Patrizia Cavalli, poetess of the present | Women Poets
Explore the contemporary richness of her verses and celebrate the enduring legacy of a poetess who found beauty in life's every moment.
Female Voices - Women Writers to Remember
by Alessia Pizzi
N.8 - January 2024
On 8 March 2022, Luca Serianni, a well-known linguist and former professor at Rome's La Sapienza University, gave a splendid lecture on female poetry at the Manzoni Theatre. That was the last time I saw him, because a few months later he would be run over by a car and leave this world forever.
In that wonderful lecture, Luca Serianni spoke to me for the first time about Patrizia Cavalli, a poetess I did not know and who would also die a few months later. On that occasion, the professor focused a lot on the attention to the present and the detail that Patrizia Cavalli included in her poems.
I only resumed studying her in 2023, the year in which a documentary on her life was released in Italy, entitled 'My poems will not change the world', the title of her first poetry collection. Patrizia Cavalli and her poetry impressed me a lot last year, so I decided to dedicate the first 2024 issue of this newsletter to her.
Now that time seems all mine
and no one calls me for lunch and dinner,
now that I can stay and watch
how a cloud melts and how it fades,
how a cat walks across the roof
in the immense luxury of an exploration, now
that every day awaits me
the boundless length of a night
where there is no call and no more reason
to undress in haste to rest within
the blinding sweetness of a body that waits for me,
now that the morning never begins
and silently leaves me to my projects
to all the cadences of the voice, now
I would suddenly like prison.
Friendship matters
Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi in 1947, but soon moved to Rome for university, and became friends with the writer Elsa Morante who was to become fundamental to the poetess' poetic initiation, both editorially and inspirational.
Elsa: So, what do you do?
Patrizia: Well... I write poetry!
Elsa: Well, then let me read them, not because they interest me for literary reasons, but I want to see what you're like!
At first Patrizia was afraid and almost ran away from Elsa in order not to show her her poems, because Patrizia was in fact an admirer of Elsa's poetry. In the end, Cavalli writes poems from scratch and in six to seven months manages to deliver a small group (a few, to risk less criticism!) to her friend.
'I am happy Patrizia, you are a poet'
Elsa Morante
The documentary
After watching the documentary, I find it embarrassing that this invaluable legacy was shown in very few Italian cinemas. One does not need to be a poetry enthusiast or connoisseur to appreciate a multifaceted cultural figure like Patrizia Cavalli. But she herself affirms this, after all, with her usual lucidity - 'It is not that I have written little, it is that no one is there waiting for your next poem' - stating something true: poetry is not waited for like a thriller. Yet here we are, after her death, remembering one of Italy's greatest contemporary poets, one who entitled her first poetic sylloge with a manifesto of profound humility: 'My poems will not change the world'. And it was precisely this sylloge that secured her a place in Biancamaria Frabotta's anthology, 'Women in Poetry', when she was just a debutante.
[Patrizia Cavalli] is not a promise, but a point of arrival. Not an interesting 'case', but an author to be admired. Who does he resemble? Only herself, of course.
C. Garboli
Poetess of the present
Why poetess of the present? What is striking about Patrizia Cavalli, besides her being so profoundly human in every interview and every one of her poems - I would almost say she is a curator of the flaw - is her deep attachment to the dimension in which she lived. She has published poems but she has also read them in public, she has even gone so far as to sing them. In Italy, you don't see poets around so much, I certainly can't call them main stream.
In this video, you can watch Patrizia read her poems and also sing them at the end: the famous song-poem It is good for the heart to take the stairs
One of her books: “Vita Meravigliosa” (Wonderful life)
In Vita Meravigliosa I found very short poems side by side with very long poems, the latter being the result of later experimentation, as is also the choice of organising the texts into different sections. I was not particularly fond of the rhyming couplets, but all is forgiven in the presence of such straightforward verses, which manage to bring together the depth of a soul accustomed to philosophy (Cavalli had a degree in the Aesthetics of Music) and the precision of a resolutely contemporary pen, which is not afraid to tell everything: boredom, pain, fallacies. Wonder is found in the end anyway.
'Happiness must exist: this is for Cavalli the first article of the law that governs the world. Only, for the most part, this happiness does not exist, or is momentarily deferred or latent."
(Alfonso Berardinelli, La poesia, in Storia della letteratura italiana, directed by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Il Novecento. Scenari di fine secolo, vol. 1., Garzanti, Milan 2001, pp.163-164).
And so, 'one will die of boredom, sweetly', after having spent a life 'wondering what to do to be perfect', in the 'eternal fear of existing', but always accompanied by a smile and an environment that becomes anthropomorphised: the city can be stretched out to be embraced by the poetess, the sky is 'undecided', and vice versa, people appropriate the characteristics of nature.
"I do not want a name, but to star your eyes".
Patrizia Cavalli
Patrizia Cavalli's poetry lulls readers between the reality of a meaningless life and the most beautiful meaning of existence itself: savouring every moment, even of fear and uncertainty, in order to fully enjoy all possible experiences. After all, life is wonderful.
What I must not do
to get out of the way
my enemy mind:
Perennial hostility
to the happy guilt of being what I am,
my happy nothingness.
This newsletter is the translation, re-editing and expansion of articles from my website poetessedonne.it.
I translated the poems with DEEPL.
The first line or two of your post--he died in a car accident. Just a reminder to truly "seize" our moments.