Giuseppe Castiglione: "Poetry is for everyone and by everyone."

Andrea Esposito | Last Saturday, September 13th, at around 8:00 PM, a very interesting cultural event dedicated to poetry was held at the Visitapoveri Confraternity in the former town hall square in Forio. Curated by Dr. Giuseppe Castiglione, the event was sponsored and organized by the Confraternity itself, in collaboration with the Incontrarte cultural association.

The event—repeated annually by its promoters with growing success—is part of the "ON THE SACRED SQUARE IN SEPTEMBER" series, featuring art, culture, and spirituality, held in the evocative setting of the churchyard of Santa Maria Visitapoveri. It was a resounding success, especially considering the nature of the event: poetry, a genre that certainly isn't at the top of literary charts, given its depth, and often difficulty in deciphering it for all readers. It also reflects the need for personal introspection, a theme that many authors—including Castiglione himself—invite us to engage in through their works. We interviewed him, and he summarized his thoughts on poetry and the reasons for its continued vital importance today in the context of culture and art in general.

Doctor, can you confirm what you said? Of course, poetry is difficult to define. Today, few people have never experimented with this art form, but equally, it is increasingly less appreciated. School has taught us to study the great poets, making us appreciate how noble yet distant this form of expression is from everyday life.

Yet how many of us have tried? Many, many. Life leads us all to be aspiring poets and to seek in aesthetic synthesis the best way to express feelings, melancholy, love, and what dwells in our soul. This is the gap in an art that we were taught was reserved for a select few, yet which, today even more so, we find everywhere, from graffiti on walls or social media, to notebooks forgotten who knows where. And so poetry was lost.

What do you mean by lost, Doctor? A trivialization that offends its quality and depth? I mean it no longer has an identity, and the poet is never an ordinary person; either a cultured intellectual who looks down on others, or a poor fool who makes himself a bit ridiculous by writing. Poetry is for everyone and by everyone. Everyone should read poetry, during their work breaks, on the train, before bed, when they're with friends, and everyone should write about it.

Isn't that too much? No, perhaps not enough. I'm not among those who believe stylistic form makes a composition, a poem, and I don't believe every text put in a column does either. For me, poetry is any delicate form of synthesis that expresses an emotion, otherwise difficult to define. With prose, we narrate, we explain, we convey contours and forms. With poetry, there's no need to define; with it, we convey our feelings to others, the intangible and emotional effects of those sensations; we lay ourselves bare and reveal ourselves for what we are.

Is poetry revolutionary, then? Absolutely, it's a revolutionary act of immodesty, of amoral sharing of our most unconscious intimacies. The only true reason for a text to be poetry is its sincerity; there can be no intimacy if lies are involved. Today, more than ever, we hope it will be a source of unity, discussion, and common ground. Defending poetry means defending oneself, loving freedom, and accepting its fascinating challenges. Living poetry means fulfilling one's existence.