Dear all,
I hope that you are all well and that you will be able to join us for our first research seminar this semester.
Our first speaker will be Prof. Luca Zuliani, from the University of Padua, currently visiting in our Discipline.
Prof Zuliani will be talking about “The poetry of Umberto Fiori”. Please note that the talk will be in Italian.
You can attend either in person or through zoom. Please, find the details below.
Date: Thursday 14 August, 4:15-6:00 pm
Location: A18 - Brennan MacCallum SLC Common Room 536
Zoom link:
https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/87991416174
The Poetry of Umberto Fiori
Umberto Fiori (Sarzana, 1949) is one of Italy's foremost contemporary poets. His poetic journey is both uncommon and, in its own way, deeply traditional. The apparent prose-like quality of his verse and his declared aim to “lose all skills” have somehow concealed the way in which he has continued and renewed the grand style of twentieth-century Italian poetry.
Fiori has a peculiar biography: before publishing poetry and beginning his teaching career, he served as lead vocalist and lyricists for Stormy Six, a folk and progressive rock band that gained prominence in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly within anti-establishment student circles. His poetry emerged in deliberate contrast to his musical work, yet this very experience forged his unique and highly personal poetic voice and enabled him – somewhat paradoxically, as we shall see – to deal with the estrangement that contemporary existence engenders in all of us.
This presentation will examine key texts across Fiori’s career, tracing his evolution from early collections dominated by urban landscapes and marked by an apparently absent poetic self, to recent works where the self becomes so central that poetry serves as a vehicle for constructing an intimate – but unreliable – autobiography.
About the speaker
Prof. Luca Zuliani teaches Italian Linguistics at the University of Padua. His main fields of interest are Italian philology, the relationship between music and poetry, Italian metrics, the history of the Italian language and the stylistic analysis of 20th-century Italian poetry. His most important volumes are the critical edition of Giorgio Caproni’s poems (Mondadori, 1998), Poesia e versi per musica. L’evoluzione dei metri italiani (il Mulino, 2009), and L’italiano della canzone (Carocci, 2018). He has also written, among others, about Dante, Petrarch, Leonardo Giustinian, Giovanni Della Casa, Gabriello Chiabrera, Umberto Saba, Eugenio Montale, Giovanni Pascoli, Primo Levi, Beppe Fenoglio and Umberto Fiori.