My name is De Santis. I was born in Rome 1976 and I live in Lanuvio, a small town in the ‘Roman Castles region. I have an honours degree in Contemporary History from the Università La Sapienza (Rome) with a thesis on post World War II emigration from the Marches to Rome. I have a devouring passion for the written word, all of it, from the prose of Céline and John Fante to the poetry of Smart, Blake, Rilke, Pound, Garçia Lorca, Neruda, Caproni and Ginsberg. I’ve been writing verse for several years, and my poems are characterized not by fixed syllables or regularity of stress, but by length of breath and how the voice holds when reading out loud: it is in the hearing that possible meanings are created (this I know I have learned by reading Shakespeare ). My haikai ( or haiku) take on the idea that Jack Kerouac had of them: “A western haiku cannot be made of 17 syllables because western languages are not suited to the syllabic fluidity typical of Japanese”. Thus, I am trying to offer a Western Haiku that aims at saying what it has to in the space of three short lines, with great simplicity, “lovely” and free from any poetic artifice that attempts to transform “impression” into description… The approach to reading them is fully embodied in the expression “fantasies of nearing” used by Andrea Zanzotto; after all, a haiku is a simple and profound suggestion, a single beat in the life of the universe…
Ndr: We publish here a selection from the poems sent to us, which are part of a corpus of 143 poems written over the years. We intend to publish others in future issues.
Beforehand
Cobalt blue sky
deep, profound, alone
the feet awaken in laced shoes....
Brief thought
Slight jolt
unexpressed motion
windy presence of a moment
frail-boned phantasm
Never let a tailor take your measure
remain in your elementary hiss flying over
time, and decency...
Animated error
The impression moves
Brushstrokes of crumbled grass
armoured souls
Aquatic pilgrimages
immobile translucent engines
of icy sun – autopsy The question is the answer – you say --
but the question – it’s dark by now – is lacking ...
Jefferson Airplane
The exasperated, closed street
The potent figure of day
of fleeing synthetic gestures
Destiny despairs and dies
a smudge in the throat
A ticket of exhausted death
two lines that crack your head
to quickly swirling silence...
Deferred ending
I want to be apocalyptic now
apocalyptic sinadora
With wind in my ears
earth in my mouth
water in my shoes
and the fire of the pen
Unknown to others
is not enough...