passed away at the age of 95. His was a pseudonym: in reality his name was Giampietro Pontiggia and he was Peppo’s older brother. He began writing in 1957 and published the first collection in ’76 which revealed an amazing author
For those who knew Giampiero Neri, a well-known story: he had changed his name because otherwise he too would have been a G. Pontiggia, like his brother Giuseppe known as Peppo, the writer of The art of escape e you Born twicecertainly better known than him who in his thirties had opted for the paths of poetry and who remained the most in the shade of the masters. And then because, he said, he loved the fourteenth-century Florentine Time.news too much, the one that saw the ferocious battle between the Whites and the Blacks: and since he was always on the side of the defeated, he identified with the Blacks (Corso Donati is a character who appears in his poem ).
Born in Erba in 1927, Giampietro Pontiggia, or Giampiero Neri, died yesterday in Milan, where he lived since 1950. A painful life, with a father, Ugo, bank attorney and then prefectural commissioner, who was killed in November 1943 in a partisan attack perhaps by mistake. Casa Pontiggia in Erba frequented at that time by the architect Giuseppe Terragni, an important figure in Neri’s future poetry. Her mother, an amateur actress, passed on her love for the theater to her children (Peppo was born in 1934, Elena in 1935, a third brother, in 1929, died one year old). After the war, the family moved to Varese, where Giampiero obtained his scientific diploma, he enrolled in the Faculty of Natural Sciences but the economic conditions of the family did not allow him to continue; therefore, in 1947 he was hired at Banco Ambrosiano, the same institution as his father, and for four decades he was employed and then assigned to the customer area.
In 1955 his sister Elena, twenty years old, takes her own life and the intentionality of the fact is hidden from the mother by the two brothers, who also keep the farewell letter to her hidden. Elena will also be the name of Giampiero’s daughter, art critic and historian. Relations between Giampiero and Peppo grow closer, in the sharing of pain but also of the passion for literature, for art, for classical music and for jazz. The two brothers encourage each other. Giampiero said: It is necessary to live, but I would say that certain pains are never overcome. I had a very deep relationship with Peppo, his mother’s death separated us for a while, but we spoke to each other every day on the phone: in Milan we don’t see each other, we hear each other. He read my things, I read his, and each changed following the advice of the other … He knew that I was not afraid to judge him and the same was true for me, he taught me a lot.
These were the years that preluded the neo-avant-garde, with the magazine Il Verri, founded in Milan by Luciano Anceschi and a group of young friends, including Nanni Balestrini and Leo Paolazzi, or rather Antonio Porta. Giampiero began writing poetry in 1957, but what Maurizio Cucchi has defined as a slow maturation process, a path… singularly extraneous, autonomous, nobly out of phase with the poetic vicissitudes of his generation, will lead him to publish late. After Alfredo Giuliani’s first refusal, it was Giancarlo Majorino who hosted it in the magazine Il Corpo and Giovanni Raboni who presented it in the Almanacco dello Specchio in 1971.
Neri’s first collection reveals a surprising voice. Is titled The western look
of the dress and came out in 1976 in Guanda’s Quaderni della Fenice, directed by Raboni himself: the result of a solitary experience and an insatiable dedication from which we draw an idea of clarity, perfection and plain colloquialism (poetry can be a handshake, said Neri). They are poems in verse and short prose poems which are decidedly outside contemporary experimentation, but whose mysterious and dreamlike tension makes them not entirely comparable to Lombard-style realism. A simple writing: precise and dizzying like certain Flemish paintings, it has been said.
There are many types of recalls. / The hunter uses whistles, screws, mirrors according to the season, but mainly from the living. Even with the subsequent collections, the reader is faced with verses that present a sort of enigmatic duplicity between dazzling immediacy and the possibility of an inexhaustible interpretation. Memory merges with the minute observation of natural phenomena
(Natural Theater a title of his from 1998), producing strange ripples of meaning, effects of the absurd or of slight disorientation. In 1986 his second collection was released, Lyceum (again Guanda), and in 1992 the third, summary, From the same place (Coliseum). The eighties are the years of disagreements with his brother Peppo, who will even speak of hatred: the rift, fortunately, will be healed in old age.
Poet of common lives, of doubts and uncertain faith, of herbariums and bestiaries. A delightful plaquette edited by Elisabetta Motta, published by CartaCanta, bears witness to the dense presence in her verses of a very particular zoo: whitefish, black snakes, salamanders, nocturnal birds of prey, owls and eagle owls, domestic geese, cattle, pigs, horses (even a pseudo-horse that runs mechanically as if on stilts), known and rare insects of all kinds, terms, mosquitoes, ants, spheces, dangerous wasp-like insects, peacocks. But Neri’s natural theater is also inhabited by plants and seedlings that seem to be observed from afar and miraculously reveal themselves as part of an intimate and suffering landscape, almost an echo of memory: From that tangle of branches / the sprout tended of a kiwi / meeting at the branch of a birch. / A new tangle was forming, / like a small triumphal arch / in which the kiwi prevails / the nearby birch succumbs / and the guest meditates in the garden. Neri’s well-deserved and full recognition came late. Un Oscar, edited by Cucchi, brings together a wide selection of texts by him from 1960 to 2005. A personal anthology entitled We would never see each other again appeared for Interlinea in 2018. A delicate book of prose fragments, digressions, thoughts, memories, observations released by Garzanti in 2017. The title, Provincial roadthe sign of a poetics that has always privileged the little marginal things of existence.
February 15, 2023 (change February 15, 2023 | 09:20)
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