Preface
A more or less urgent question that
arises from this book by Canio Mancuso is whether matchsticks allow us to
construct an outline of poetry or of life. In fact, the underlying metaphor is perfectly
legitimate and straightaway tackles references to spotlights that light up the
scene or to mini-flashlights that burn out in an instant, with both making it
possible to distinguish traces in anticipation of the coming darkness.
Here, in short, the humblest of objects
is ready to surprise us and comes across as words looking for a way through silence
or nothingness or buried speech. Thus, for Mancuso, the central memory of his
father building the most useless of model ships fires up the motor of memory and
the meaning of life. There is an existential blueprint extending from father to
son that seems to superimpose the two and sketch out the silhouette of another
who is “useless” par excellence, the one heralded by the author in the person of
the poet and/or of the intellectual, in a twenty-first century guise.
We find ourselves face-to-face with yet
another self-aware reincarnation of Don Quixote. Who is Mancuso, and his
double, the poet, if not one more affirmation and immediate negation or
exorcism of the one who senses his vocation to live and write threadbare poetry,
unequal to the part, occupied in a Gozzanian manner with an Époque that is anything
but Belle? Canio’s father built his ships for an impossible journey, Canio crafts
his words for a dialogue that he wishes were possible, sewn together with the
perfect images, with the most original enjambments, with the boldest
metaphorical bridges.
His “passage” is for the most part
cleverly ironic, whether we are looking at streets crossed, avenues of a past
age, people and characters that enlivened his gaze, the experiences and
fragments of a life lived without pedantic hubris but with a lively curiosity to
confirm rationales and theorems about human nature. We could say at this point
that what we have before us is a wholly autobiographical text, executed with
the art of looking from askance that is needed in poetry to capture the scuff
marks of being and segments that are apparently unrelated, posthumous
reparations for nonexistent sins along a parabola that is properly middle-class
and set in a minor dulcet key.
Beyond the figure of the father, as suggested
by the author in his self-presentation, it is easy to imagine an entire family realm
where wise disenchantment and quiet sarcasm have accrued with the succession of
generations: an opening out to the truth of the world that sometimes becomes a
Schopenhauerian discovery of the infernal precariousness of all things and the bitter
urge to balance.
But leave it to the
forty-something Canio, who is still rather young, to sniff out his own future
with a healthy dose of self-assurance and self-critique when, in an original
twist, he dons the role of Bigio Graus (conceivably a reference to the caustic
Kraus of the Weimar Republic) giving an earful to his double, who “does cartwheels /in the shadow of an
Elzevir /on Kyrghyz literature” merely because he deems himself worthy of a
literary history. It is the road that leads to a balanced and sincere diction, exactly
commensurate to his personal potential, far from the unrealistic stances of the
“intellectual to-go” (another memorable expression).
Unnecessary Forward
There is nothing symbolic about the matchsticks
that lend their name to the title of this collection, they are not meant to be
a metaphor for something else: they are the key elements of a structure, the
miniature ship that my father assembled, piece by piece, with strenuous joy,
some thirty years ago. This little book, like my father’s weird art,
is the fruit of a great deal of patience, lit up by memory. Each poem is a
paragraph in a tale that moves along by fragments, more extended stanzas,
enlargements and flashes bordering on wit. Everything in the book that seems autobiographical
really is, or is purported to be, so. In almost every instance, the made-up
names are masks for real faces and lives: my father, my mother, Ida, Pyrrha and
a couple of imaginary enemies. This is not a confessional book, however. I was
mainly trying for accuracy through an honest music that I hope is not abstract.
Coming back to the matchsticks, I like to think that they resemble words, at
least a little bit: matches can be used to light stoves, start fires and build
ships. Words can be used to greet friends, fill out tax paperwork and build
ships. (I’m afraid this is a kind of metaphor).
C.
M.
Commenti
Posta un commento