Macale, DeCave, Appetito, "Resushitati"

Cardiopoetica is a literary collective made up of three people — Marco De Cave, Fabio Appetito and Mariano Macale — which does not arise only as a union of three authors in a single volume, rather — at least in intentions — as a sort of new cultural avant-garde, of literary manifesto.

The group was born in Cori, in the province of Latina, in 2010, and aims to revive poetry, which, according to them, has been slumbering since the nineties, bringing it into everyday life, bringing it among the common people, with a series of reading, of multimedia events. “Resushitati” is their second book, published by Il Foglio Letterario.

The title has three interpretations. If we consider it a flat word, with the accent on the penultimate syllable, it gives it a tone of event, of what has been done. If, on the other hand, it is read with the accent on ù, it takes the meaning of an exhortation to rise again, to get out of a condition that is “apparent life”, the night of the “living dead” à la Romero: “even if you are stuffed on the wall of a room. “

We are dead, we are alienated by consumerism, by the exaltation of the exterior, of the body and clothing, by a communication that becomes only externalization on social networks, an unheard monologue and no dialogue. We need to “start all over again”, as the quote from Lenin urges us to do, a stimulus to a revolution that is not only political but also interior. (The concept is well explained in the small prose piece by Marco De Cave entitled “Heavy day”.)

To do this, to get out of a life that is not life, to wake up and resurrect, you need a clear choice, a social stance, a relationship with the community, with others, so that individuality can merge into a “we” and the soul is shaken by poetry. If you choose to relive, you don’t do it like the disgusted hermit, but trying to understand our world from the inside and then overturn it.

The title also includes the word sushi, something that you take away, a taking away not only of the object but also of the subject. And poetry comes to take you away, to drag you, to wake you up. A poem, however, modern, made of things of today, and nevertheless capable of ancient lyricisms, invocations, prayers, songs to the moon. The collective claims to refer to the Montalian, Nerudian and Beat Generation traditions, but there is no lack of crepuscular echoes and more classical and less experimental stylistic features.

The subject, the lucid and a little desperate introspection, “But I am not good at living”, remains, in our opinion, always at the center of the poems of these three authors who, despite their avant-garde study, despite their socio-cultural commitment, even in the creation of a common manifesto, seek nothing but love, fusion with the other from oneself, an authentic and not superficial communion, a deeper us, where we listen as well as speak.

“That we had a word at least

To be divided into one when we are together “

It’s still :

“I stopped looking for the answer that blows in the wind

Because now I am the wind

And I’m already behind you. “

As in Macale’s poem, “May the evening never fall on your eyes”, which I like precisely because it stops experimenting and lets itself go to Pavesian lyricism.

“Never let the evening fall on your eyes,

reality is not hidden from the arcane pupils

broken, minute of this lost shard,

but the vote of the assembly is not in vain,

if the whole world ostracizes you

you will find refuge in me as a rare pearl,

no matter how unruly my words are,

my projects have failed, the chimeras and utopias have long since departed

towards imaginary worlds.

The only dream remained in the port

Of a whole life: us. “

In the end, once again, the collective, the social, identifies with the “we” formed by two souls who are never able to merge as much as they would like. As Macale still states, “out of love one can rise again”.