Born in Turin in 1967, Andrea Inglese is currently lecturer in Italian at the University of Paris III.
Andrea Inglese has been described as a young Italian poet with “a laudable penchant for intelligence” (G. Majorino). His poetry shows an almost philosophical awareness of the emblematic value of everyday life, including its most detailed fragments, as well as of the contradictory nature of Being and the ambiguous reliability of perception. His work revolves around a dense dialectic of the self and the world, which acknowledges the difficulty of fixing the peremptory concreteness of matter and reality, but affirms the unavoidable necessity of personal perception, no matter how uncertain.
As Inglese himself writes, “the most difficult task today for those who have intellectual aspirations, even minimal ones, is that of not being predictable in the form and content of one’s discourse. And the only way to emphasize this unpredictability seems to me to face up to one’s living, incarnated subjectivity, daily compromised with the limits of the self in ordinary praxis. What Musil called essayism, that is, the effort to enounce general truths not on the basis of the impersonal scientific self, nor the irresponsible self of fiction, but of the biographical, positioned, self, a subject that is not solely thought, but also experience. Resist the temptation of speaking of reality through big theories (…) Try to stand up to one’s experience, see what it can tell us beyond intellectual, philosophical discourse (…) in a bold and daring fashion. Do away with all automatic responses.”
In this examination of reality in the light of one’s subjectivity, Inglese’s poetry inevitably tends towards accumulation, stratification and inventory, in the effort to achieve an ever increasing focus, in a mature balance between participating perception and analysis, between “textual spontaneity and thematic density” (G. Majorino). The result seems, in any case, balanced and mature. And mature seems also the language. “One of the merits of Andrea Inglese,” notes Marco Giovenale, “is that of using at the same time the poetical and anti-poetical register, not by short-circuiting the two or making the conflict, but by showing them as implying each other, connected.”
Bibliography
Poetry
Prove d’inconsistenza (Proof of Inconsistency). With a preface by G. Majorino in VI Quaderno italiano. Marcos y Marcos, Milan 1998.
Inventari (Inventories). With an afterword by B. Cepollaro. Editrice Zona, Rapallo 2001.
Bilico (Balance). Edizioni d’if, Naples 2004.
L’indomestico (The Indomestic). E-book in Biagio Cepollaro E-dizioni, 2005.
French translations of Inglese’s poems have appeared in Action poétique, September 2004.
Multimedia
Inglese’s poetry has been adapted by electronic music composer Giovanni Cospito:
Supra Modum for soprano, electric/acoustic sounds and live electronics, 1996.
Prologo da Le camere di Orfeo (Prologue from Orpheus’ Rooms), 1993.
Together with videoartist Rosanna Guida:
La buiosa (video), 1997. Winner of the Prix de la Creátion Vidéo 98 prize at the Festival of Contemporary Art of Clermont-Ferrand, France.
Short Stories
Inglese’s short stories have appeared in the magazines Qui, Sud, Nuova prosa and on the collective weblog Nazioneindiana.
Essays
Akusma. Forme della poesia contemporanea. Metauro 2000.
Scrivere sul fronte occidentale. Feltrinelli 2002.
Ritmologia. Il ritmo del linguaggio. Poesia e traduzione. Edited by Franco Buffoni. Marcos y Marcos 2002.
L’eroe segreto. Il personaggio nella modernità dalla confessione al solipsismo. Department of Linguistics and Comparative Literature, University of Cassino 2003.
Inglese’s essays have also appeared in various literary magazines.
Links
In Italian
Nazioneindiana
Novelists’ and poets’ blog.
L’Ulisse
Online magazine.
Italianistica online
Online magazine.
Cepollaro weblog
Critical essays.
