Believing in the word

Bultrini tells us: "We started in 2020, applying the method practiced by Schultz. Courses of eight classes, two hours per week, each season: fall, winter, spring. COVID forced us to go online. But even remotely, the lessons have not lost their effectiveness. Last spring, at the end of the course, the students and teachers met up. They came from Milan, from Sicily, from Lisbon. An immersive experience full of intellectual and human warmth."

How do you teach people to write? "It is a very pragmatic operation, in the American spirit. For each course, we form a small community of participants, from six to ten students. In each lesson, the teacher presents the text of a famous author from the Writers Studio archive. Ungaretti, Homer, Shakespeare, Kavafis... I read a poem and my own explanatory text highlighting the characteristics of the poetic voice. And it is immediately interesting to see how the students react. Then, at home, during the week, they work on imitating that voice. At the next meeting, each student reads what they have produced, and everyone else comments on the work."

How do you teach people to write? "It is a very pragmatic operation, in the American spirit. For each course, we form a small community of participants, from six to ten students. In each lesson, the teacher presents the text of a famous author from the Writers Studio archive. Ungaretti, Homer, Shakespeare, Kavafis... I read a poem and my own explanatory text highlighting the characteristics of the poetic voice. And it is immediately interesting to see how the students react. Then, at home, during the week, they work on imitating that voice. At the next meeting, each student reads what they have produced, and everyone else comments on the work."

What are the expected results, do some get published? "At the end of the course, we issue a certificate. Over the years, we have identified some talented people. But that is not really the point. The goal is not to become famous, rather to learn how to handle the material of your own experience. The students—and they are of all ages, in equal proportions of women and men, even beginners—have a different awareness from the throngs of amateurs who write without having ever read anything, self-publish and indeed now promote themselves on social media in the search for likes. By this I do not mean to dismiss snobbishly those who compose verse. Because in today's fragmented reality, if you dabble in writing poetry, what's the harm? Unless it is out of the urge to be seen, you become aware of your inner self. In the concentration camps, internees took up poetry, or read the Divine Comedy, as I talked about in one of my books. It was a way of reacting."

This is also why you are a tireless disseminator of poetry. Not "narcissistic" readings, but creating situations that leave a mark. Such as the readings at dawn in October 2021 and the following October. The first time in the setting of the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, the second time in the atrium of St Peter's Basilica. "These were occasions of strong symbolic value, which created moments of sharing and unity of voice. A free and strong gesture, as only poetry can be. We were in the midst of the pandemic.

Twenty authors took turns to read at Villa Giulia. At the first light of day, standing at a lectern, they read a text of fifteen to twenty verses, without preamble or commentary, simply calling up the next author at the end. At the beginning and end, the Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio performed a piece of music. Because the event must have a performative side, a feel of entertainment: you need microphone, lights, voices, sounds."

The event at St Peter's was even more evocative. "Giuseppe Conte, Edoardo Siravo, Maria Letizia Gorga and Monica Nappo brought to life the full stage reading of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. April is the cruelest month, the first line of the poem, a cosmic drama about the condition of man in which we nevertheless set out on a path of new beginnings. In total silence all around, as the day gradually turned pink, in the atrium of the Basilica, I experienced a moment of sharing with everyone around me. Again, the Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio played at the start and the end. To emphasize the fact that poetry is always song. And, besides, music has a strong evocative power."

And there was background, or introductory music also for readings in the lobby of the Policlinico Gemelli in Rome, a small concert and verses for the hospital's inpatients against the backdrop of a grand piano. "This monthly event lasted for seven years, later interrupted by the pandemic. Great jazz musicians—Danilo Rea, Stefano Di Battista, Fabrizio Bosso—and great actors—such as Fabrizio Gifuni—participated with enthusiasm. The patients approached shyly, then sat, participating in silence, among the doctors and nurses."

Poetry in pain and bewilderment. During the lockdown, you launched a daily event via WhatsApp. Every day, a poet recites one of their own poems in a video. "It was like having a poet at home, and the authors, locked in their own four walls, were able to come out of isolation with a very human, albeit virtual, contact. I forwarded the link to a list of three hundred people. When the pandemic ended, many wanted the daily event to continue: It really kept me company, they said."

You also played your sax, accompanied by Fabio Belardi on the piano, for Radio Vaticana, with a series of ten short podcasts called Jazz on the Bible. "I like to mix, therefore to play and to write, and to speak. I focused on certain characters and situations in the Old Testament by telling them in verse and setting them to pieces of jazz. Each podcast lasted a maximum of two minutes. A light yet substantial read. Each main character was stopped in a moment, almost like a photograph. There is Lot turning his back and forced to leave his land; Cain at the moment when God asks him the burning question ‘Where is your brother?’; Joseph crying when his ungrateful brothers recognize him; Sarah's laughter when she is told, as an old woman, that she will bear a son and the promise comes true. To the music of Bacharach, Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk... Even Piazzolla, in tribute to Pope Francis."

A graphic novel published in 2018, La Grande Adunanza, its text and drawings by Mauro Cicarè, features a Blade Runner-like world—we are in the year 2100—in which poetry is banned, and of course books. Except that one fine day, a poet and his friend track down a "survivor" who managed to save the library. With him they work out a plan: on city walls, on lamp poles, in the subway, they will scatter graffiti and sheets and bricks bearing verses (from Homer and Pascoli to Claudio Damiani...). A silent revolution, against which nothing Power can do. A revolution that shakes people's souls, as stealthy characters wander the city with the faces of Alda Merini, Valentino Zeichen, Silvia Bre, Davide Rondoni, even Sanguineti and Pasolini. And thus, the great gathering of poets becomes possible again, coming back out into the light of day with their song.

A warning and an invitation to remember, precisely now that schools are starting again. In conclusion, here is a poem by Bultrini from his latest work, Vetro (Glass) (published by Internopoetry):

Davvero contento non ti ho visto mai.

Me la ricordo la gita in terza, il treno

che faceva plausibile il rancore.

A me puoi confidarlo senza pudore,

ti ruba il fiato la malinconia.

Forse per questo dici, tanto

ti piace il temporale, il cielo

che tuonando impreca al posto tuo.