english introduction to the book

all the texts gathered here clearly show poetic work that cannot be reduced to the level of a mere ‘intimate emission’ of the state of mind of the ‘i’ in question. these are subtle creations, requiring to be ‘read between the lines’ while attending to meaning and form -not as a recognition of subjective properties, but for the sharing of an object. if the word communication has any meaning, it is ‘sharing something, possessing it in common’: this something is a structure of words.
whatever the reason that induced the writer to combine them in a certain way, the problem is if this specific verbal world is useful to others, arouses doubt and encourages further reading, becoming a spur to self-analysis, re-thinking and finally mobilising re-investment.
it only remains to use poetry as a support in the struggle not only against the evident ‘sleep of reason’, but also and above all against the veiled but no less worrying ‘sleep of the imagination’.

cata-modernism is the sinking of modernism, its utopias and its achievements, overturned in the spasmodic contractions of an epoch that has no idea what to rely on.
yet the notion of cata-modernism is a task and an imperative: it indicates the need to take modernism as far as it can go. this means following in the tracks of radical modernism and avant-garde extremism, taking them to their ultimate ends.
to be cata-modern includes a message of rigour and resistance to the tides of fashion and the notions that ensure that peop­­­­­­­le will agree with you, identity-isms of all kinds (if only they were those of genre), the now dominant content-isms, blackmailing moralisms, but also to crypto-aestheticising hedonism (perhaps transferred from poetry to the body industry) and the kind of eroticism that is controlled by being commercialised – the whole factory of desire and pleasure.
to be cata-modern is to brand all intellectual production with the mark of criticism.
but what is the basis for criticism in such a tension-ridden force-field, so lacking in firm footholds, in the tempest raging around us? the answer is in the impossibility of criticism: it is generated as an unsatisfied aspiration, an irrepressible challenge, an internal conflict and thus an allegory of contradiction.