Luigi Ballerini

I Novissimi. Poetry for the Sixties Luigi Ballerini

Literary Nonfiction. At the time this anthology was being conceived an explicit tendency towards a new poetics did not exist. A group of poets had not rallied around the project of a new style. Nor did I ever have the intention to put one together. I simply had identified the formative nucleus shared by certain authors, extremely different one from the other, who had arrived at their own programmatic ideas independent of each other. I called that nucleus: schizomorphic vision. This means: to intensify the expression of discontinuity in the imaginative process, to employ a ruptured syntax and weave dissonant propositions within a completely semanticized metric texture. It means: to give a rhythm to heterogeneous lexicons, to the short circuiting of events, to the perpetually disturbed nexuses of reality. Naturally, this was the critical invention that enabled me to put together five authors as disparate as we were; and that enabled me to write my best poems after the anthology appeared. The schizomorphic vision was not an expedient, was not a gimmick. It was the only serious way to tie method and madness into a single knot. The only psychological, psychiatric, philosophical, historical way possible. And poetically appropriate.--Alfredo Giuliani