When I wrote this piece in December , I could not have fathomed that a few months later all of the frantic movement of pre-COVIDCatania would come to a full halt: empty streets, closed bookstores, abandoned airports, deserted churches, no honking, no raging scooters, no hugging, no shoulder-tapping, and especially no kisses on the cheek.
And we can only run it to the nearest supermarket and back. But the poetry has not stopped: my inbox, WhatsApp, and Facebook feed are clogged with sonnets, invitations to poetic hangouts, screenshots of favorite verses, virtual poetry slams, Zoom readings, and so on and so on. The silence is only material alright. Virtually, we are bombarded by pandemic noise.
So overwhelming is the poetic output and the public opinion-gasming on social media that I am one step away from pulling the plug and committing digital suicide. But wait. Humans get sick and die. The WORD persists.
Perhaps, as one of the poems cited below says, the worst does not exist, despite the current bitterness of solitude. Heroin, LSD, cocaine, marijuana, mushrooms, ecstasy, amphetamines, opium, meth. Forget it. In the city that some used to call the Seattle of Italy, nowadays you can only overdose on poetry. These are followed by updates on marriage, kids, former lovers, priests, graduation parties, phallocentric feuds, and a couple of shoulda-woulda-couldas away from death by scooterβone huge stinky finger in the face of their Catholic god, the ring finger still duly tucked between pages of the bible.
A lot of poetry. Words, words, words so much rhetoric and not enough persuasion, Michelstaedter would say. And who are all these kids anyways? What are they after? Who are they running from? Where to? It is born either out of shortage or excess, stringing the contemporary poets of Catania into a cheerful Bergmanian dance of death.
