Silvio Talamo - "The important thing in art is to make it happen"
What does poetry mean to you?
For me, poetry is a performative act, as well as an exquisitely literary one. William S. Burroughs said that the important thing in art is to make it happen, even when I would add in solitude. We live in a time of perceptual saturation and induced desires: images and messages overlap, language becomes immediate consumption. The poetic word is for me a gap still open. An act of visionary, pulsating, if not meditative resistance because it helps me absorb those processes, those masks produced by a historical time that is ending. We are always going through processes. Probably the zen master Dogen, a great enlightened man, would be pleased. After all, meditation also works with the mind, and on the mind — as well as the poetics of flow, albeit on opposite sides.
What do you think a poet is and what functions do you think they have in society?
The poet has no pedagogical or moral task. It is, rather, a form of lateral consciousness. There is no need to be superheroes of writing, even less of life: it would only be a further boost to its virtualization. Perhaps the concept of revolution has had its time; that of alchemy — also of the verb — of transformation remains. There is also no need to "be poets", if anything to access poetry as one of the last still open spaces of the symbolic. We need radars that capture what normally escapes away, cracks, small cracks in regulatory thinking. Although the struggle is almost impossible and the result can accommodate even opposite poetics, the gesture remains.
As a person who also makes music, what is the relationship between music and poetry for you?
The relationship between poetry
and music is very close, it always has been. I always remember with pleasure an
essay that I have not had in hand for decades by Giuseppe Cocchiara, an old
Italian scholar of folklore, on the magical-ritual origins of verse: nursery
rhyme, magic formula, song. At the time I was very interested in the carnival
culture.
But for me this relationship is not just
an abstract or intellectual matter: it is something extremely concrete,
something that works on meaning. Music may make sense, but it may not. Those
who practice singing know it well: tone, balance, physical visualization,
diaphragm, breathing. There is always a work on the body and its location in
space.
Speaking of rhythm, I can think of some readings by Amiri Baraka, a poet, yes,
a revolutionary and African-American. The unforgettable Carmelo Bene comes to
my mind as well. And of course the dear old Dionysus, always poised between
flight and dismemberment.
Do you think you can fully express yourself through poetry?
I don't think there are complete
expressions. The only totality is our living, the time that marks existence
second by second. This is one of the few realities that cannot be reproduced.
However,
We can try to consider every single expression, every art, as a momentary
totality on which to work. So, I think, we find a way to engage with the whole.
That's why we should bring art back into
everyday life, and not the other way around. It is a way to safeguard the
symbolic: that mythical and eruptive dimension that completes — without
replacing it — our logical need.
Have you ever thought about leaving the art world? When and why and what made you continue?
Maybe I did it from the beginning, but we should understand what the "art world" is. I am a small self-employed person, although I have had high-level artistic and work experiences. With poetry, in addition, I have published in dozens of sheets, underground and non-underground magazines, blogs that now no longer exist. The logic of click and numerical-quantitative value, the direct daughter of marketing — the true theory of our present — does not interest me. I am happy if someone reads or listens to me, but life is short and we cannot waste time counting positions or creating artistic authorities that are not always so authoritatively interesting. I prefer to build communities of human and intellectual exchange, but all in all it is not said that this exchange should take place only in the world of art or official art.
What or who prompted you to start writing?
I don't know. We should ask ourselves, more generally, why we write or
produce art and symbols. I believe it is inherent to our being: we function in
this way, and following these forms we rejoin what we are, what we come from;
we remember our root.
I think of memory according to Giordano
Bruno: technique, animistic vision. We need to cycle our way to this root so we
don't forget. Perhaps everyone needs their own Montevideo, as Campana
called it, a great outsider of the Italian twentieth century.
The poetry-travel metaphor is as old as
the world. In this dimension, the other can be an intruder or a savior. You
just have to figure out whether to forget it — erasing the reader's idea and
focusing on the subject — or maintain a conscious relationship with it: throw
bridges, not explain yourself.
If we wanted to joke a bit, and play the
impossible, we would have to bring together Ezra Pound and Brecht in a single
dismantling workshop, desecrating all the past to be able to cross it again.
Two great intellectuals — the first, politically, much less lucid. Like our
times.
Read how poetry can be a way to perceive reality;
https://promosaikpoetryblog.blogspot.com/2025/06/poetry-as-way-to-perceive-reality-eldar.html?m=1
Here you can find an introductory video about ProMosaik Poetry;
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