The last months, a strange winter's end, followed by an atypical spring, have been immersed in silence. People who live in the city especially had to face long days full of loneliness, where the only contact with the external world was permitted by computers, tablets, smarthphones.
However, I don't know what you think about it, but speaking seemed to be quite difficult. How many times did you have to record and re-record vocal messages of WhatsApp, because speaking in a clear way seemed to be so difficult (I had to, many many times)?
What happened to us seemed so absurd that we are almost unable to speak about it and to express what we feel. During difficult times, crises, general confusion, I often find a safe space in the world of words, especially poetry. But why poetry? It may seem a little absurd that a literary form usually considered old-fashioned or even archaic can express a contemporary feel, but if we deviate from our school books, we can find a canon, a female canon in particular, that sounds very close to our sensitivity: for example Antonia Pozzi, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.
Their poems are written on precious book but also on the pages of Tumblr blogs, where we can find cummunities that share thoghts and combine fragments of different poems in order to tell communal stories about feelings, states of mind, sensations, with thousands of shares.
It may seems strange, but the power of words is massive. We are the first generation who fought a silent and passive war. With the only exception of those categories that had to courageously keep on working, such as the health and food service personnel, we were told that the only solution to win was to do absolutely nothing and stay at home. There were many charitable initiatives, but we still felt powerless and alone in the face of something incomprehensible. Under such circumstances I found myself literally in need to read bright, comforting words and the momentary joy they brought me was something huge. Then I wanted to share those feelings with my words. A personal expression, of course, but in this case it is different, because the personal has been a reflection of a collective mental state, which has basically brought the whole world together (has such a thing ever happened? I doubt it). The metaphors, the images, the colors of a single person's home became something collective and isn't this a beautiful thing, in a weird sense? And what is the place where young people, isolated at home, on smart working or not, share their personal and collective world? Instagram, of course.
Contests and sharing chains started to appear in order to express the moods in such a difficult moment. We could say that it was some kind of group therapy, without physical boundaries, where sharing is absolutely good.
One of the examples that struck me the most was that of Greta Bellamacina. A model, director, actress (she started with a small part as a Slytherin student in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), she is an appreciated author who thinks of poetry as something "punk" that lives in public places, among people and on online platforms and that is not really archaic, but can express an absolutely contemporary and social sensitivity. During the lockdown she shared on her profile several pieces, including some of the one she published for the Valentino FW/20 fashion show (the brand also posted them), feminist messages, love letters to the health personnel who took care of us.
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Another fantastic example is Lou Doillon. One of the most known icons of French beauty and style (and I mean, she's the daughter of Jane Birkin and the sister of Charlotte Gainsbourg), she opened the doors of her personal library (chaotic in a super aesthetic way, of course) with daily Instagram lives, where she shared music, poems often recommended by followers, by Baudelaire, Bukowski, Plath, Ovid, Homer, for moments of immense beauty.
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Mimi Zhu's poetry is strongly social. An activist who considers writing a radical action, a sort of lifeline, which helps to preserve mental health, heal wounds of the soul and create a sense of boundless union and community. One of her compositions, an intense manifesto on the need to create a fairer world after the Covid-19 emergency, became quite known after it was shared by the eternal pop princess Britney Spears. Strange magic of the Internet.
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