questions and translation
by Hannah Armbrust
Umberto Fiori was born in Sarzana in 1949, and has lived in Milan since 1954, where he graduated with a Philosophy degree. During the ’70s, he was the singer and songwriter for the Stormy Six, an historic Italian rock band. He is the author of two novels, and essays and criticism about both music and poetry, and has collaborated with numerous musicians, artists, and writers over the years. His first book of poetry, Case, was published in 1986 by San Marco dei Giustiniani. It was followed by Esempi (1992), Chiarimenti (1995), Parlare al muro (with images by the painter Marco Petrus, 1996), Tutti (1998) La bella vista (2002), all published by Marcos y Marcos. His latest book, Voi (2009), and his complete Collected Poems 1986-2014, were both published by Oscar Mondadori.
Hannah Armbrust: What first drew you to poetry?
Umberto Fiori: Since childhood, words—I would say even single letters, individual characters—have enchanted me. I sensed a quiet power, a great magic within them. They were alive; they were like divine animals. They knew me. I craved them as you might crave a delicious plate of ravioli and sauce. I have always felt a physical, erotic attraction to the Italian language.
Armbrust: How did you begin to write?
Fiori: I began writing very early, modeling myself after the great poets I was reading, but in comparison, my own poems seemed immature, shaky, clumsy, and wooden to me. They were exercises, imitations. Around thirty, I convinced myself that I had finally written something meaningful and began publishing.
Armbrust: Which poets would you say have influenced, strengthened, or challenged your work?
Fiori: A full list would be very long. Naturally, it would include the classic Italian poets, beginning with Dante and Petrarch, and then Leopardi. Around the age of twelve, I began reading 20th century poets, whom I’ve continued reading and meditating on over the years: Eugenio Montale had a marked influence, and then Ungaretti, Sbarbaro, Sereni, Penna, Caproni, Pasolini, Zanzotto. . . As for foreign poets, I would list Mallarmé, Eliot, Rilke, Benn, but above all, Baudelaire, whom I still read in order to learn. I like how his poems always have a strong visual element, a memorable figure: The Passerby, The Blind, The Swan. He has the ability to make them truly appear, to impress them on the reader’s memory. Another very important author for me is Kafka. Though he’s not a poet, he is perhaps something more. In him, I admire the ability to create archetypal figures, which stand alone, “recounting” a thought.
Armbrust: You began as a musician, how has this affected your writing? What do you see as the relationship between music and poetry?
Fiori: Actually, in my personal story, poetry came before music. I wrote poems before becoming a musician. My activity as a rock singer led me to come to terms with an “incarnate” word, exposed to the public alongside the author. Someone who writes for the page is largely distant from his readers; to write for the voice (or with the voice: the title of my book of essays) means to accept a risky (but exciting) proximity to the public. It’s a type of “full contact” presence that doesn’t exist in poetry. When you write, you are alone; later, when you sing on stage what you’ve written, you find a response, even physically, to your words. This experience of responsibility, of exposure to the eyes and ears of an audience, has profoundly influenced my writing for the page. When I write, I imagine myself giving a speech to a person (or many people) who can respond, counter, comment, approve, or oppose what I say. The reader, the other, is in a sense encoded into my poems; not only as an influence, but as a contributor in their creation.
If I left songwriting for poetry, it’s because I felt that in the songs (and even more in opera, or in “cultured” music) the words are always in service of the music. This inevitably limits the freedom of the writer, who becomes subordinate to the music. Songwriting is a craft that I enjoy, am fascinated by, and continue to practice; but poetry is something else entirely.
Ambrust: Buildings and urban landscapes seem to play a large role in your writing. They seem to be living spaces and characters. Can you talk a little about this?
Fiori: The poems I published, after discarding my previous work, grew from the image of a house that I saw in my childhood, and which I discovered many years later. At school (I must have been eight or nine years old) from the window of our ground floor classroom at a certain hour in morning, I could see overhead a building facade illuminated, animated by the sun’s presence. For me, it was an apparition: I felt that the house wanted to speak to me. I awaited that moment. In my thirties, I remembered this scene and sought to find an explanation of the meaning it had for and within me. In my poems, house facades, blank walls, and excavations are like angels, examples, warnings, and lessons to be deciphered.
Ambrust: You’ve succeeded in making everyday, spoken Italian elegant and musical. Was this an intentional choice or something that arose organically?
Fiori: At some point in my life, Italian poetry began to sound unbearably artificial, gesticulated, and scripted to me. I became attracted to spoken language as a potential antidote to the overly literary. I listened to people’s conversations; I made notes; I recomposed them in different ways. These too were “built” texts, where language was used as “material” to create an aesthetic result. Playing with language, treating it (literary or spoken) as a keyboard at my disposal, began to feel like a sterile, empty exercise of skill. I was tired of obscurity, of allusion, of tricks and irony: I wanted clarity—direct, disarmed, naked. So I sought to find my own “normal speech”: a rule of speech that would ground me in the world, in community. I tried to abandon all of my literary skills and vanity—to attune myself to the deepest source of speech—to find my own voice, that voice which I cannot choose, do not possess, but involuntarily am. Every animal has its own call, I wanted to understand my own. When I believed that I understood my own call, I involuntarily and inevitably surrendered to it. In this way, after years of “experiments,” I began to truly write.