Poetry as extraordinary food Section curated by
Ugo Magnanti
One of the most intriguing reflections on the nature of poetic inspiration – that, however, is most likely to fail, all the more so as it is tinged with cutting irony – is Montale’s reference to the terms roaster and sorbet as metaphors of intuitive creation and ‘cold’ time-consuming work, respectively, that the poet used in conjunction with other semantic culinary terms, such as oven and freezing, in the same text (“La poesia” in “Satura”, 1971). If this metapoetical witticism evokes everyday life and normal circumstances through references to food to convey the artificial nature of an issue that is useless per se, the same can’t be said for the performance poetry section of the fifth edition of Shingle22j – that we curate and that this year revolves around the theme of food – which is enlivened, in a determined yet playful way, by a sort of subtlety that doesn’t take itself too seriously. In fact, if we want to find a common thread in the selected works of art, which differ greatly in terms of means and forms of expression, we can see how the use of “culinary” elements and contexts is, instead, functional to the reproduction of extraordinary events, decisive moments, as well as unconventional intentions, perhaps even in the form of fake normality, always characterized, however, by the subtle turmoil of reverse standpoints; and while Montale’s inspiration, apart from the rhetorical hidden danger that lies within its much-debated origins, ends up overlapping, tout court, onto poetry itself, a kind of poetry that denies itself and has no end, we decided to require from the poets-artists (and artists-poets) of Shingle22j an admission of commitment, a somehow perspectival vision of the ‘human consortium’, starting with how we relate to food, especially in its symbolic meanings. It almost goes without saying that human nutrition not only coincides with a physiological instinct of self-preservation, but also with a philosophical expression, a significant interpretation of existence. Our ‘nagging thought’ therefore, does not regard a possible function of poetry and art in general, as, in the absence of such function, our ‘public’ presence would no longer make sense, especially in culturally deprived territories, but it regards the boundaries between the poetic word and its interdisciplinary performance dimension; it wonders about how the intimate, private act of writing, especially when writing poetry, can build or establish a relationship with forms that mutually cross and ‘raid’ other disciplines, at times verging on denaturing them, and that represent a desire to share a voice, a gesture, a body, also through well-established multimedia ‘passages’. In this sense, the theme of food is propitious, since poetry, which, through its ‘contaminated’ action becomes a sort of collective rite capable of even offering personal sacrifices, can better express a correlation with the act of eating, as such act takes on the meaning of ‘eating together’ and is therefore converted from a simple private nutrition matter into a cultural experience. The collective nature of poetry as a relationship, which is equivalent to the social nature of food, cannot be conveyed, as such, if not more or less openly through a critical review of the prevailing models and through the tangible presence, hic et nunc, of the artists offering themselves and their ethics to the community or through a possible dialogue between reality and its excessive and complex reproducibility. Of course, this may also happen with practices that are more similar to literary forms of expression and therefore closer to written texts, or through pure sonority and the prevalence of a signifier, or even through a sort of negation of the word as an autonomous object foreshadowing a form of poetry that is on the boundary between stricto sensu and lato sensu or, once again, through a pure theme or in conjunction with how the theme of food is considered in almost exclusively ‘artistic’ contexts. Therefore, in this edition of Shingle22j, poetry presents itself as an extraordinary type of food, as well as something at the top of an emblematic food chain that strives to assimilate and question art and its ancient and rich heritage with respect to a theme, such as food, that is embedded with special ‘historical’ implications as, since the dawn of performance art, it has been a constant presence in contemporary art.