2023-10-05 21:22:16
The first edition of the Strega Poetry Prize is won by Vivian Lamarque, author of ‘Love as an old woman’ (Mondadori), with 33 votes out of 98 cast. Next in the ranking are: Umberto Fiori, ‘Automatic Self-Portrait’ (Garzanti), with 24 votes; Silvia Bre, ‘Le bells’ (Einaudi), with 17 votes; Stefano Simoncelli, ‘Under a false name’ (Pequod), with 14 votes; Christian Sinicco, ‘Ballad di Lagosta’ (Donzelli), with 10 votes. The winning work was chosen by the Friends of Poetry, a voting body made up of one hundred women and men of culture who deal with poetry in various capacities and which also includes the members of the Prize’s scientific committee: Maria Grazia Calandrone, Andrea Cortellessa, Mario Desiati, Elisa Donzelli, Roberto Galaverni, Valerio Magrelli, Melania G. Mazzucco, Stefano Petrocchi, Laura Pugno, Antonio Riccardi, Enrico Testa and Gian Mario Villalta.
It was the Scientific Committee that announced the five finalist books at the Turin International Book Fair last May. This is the motivation, written by Maria Grazia Caladrone, with which she admitted the winning work to the final: “If it is true that poetry is a continuous approximation to something we don’t know, Vivian Lamarque carries out her approximation in books of very slight cruelty like the latter, ‘Love as an old woman’. With a merciless grace, the author retains the crystalline stamp of childhood, managing to put on paper the reassuring equality between person and person. The poetic self exposed by In fact, Lamarque wishes to be a collective ego, without gigantic declarations, writing instead about minimal things, treating the stars as common things, bringing the greatness of the cosmos closer to himself to make it habitable, confidential, just as real things are elementary. , the task of poets is above all to point out the limits of words, to build a living herbarium of words to which the land of their own thoughts and, above all, of their own experience, gives new life. Words that grow green and come back to life on the page just as small plants collected in strange places like Emily Dickinson’s tomb turn green and come back to life.”
“Of course – we read again in the motivation – we are afraid of the time that lets us die, but in the meantime we can revive what has never truly died, common words together with grass, because poets steal meaning and words from their own dreams Finally, Lamarque describes poetry as the desire to put alphabetical order in the chaos of life, thus revealing one of the emotional secrets of metrics, the need to arrange the living and vital cosmic disorder into syllabic patterns. Thus, in a pyrotechnic mix of diminutives, inventions, Latinisms and internal rhymes, Lamarque shows things as they are, with a nakedness in which our secrets are reflected and words live, moved by the light wind of an invincible, almost never desperate, vitality”.
The author of the winning work received a cash prize offered by Strega Alberti Benevento and the work L’Infinito Premio Strega, created by Emilio Isgrò to celebrate the birth of literary recognition. Conceptual artist, poet and writer, through his famous erasures the Maestro wanted to represent poetry both as a form of expression today almost completely erased from public debate and, positively, as an art of the word which par excellence works by removing the encrustations and the automatisms of stock phrases and clichés.
The event took place in the setting of the Temple of Venus and Rome, inside the Colosseum archaeological park, and was broadcast live by Rai Cultura, hosted by Ema Stokholma. Speakers included the director of the Archaeological Park of the Colosseum Alfonsina Russo, the councilor for culture of the Municipality of Rome Miguel Gotor, the president and director of the Bellonci Foundation Giovanni Solimine and Stefano Petrocchi, the head of External Relations of Bper Banca Gilberto Borghi, the president by Strega Alberti Benevento Giuseppe D’Avino. Vivian Lamarque also wins the Strega Young Poetry Award with 54 votes out of 167 cast, a special award offered by Bper Banca which thus renews its closeness to the Strega Award in promoting reading among school communities. Love as an old woman was in fact voted for by students of secondary schools in Italy and abroad, who were sent an anthology of the finalist texts selected by the authors themselves.
The five have been and will be guests in various Italian locations and abroad. These are the stages: May 27, 38th parallel, Marsala; June 3, Cervo Ti Strega, Cervo; 14 July, Maxxi Museum, L’Aquila; 2 August, Festambiente Sud Foresta Umbra; 16/17 September, Pordenonelegge, Pordenone; 27 September, Gabinetto Vieusseux, Florence; 8 October, Book Pride, Genoa; October 14, Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin. The final of the Strega Poetry Award is one of the stages of Ticket To Read, the traveling podcast created by Margherita Schirmacher and Enrico Orlandi, who will create a special episode with interviews with the protagonists of the evening. The first edition of the Award was accompanied by the image of Alessandro Sanna, the result of the live painting performance created on March 21st at the Maria and Goffredo Bellonci Foundation, on the occasion of World Poetry Day.
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