A recitative banquet based on materials issued on "nabanassar" website from november 2002 to june 2003; all rights reserved to the authors. Abridgment by Giuseppe Cornacchia and Angelo Rendo, binding by Chiara Nifosì and Michele Maino. Paper edition by Ass Cult Press, Pistoia, Italy, july 2003.

Tradition: Stitches suppurate. Health is directed by the fact that the measures of contiguity, the ones taken by a blunder, the archetypical ones, threatened by a little monkey, become dynamic, intercepted under the sun, claimant shade, are bridges, and everyone must be quiet, they can only be crossed

Aladar: the gradation of irony in poetry i happen to read is from witticism to black humour, until sarcasm. Logos in Fabula said that the premise to such tones would be a tragic outlook on life. If this is a declaration of poetics, i wonder how much efficacious are the instruments expounding it since irony, now, is a widespread pose among all the social classes. To the point: what an ironic poet adds to the bar customer and to the nice colleague (or depressed, another premise to irony in my opinion)?? If the goal is to destroy the self certainties, a strong self-irony could be more efficacious, funny and surprising, i think; if the goal is accusation (or scream), irony is not enough, lacking of unhanging strenght. The ironic poet set himself on fire in front of the cathedral of Milan and i’ll gape at him!!

Luminamenti: Beatiful issue opened! In my opinion among the most interesting and problematical, topic maybe sparingly investigated by critics. Bataille tempts me, his splitting up of tragedy into laughter and back. By a glance at sky you can see a great deal of stars shining, crying, rising, fading.

Angelo: the poet i and Giuseppe believe we need is the insane poet – without inverted commas. He must force to action on new basis, after having macerated and worked on he himself and his own writing. The ironic poet swallows up his voice and, by these times, could be a narrow-minded; he lives with a foot in the grave and the other in the life. Is he normal? Is it right?

FabioCi.: I arrived at quiet despair, without consternation. I get off. All the best to you.

Aladar: three ways: 1-insanity; 2-mozart; 3-idiocy.

Aladar: Anatema iettaris in catacumene / and his brother U.E.D.A. (little cow) / unknown to hovels, passed over / fencing, gates to play hand-ball / and olympic games: five trees, / seven trees, putting the stone, / one hundred meters, long jump, lap / of the track. U.E.D.A. organized.

Aladar: … what is this voice you say / i own. I can’t hear, i own not. / This body in which you fix me. / Dulcinea! / Of you i’ve only the name left and so i own. / It does not slam doors but lives, / it drives me to go out, / forces to step tired limbs / but not tired i am, a body i don’t have / i’m not the one you say i am. / Dulcinea. I can’t live / but after that told will your father, your mother / your friends be the same to me? / I don’t mind, what do you want it matters to me.

;-P: Ehm… i’ve just read in encyclopedia that irony, according to a Socratic point of view, is the attitude of who attributes less importance than due to himself or, according to the Romantic interpretation, to something external but connected to us. So irony could be a system (inaccurate) to estimate things, presupponing in its being a distance from things themselves, from reality to tragedy. Considering that into reality we all, sooner or later, end, could irony be reputed as a pause or, rather, a suspension before falling?

Luminamenti: Then through irony i accomplish a shifting from what is not evident: that is to say irony is a no-thing! Who can say who is right? I don’t think i own this thruth.

Eulogy of Excess: to be once clear, irony opens to ‘discursiveness’ and to infinite reproducibility of poetic. Irony is a part of speech, so of persuasion, then of a defensive pose. Irony halves the sacrifice of a poet, making it plausible. In short i mean to say that poetry is mining in ache (clearly it could be not felt anymore or transvalued; into lexical orgy or into enthusiasm, for example), consciousness of abyss and of unreasonable initiation. Nothing more distant from that selfconsumpting pose, as enormously as invisibly egolallic (in the proper sense of a not visible egopathy but even more essential), related to ironic practice.

Fabio Ci.: in my opinion irony is the supreme arm of quiet despair without consternation. Despair’s irony has the presumption to state that the author, the poet who makes use of it, passed through everything already, already tried fight, commitment, radicalization and anything else, so concluding that he can but bitterly smile. Nothing more. That is what i think. And, when able, i write. It’s a distressing message, i see, maybe even a non-message, but genuine.

Luminamenti: i think we are in Western world and here in Italy it’s only the beginning of ironic poetry; anyway the tried issues lack of research and investigation through other worlds, so being disappointing in all. The ironist counts by his own fingers: charming prince or beggar, and so on… as all of those embodiments have for him no other value than pure possibilities, he can so run along the gamut like children in their games. On the contrary, what burns his time is the care put on disguising himself exactly in conformity with the poetic role assured by his imagination… and if reality so loses its value to him, it doesn’t happen because of getting over (so that a new reality has to come) but because ironist embodies the fundamental Ego, for which there is no adequate reality.

Eulogy of Excess: Ok. I make my meaning clearer. The problem of irony is that it can become (and often does) the catalyzer ingredient towards writing without initiation. Towards a writing made of writing only, of lexicographical evidence (by the wished for game of words), that is of words. Like one of the various production of language. This is the problem i hold aloof. But another matter is an irony not of language but of direct relation to the world; somehow, an ontological irony. An irony that is not persuasion of language. That stays elsewhere. Hardly elsewhere. An irony that we can define, for example, on the mistery of Matter (the world and its sense, the uninterrogable things) and its silence. Beyond utterablity of things, utterability of language (as a consequence) and that, just like the poetry i call of ‘strength’ (this term could appear ingenuous but its naivity is the preserving perspective) for what, by the opposite side, happens beyond the decryptable sense of speech so becoming Writing at last. Stays hardly beyond poetic, grazing it too. And by that grazing we understand its autonomy, its capability in being fortunately, for ever, out of conversation about things too.

Logos in Fabula: I think today we can’t ask a poet for the salvifical function ascribed to past times bards.

Venedikt: Mates, you wrote a lot as usual, quoted plentifully and chucked bulls on fire. Unfortunately, my condition of semi-chronic sleepwalking due to much insomnia, domestic tangles, creative mess, doesn’t allow me to be up to you. I apologize, i will not be an acetous Rondoni with a cigar among teeth and an eye to Giussani, nor Zzzzzz, not even Viviani with his lobectomic-sacral lineaments… but from a side speaking: irony is the not eliminable sense of estrangment to our own elocution, that sort of backward step that somebody here recalled, maybe self-defensive, but in the same manner conscious of the inevitable sword of Damocles related to ridiculousness that every expressive attitude devoted to genuinity drags behind it… irony exists because pure tragicalness is not possible, socially before than poetically.

Hormiguero ugoloso: but it is the antigraceful of Carrà, it’s Picasso drawing cards enormous and harmless, they’re the women with arms to sky by Dubuffet, they’re the sculptures in stone by Jorn. Irony drove there, became humanity, grace of ugliness, voice of silents. I hope you see what i mean.

;.P: another argument has to be added to discussion: the carnival.

Venedikt: The Bachtin’s about Rabelais and Renaissance. That is about carnival literature. The filiation Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Beckett. According to Bachtin, in reality, there is no more carnival in modernity, that is no more comic-serious ambivalence but only a parodic, satiric, destructive version in modern writers (that is since romantics then). But i don’t think he’s totally right. Beckett is an example of the contrary. Around the impossibility of tragedy in the 20^th century, read Agamben about nazi’s lagers. There is no tragedy in lagers, especially in lagers. Nor heroism.

Luminamenti: then the writer "true" since "real" has two chances to talk and ask about reality: 1) to become cultivated; or alternatively / together: 2) to pass through unusual experiences, particular, esoteric, singularly sad, uncommon, shocking, accidentally catastrophic, existentially destructive, creativelly destroyer of self certainties, obscene, chaste, obsecely chaste, criminal, exquisitely amoral as regards common sense, furious of revenge and anger or viceversa pitifully consolatory, graceful in a Good made of self annulment, modestly ingenuous and i quit now!

Tradition: to tap on comprehensivity, to decimate audience with a careful and woodle eye. "What are you doing here reunited? Get out now!!"

Angelo: sentiment runs along the road of disappearance. It has its way, its style. It does not follow a path, does not geometrize a priori, does not reveal in poetics. It’s a power that forms, imbues and deforms. It’s into things, like a specimen, and does not turn into more representation. (In a semiorganic writing of events – the event is least – it is always beyond, or under page). May it be clear: i’m not interested in looking for the causes of sentiment but adhering to it, being it. I take no further notice of a tangle. That is to say: there is a knowledge that passes through several kinds of representation and expression but doesn’t stop; it’s peculiar to it a wrapping sensibility then becoming intelligence; it’s a stratified knowledge, fanced, not referable to univocity of horizon. Sentiment can’t become concept, it’s liquid, or sperm. When, for example, i offer to a text, let’s say a work, i intuitively attain an evidence. But i stop, look for one and one only gold mine, if i see it. Meanwhile, sharpen my eyes. I spread the originary, smell it all then decide what to do. I absolutely don’t want to cover the margin, the space. What i know is not mine, it owns to others, to communitas. It is the common sense. It is sense becoming biological work, tridimensional. It’s the core of humanity. Common sense is a very powerful tool, able to unhinge the system, all of its implications in rules and unity. (After all i am probably talking about beauty). So we are in light (clearity) or dark (obscurity), but substance does not change because, as we said, it’s originary. I can see the process, the birth, if i know it. I don’t absolutize empirically, basking exactly in "spoken" sensuality, i don’t like echo. Only by this way a chance of relation is given. Ok, you could say, something remains unsolved. All remains unsolved, i answer. In conclusion: if halfbacks (thanks, crow, for your help!) look at "style", strikers (like Inzaghi) parry and go off-side, so strikers are. They stay in front of sensible shapeless: the net. Summing up, sentiment drags itself to a black-hole, doesn’t it? The net will break, sooner or later, so it goes. But don’t let us loose it prematurely! Otherwise we’ll lose our words and, above all, sentiment.

Paolo: I gape in you / like in a barley-sieve, / of things pell-mell / holding a wind of silt / in a echo, unequal to wait, / to anxiety lost in white flesh / worked by womb that still / works me, foreign to skeleton / of who dies beside me, / to my sperm on your back / to collapse in the stale brow that sows / our being in surrender.

Stefano: I consider out of time to say that Christianity is in crisis, we often note misleading ideas about faith in and out Church (that even in its "roman-catholic" dimension must be community before institution). Even because i don’t share Messori’s (and other divulgers) exclusively apologetic slant. Then i personally believe deeply, and catholicly, just in ecumenism that he often criticizes. Spirit blows where it wants to and we don’t know God’s ways. The seeds of truth are everywhere, in every one, in every science, in every faith. I believe in God dead and resurrected, in God become man so that man can become God, to say by the Greek fathers words. Faith in divinization of creation is my folly. About this, Nietschze, and Leopardi before, can be really understood only in Dostoevskij. "Madness for greeks and scandal for jews", St. Paul said. But if God can all, do you want to deny him the chance to have become man? It doesn’t appear logic to me. Then Lord can. History tells that Jesus’ corpse was not found. Honest jews, like Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Gaza Vermesh and others, are ready to admit that the idea of stealing sepulchre could not have reminded any jew at that time, even if Christ’s disciple. That is: Resurrection remains act of faith and it won’t ever be demonstrated, but it’s an inexplicable fact that the corpse was never found; at least by the light of a serious cognition around the historic-religious framework. What could be the use of the proof about the man-god which, in reality, was not known how, when and where resurrected? Did this fact rid Israel or his disciples of the load of their own desperation? No, it didn’t. And yet, women before others, announced: the corpse is not there. And then He appeared to disciples. Ok, stop catechism. The point is that this is not a "catechism" to me but history and faith: it’s different. Will we be able to build a fair society one day? It was the dream of St. Augustin, Dante Alighieri and down to Carlo Marx. Different men animated by the same mirage: the City of God. But Marx thought that in building that city it was necessary to renounce God Himself, pacifically and step by step: at least the God preached at his times. Yet the idea of social justice is really ancient, it dates back to prophet Amos and before him, to Codex of Deuteronomy. That is just judaism, and so judaic-christianity.

Francesca: when a child / few months aged / with sweaty curls / with a red dot of gnat on his brow / laughs / my body crumbles / my head spins like Earth / my heart shrinks like a sponge.