In accordance with the topic used over past years within the creative and partnership world, in this new project, entitled Poets from the Frontier, ALL, in collaboration with the Partnership Studies Group, aims at creating a prize, which can hopefully be awarded year after year. The prize aims at assessing and enhancing poetic expression and creative writing, with the objective of traversing interdisciplinary borders, exploring complex and mutable landscapes, tracing paths in ‘different’ territories, from local to global, in order to achieve an experimental multidisciplinary, poetic and artistic laboratory, where a caring and partnership culture may be cultivated, according to the principles proposed by the Partnership Studies Group. Since poetry expresses itself in different languages and suggestive forms, like the multi-coloured tiles of a mosaic, the prize is also intended for other ‘arts’, such as figures of the constant presence of the humane, indelible traces of a route where being and becoming meet, iridescent and magical textures of spiritual and artistic itineraries, as in the Songlines of Aboriginal Australians, or other ‘singers of boundaries’. Poetry, in particular that of minority languages, is often a song with manifold voices, narrating stories of strength, courage and great love for one’s roots, language, tradition and culture.
Parallel to the literary dimension, poetry enacts a series of different functions that go from the representation of identity, to educational practices, to shamanic rituals for the community. The prize intends to promote a new awareness of these multiple roles and meanings of poetry in our contemporary world. It aims at valorising figures of poets and artists who operate across borders, among different practices, genres, cultures, and who recover artistic forms which are menaced or have disappeared, who experiment by taking poetry into new territories, or bringing it ‘home’ from places which may seem far away.
The prize will be awarded for the internationally renowned activity of scholars, artists or poets of recognised merit, whose work embodies an open and bold interdisciplinary vision from a cultural, literary, poetic, linguistic and scientific point of view.
The prize will be awarded according to the undisputable evaluation of an international Commission expressly established and chaired by Prof. Antonella Riem, University of Udine, Italy. The Commission is thus composed: Honorary Professor Sue Ballyn University of Barcellona, Spain, Prof. Franco Cardini, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History, Institute of Social and Human Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy; Professor Emerita Coral Ann Howells, University of Reading United Kingdom; Prof. Anselmo Paolone, University of Udine, Italy.
The prize may be bestowed also in further editions to internationally renowned scholars, artists and poets.
IN MEMORY OF FRANCESCO BENOZZO. BELOVED FRIEND, SHAMAN, POET, AND BARD
Antonella Riem Natale for the International Partnership Studies Group and the Global Academy of the Liberal Arts Network
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
It is with a heavy heart that I share the devastating news of the sudden death from a heart attack of our beloved friend Francesco Benozzo, poet, singer, musician, and Bard, as well as our candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. This is an immense loss for all of us ‒ friends, colleagues, and the wider world of scholarship, poetry, music, and song. In honour of his remarkable legacy and in celebration of the beauty, light, and truth he brought into the world, I would like to share an excerpt from the afterword I wrote for the third publication of his brilliant, original, and thought-provoking poetic work, part of our ALL series.
Sciamanica. Poemi dai confini dei mondi. Poems from the Borders of the Worlds (2013-2023) is the third publication in our series ALL of a book by Francesco Benozzo, an it completes an important triangulation. The first publication of the Welsh Bards’ songs is the basis of this creative equilateral triangle, where Benozzo recovers and presents what he thinks is at the foundation of our world poetry, that is the Bardic poems/songs in the ancient Celtic traditions. Benozzo imagines them as men constantly exposed to the inclemencies of bad weather, with seaweeds sticking on their ankles when they walked along the rocky seaside plateaus, rhythmically and dangerously being submerged by the high tide and then resurfacing in the low. He imagines them moving constantly on river estuaries and in the small villages of the heartland, classical figures of poetic dissidence who fought through poetry and song, trying to show what really mattered, the permanent and fundamental elements of nature and life, far from its empty social habits and customs. Benozzo believes that a rebirth can or should take place through the poetic word and song, expressed through a poetic dissidence and tied to the great and ancient landscapes, rather than connected to the social packs of Homo Sapiens, with his disruptive appropriation of the Earth for his own vile purposes. Benozzo speaks of a few solitary voices that continue to tell about winds and tides and men and women who can never resign to world injustices. This is also the role of his own voice, in his poetry, song, academic work and poetic dissidence. He continues to inspire young and old who happen to meet his work and him in his lectures/concerts worldwide, beautifully occasioned also by his victory in 2022 of the first edition of the International Prize Poets from the Frontier. The prize was awarded on July 1st 2022 in the Gardens of Palazzo Antonini, Udine University. This is the International Jury’s motivation:
Francesco Benozzo originally traverses different genres with outstanding beauty and originality, balancing visionary power with an in-depth reading of landscapes experienced through and in the physical body. This occurs through a ‘spontaneous adherence’ to their rhythm, as a voice and lyric experience of the magnificence of the natural world. Thanks to his precious ethnophilological, social, cultural work and his civic engagement he succeeds in reviving ancient native traditions, giving voice to ancestral landscapes, at the margins and ridges he explores as an itinerant walker, moving like an acrobat along a fine line, at the edge of mythology, lyric and song. His idea of poetry is significant and original. Benozzo’s poetry builds ‘unusual mansions’ for itself; his poetry, as he says, ‘manifests while subtracting itself’. It takes form always on high cliffs and at the edge of emerged lands, in a timeless and universal dimension, which, at the rhythms of the poet’s walking, sets the step for a positive restlessness, erratic and nomadic, open to a dialogue with places and the ancient Bards’ song.
This is a fond memento of that very special occasion.
The second side of this triangle is a dense, thought-provoking and penetrating poetic manifesto on Benozzo’s own idea of poetry, in its multifarious connections and echoes with the natural world and song. The Ridge and the Song. Sailing the Archipelago of Poetry indicates a path to the poetry reader/lover, in particular for those who believe poetry can still save the world, taking us into the secret/sacred core of poetry and his own poems, in their mysterious creative energy, full of sudden revelations, incredible heights and fearful abysses of magnificence and verity. Benozzo explores the way Homo Poeta composes and sings the cosmos and gives voice to a poetic dialogue and mirroring between inner and outer worlds, the Landscape and the Soul. Thus, the Poet is the ancestral shaman, who, like the Welsh Bards, while ritually walking the landscape, expresses integrity and grace for those who can listen with their open hearts.
The most welcomed and applauded third side of this equilateral triangle is this publication, Sciamanica. Poemi dai confini dei mondi. Poems from the Borders of the Worlds (2013-2023). Thanks to the gracious collaboration between Chiara De Luca, with her praiseworthy Kolibris publisher, and our series ALL, Forum Editrice Universitaria, we collect here the seven main Poems by Francesco Benozzo, published in the past ten years, with an English translation by the Canadian poet Gray Sutherland. They are mythological and epic texts composed mainly in an oral form, en plein air, and then transcribed in Benozzo’s notebooks. The poet moves in an absolute physical contact with natural landscapes and creates poems that are “poised between shamanic song and the cosmogony of the human heart”, as the U.S.A. poet Barry Wallenstein commented. The literary critic M. Lope Estrada thus speaks of Benozzo’s poetic activity: “Visionary, bewildering, epic, Benozzo has a special capacity to take the word back to the moment when it named the world for the very first time. […]. What this poet consistently and surprisingly puts into action, poem after poem, is a revolution of the very idea of poetry: bluntly, and with its timeless and universal dimension, he is today’s Homer of post-modernity”.
Thus, his Poems charmingly appear all together, for the first time, in our Series ALL Forum editrice universitaria, in Sciamanica. Poemi dai confini dei mondi. Poems from the Borders of the Worlds (2013-2023). This title, significantly related to shamanism, manifests a profound and creative connection with the Master of Partnership Studies and Shamanism, in its subsequent incarnation under other subtitles: Master of Partnership Studies and Native Traditions, Master of Partnership Studies and Poetry and Wisdom I direct, active at my Department DILL, University of Udine, since 2020-2021. Benozzo’s long-standing scholarly knowledge and profound experience of world native shamanic traditions was the occasion to invite him to participate in the International Scientific Committee of the Master, together with other worldwide experts of shamanism. This was the beginning of a profound and beneficial collaboration, and a long standing friendship which brought and will always bring to fruition many interesting and valuable projects, such as these editorial works, concerts, projects, lectures and much more.
The first thing I wish to mention about Benozzo’s Poems is the epic originality, freshness and powerful resonance of their titles, so far removed from any fashionable poetic trend, empty and superficial, aiming at tickling the palate of a public used to synthetic tastes, full of artificial flavourings but empty of any nourishing force. Inert, dead, empty. On the contrary, these titles, these noble and ancient words, cleansed of their everyday and banal use, renewed and trans-formed through the poet’s power of intent observation, create a potent alert for the mind and the senses. They invite to an impassionate but steady gaze and ear, preparing the reader to be ready and move along with the rhythm of the verses and the landscapes they cover – or try to uncover. Onirico Geologico / Oneiric Geological (2013); Felci in rivolta. Un Poema orale in quattro parti / Ferns in Revolt. An Oral Poem in Four Parts; La capanna del naufrago / The Castaway’s Shack (2017); Stóra Dímun. Poema camminato / A Walked Poem / Gonguríma (2019); Poema dal limite del mondo / Poem from the Edge of the World (2019); Máelvarstal. Poema della creazione dei mondi / Poem of the Creation of the Worlds (2020); Autoktonia. Poema del suicidio / Poem of the Suicide (2021). This is so far the main published poetic production of Benozzo. However, thousands of lines lie half-dormant and secreted in his notebooks and recordings. I hope they will take to light soon and be launched into the world, for the benefit of beauty and poetry, bringing to us their majesty and glory, their wealth of perceptions, melodies, vibrations, words, harp and song. A gift of poetry, beauty and truth has to be revealed, openly, passionately, wholeheartedly. It has to be shared as a boon of partnership for the world, to take flight and light, thus illumining our paths.
As Benozzo says, we know very little of the Soul. Some say it quenches its thirst at the sources of dawn, like breeze. Benozzo imagines it rather like a wild animal, a magnanimous and ferocious creature who occasionally embraces us humans as the tiger from time to time embraces the enamoured trees in the wilderness. Reading Benozzo’s poems is like being embraced by the wild, magnanimous, ferocious and enamoured tiger, by our wild Soul, quenching our thirst for Beauty and Truth at dawn, “drinking the milk of Paradise” in the verses of Benozzo’s Poems, like in the Welsh Bard Taliesin’s lines:
I was among the wise men,
I am the old and the new course
I am the voice, I am the soul of men.
I am a bard, I do not compose for others,
I am the principle, I am the life of things[1].
Francesco, Rest in Peace and Light and Beauty and Truth. You are the Life of things.
[1] Benozzo, Francesco, Poeti della marea. Canti Bardici Gallesi dal VI al X secolo. Udine, Forum, 2022, p. 61: “Io fui tra gli uomini saggi / Io sono il vecchio, sono il nuovo corso / sono la voce, sono l’anima degli uomini. / Io sono un bardo, non compongo per gli altri, / Io sono il principio, sono la vita delle cose.” (I translate from Benozzo’s Italian version).
WINNER 2022: FRANCESCO BENOZZO
In 2022, the Partnership Studies Group Committee (USA, Australia, UK, France and Italy), chaired by Prof. Riem, awards the International Prize “Poets from the Frontier” to Prof. Francesco Benozzo. Benozzo has been a permanent candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature since 2015, with nominations made public by PEN International and is also the Italian candidate for the prestigious Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. He is the author of long epic-oral poems translated into the main languages, including the recent Autoktonia. Poema del suicidio (2021), Máelvarstal. Poema della creazione dei mondi (2020), Poema dal limite del mondo (2019) and Poeti della marea. Canti bardici gallesi dal VI al X secolo (2022).
The eminent critic Lope Estrada thus describes Benozzo: “Visionary, unsettling, epic, windy, Benozzo has the inimitable capacity to recapture the original word when it first named the world. […]. Poem after poem, unfailingly and amazingly this poet enacts a revolution of the very idea of poetry: with his atemporal and universal dimension, he is the Homer of post-modernity”.
On July 1, in the garden of Palazzo Antonini, University of Udine, Prof. Riem awarded the Prize and read the motivations:
“Francesco Benozzo originally traverses different genres with outstanding beauty and originality, balancing visionary power with an in-depth reading of landscapes experienced through and in the physical body. This occurs through a ‘spontaneous adherence’ to their rhythm, as a voice and lyric experience of the magnificence of the natural world. Thanks to his precious ethnophilological, social, cultural work and his civic engagement he succeeds in reviving ancient native traditions, giving voice to ancestral landscapes, at the margins and ridges he explores as an itinerant walker, moving like an acrobat along a fine line, at the edge of mythology, lyric and song. His idea of poetry is significant and original. Benozzo’s poetry builds ‘unusual mansions’ for itself; his poetry, as he says, ‘manifests while subtracting itself’. It takes form always on high cliffs and at the edge of emerged lands, in a timeless and universal dimension, which, at the rhythms of the poet’s walking, sets the step for a positive restlessness, erratic and nomadic, open to a dialogue with places and the ancient Bards’ song”.
“Poets from the Frontier” is supported by
Organising Committee: Professor Antonella Riem, Dr. Mattia Mantellato, Dr. Giada Ganis.
COLLATERAL EVENTS
Thursday 13 October 2022
Liceo Leopardi Majorana, Pordenone
ALL and PSG (Partnership Studies Group) present the lecture entitled “Perché la poesia può salvare il mondo”, by Francesco Benozzo, winner of the International Prize “Poets from the Frontier” 2022. The lecture was held from 10:30 to 12:30.
Friday 11 November 2022
Ajace Hall, Piazza Libertà, Udine
ALL and PSG (Partnership Studies Group) present an event entitled “Tra sogni e rivolte”, held by Francesco Benozzo, winner of the 2022 ‘Poets from the Frontier’ International Prize. The lecture will be held at 5.30 p.m.
Saturday 12 November 2022
Zanon Auditorium, Udine
ALL and PSG (Partnership Studies Group) present the meeting entitled “Why poetry can save the world”, curated by Francesco Benozzo, winner of the International Prize “Poets from the Frontier” 2022. The meeting will be held from 10:30 to 12:30.
Friday 20 January 2023
Former Convent of San Francesco, Pordenone
ALL and PSG (Partnership Studies Group) present the concert event entitled “Di terra in terra. Un viaggio lungo i sentieri dell’arpa”, curated by Francesco Benozzo, winner of the International Prize “Poets from the Frontier” 2022. The event will take place at 18:30.
