Poet of the Lecce “squario”. Umberto Valletta's poetry offers more food for thought than consolation; it shifts the axis of participation more towards the scale of a bittersweet philosophy than towards the plane of aesthetic enjoyment. And this is because the pleasure of reading lies in the helpless offering of a life experience precisely circumscribed in the parenthesis of existence, in the niche of an ego that is ruthless in its sincerity but also sublimated by the docile acceptance of being in itself, without debts or resentments, without memories and without expectations: the poetry of living, the poetry of the confiteor. It could be related to the scope of an Epicurean horizon, if it were not for the foundation of a sublime religion, of a faith that justifies and embellishes the limits of an existence that has grown and consolidated on itself, outside the parameters of imitations and pure and simple literary tradition. More confession, then, than invention; more abandonment than artifice. One could argue endlessly whether this is enough in itself to give birth to poetry; but it is also true that poetry of pure literati always has something artificial, obeys a canon that refers to the implication of a re-created experience, entrusting to the word - if possible - the miracle of a new birth, of a new life. Here, instead, we are faced with a completed experience, a decision that erases the hesitations of possibilities. Even the Hermeticists spoke of poetry as life, meaning that it was poetry that became life; in Umberto Valletta, instead, it is life that becomes poetry, it is life that renounces its frills to become entirely the throb of an energy that justifies itself. To do this it cannot but exhibit its poverty, its helpless abandonment to an attitude of confession that has something religious about it because it is profoundly human. (from the first introductory speech by Prof. Donato Valli – Former Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Lecce. Formerly Magnificent Rector of the same University. (As well as a critic of Italian literature) “He is a typical case of the “outside the lines” intellectual-artist that everyone ignores, due to his way of existing, because for him art is inherent to existence. This is a good thing, but, in most cases, you pay for it with your skin, with your life. And on the profession. Umberto's verses are confessions without any mediation, almost automatic expressions because they photographically reflect his experiences and his thoughts. For this reason they alternate glimpses of poetry with moments of rational discourse in which one searches for the meaning of things and of a fragmented existence. They are thoughts of love (not like the obscene eros of Pietro Aretino). They are also fragments of a love discourse (Roland Barthes) or reasonings on ethos, on existence. (from the second introductory speech by Prof. Giovanni Invitto, Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Lecce (Info link Umberto Valletta, Architect (UVA)
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