted me New life, which I translate for you:

You saved me, you should remember me.
In spring, young people bought boat tickets.
They laughed, because the air was full of apple blossoms …
I remembered sounds like that, from my childhood,
laugh for no reason, just because the world is beautiful …
And so I woke up drunk, at my age
hungry for life and full of confidence.

If you read it ten times, you will breathe easier.