Alessandro De Francesco - Quotes

As to move objects doesn’t mean to create a parallel, virtual reality out of the world we live in, to open possibilities of linguistic and cognitive paradigms through poetry doesn’t mean at all to give the poem a metaphoric or meta-linguistic power.
De Francesco, Alessandro. Lecture at European Graduate School.

I try to conceive my books not as collections of poems but as 'units' where a non-linear narrative takes place into poetry and into every poem, i.e. where several series of facts are supersposed and described. The non-linear logic, timing and structure of a dream are a perfect example for such a practice. Like Ignacio Matte Blanco, I think of dream as a language with a precise logic. The logic of dreams helps me in expressing a narrative that has a lot to do with the world we live in, because it is as non-linear as human relationships, history, reality, information and media.
De Francesco, Alessandro. Lecture at European Graduate School.

White for me is semantically dense, it is a part of the text, a sort of 'noise' on which the poem is said. The quantity of white, in my texts, determines the length of the rests between words. I try to pay a lot of attention to this aspect while I read. In my reading environments white is often represented by low-frequency sound pads coming from my spoken voice made incomprehensible.
De Francesco, Alessandro. Lecture at European Graduate School.

Redefinition can be described as a multidimensional storytelling.
De Francesco, Alessandro. Lecture at European Graduate School.

Dealing with what can’t be said/known through a conditional attitude: a poetic possibility about how it would be.
De Francesco, Alessandro. Lecture at European Graduate School.

1. A cognitive obstacle: the conformation of our brain allows us to perceive and think only a part of what could be perceived and thought.
2. A medio-political obstacle: there are things that we are not allowed to say, to know, to think, and we don't even know it.
3. An emotional obstacle: there are memories, experiences and feelings that lost their centralness and became non-verbal parts of the self.
Spaces and gaps inside my poetry testify to these obstacles while trying to focus on them, in order to give alternative descriptions able to avoid them.
De Francesco, Alessandro. Redéfinition. Mix. 2010. French edition, back cover.

bleeding in the plastic bag it buzzes
filters in the park behind the buildings the trace slides
unglues the event multiplies
the bag saturated by the expiration
rustles
moves
exits into the warmth of the straw
De Francesco, Alessandro. Redefinition (last text). Translated by the author and Noura Wedell.

in the early morning looking at the room surrounding the
notebook he is astonished how far necks can rotate how
eyes can move this since early childhood when some
needs we could not express to cry was to examine the real
head rolled back hands unable to grasp
now that thought has no truth to question seen from
darkness much of what he says actions we could perform
are celluloid in an unlit projector certain situations
have occurred somewhat unidentical to the first description
provided there was a time we thought of ourselves
at the centre
De Francesco, Alessandro. Redefinition (first text). Translated by the author and Noura Wedell.

he enters unexpectedly looks around opaque eyes jutting out of his transparent body his presence produces an increase of possibility
they want to stick a muffled life
but firs facilitate the view of the building
they render it in negative
at night we tried to release childhood traveling the path with the car behind the park close to home the balloon’s colors have been bleached
the toys deformed
left panting
writing about it would have been necessary before the firs
we forget to breathe we sink into people in the streets finding oneself motionless happens
at high speed on the side
De Francesco, Alessandro. Redefinition (first text). Translated by the author and Noura Wedell.

In my work, 3D digital typography and spoken voice digital processing are forms of enhanced (or augmented) writing, where virtual and augmented realities are mimed and criticized at the same time. Images and sounds of events occurring far away and delivered by information media or verbal therapies, as well as images and sounds of virtual and digital spaces, are denied and erased by poetry. The processed text becomes an image itself, an object, a superposed semantical geography increasing the real through virtual devices.
De Francesco, Alessandro. Presentation of the new work Remote Vision for a writer-in-residence programme.

I think that poetry itself, when we write it, can be contemporary, can be inside what is happening, not before or after. [...] I can feel a lot of respect and interest for what came before me, but when I write I write now and the heritage of the past enriches my text without disturbing it or 'speeding it up'.
De Francesco, Alessandro. "Lyrik-Diskurs" (with Dieter M. Gräf) in: Poetenladen. 2008.

A reading environment is a poetry reading where the text is enhanced through spoken voice live and playback digital processing and multi-channel spatialization.
De Francesco, Alessandro. "Environnements de lecture". Lecture at University of Paris – Sorbonne. October 2008.

Climb.
Teck-tss. Teck-tss. Teck-Tess.
It is not dark. Escaped the narrow metal leather framed and heated by yellow walls.
Everything had already begun.
We were on this climb eternally,
There is no before.
De Francesco, Alessandro. "Poetry, Age and Politics." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.

Una pecora di fumo scivola nell tempo
obliqua la luce
nell frigorifero
e gli alberi fuori senza foglie.
Sheep of smoke slides in time
oblique light in the fridge
and the trees outside with no leaves.
De Francesco, Alessandro. "Poetry, Age and Politics." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.

E alla fine cos'è questa realta,
que su non e un qualcosa non e ne pure o niente
perche nella mancanza di sogni
di un pomeriggio bacco, assolato
C'è questo dolore qui che communique si sente
De Francesco, Alessandro. "Poetry, Age and Politics." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.

And after all what is reality,
If it is not something neither is it nothing
For in the sun-less-ness of the sunny opaque afternoon
There is the sorrow one feels anyway.
The snail like the barrier bursts beneath the step
Shopping bag falls to the pavement with a thud,
And I return at night tired, and the cable fades
that connects me to time
It is true that only this language
Can be said to exist
Perhaps it's life in it's astonishing movement
Then from where can we think the void
something else in a form, contained.
De Francesco, Alessandro. "Poetry, Age and Politics." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.

Sometimes people's faces belong to another dimension
a virtual history where the undo function regenerates the present
their external life seems that of a cluster of trees exist only in the winter
De Francesco, Alessandro. "Poetry, Age and Politics." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.

These minimal spaces
where gesture causes collapse
the daily emptiness,
that for an instant after-coffee
gives us a certainty we can return
to the place where something is breathing, bleeding in the grass
De Francesco, Alessandro. "Poetry, Age and Politics." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.