Lecce: Vittorino Curci is awarded 'L'Olio della Poesia 2023', the first Apulian awarded.

Lecce: Vittorino Curci is awarded 'L'Olio della Poesia 2023', the first Apulian awarded.

Since 2022, the Polo Bibliomuseale of Lecce, directed by Luigi De Luca, has assumed the artistic direction of thePoetry Oil, historic event, in its XXVII edition, promoted by the Municipal Administration of Carpignano Salentino which takes place in Serrano, a small village in Grecìa Salentina, on the last Sunday of July, to read poetry, meet the poets and to donate them, oil, in exchange for verses.

The Bibliomuseum Center and the Poetry Observatories:

With a collective work, which involves the "Poetry Observatories" of the Libraries of Greece, the Polo Bibliomuseale has developed a new reflection on the meaning of the Prize, of "rewarding" and on the need for poets to bear witness to an action that is not stop only at writing and making verses to grow a project aimed at broadening interactions with authors and the public. Go in search of popular poetry, of its metropolitan declinations in a contemporaneity that is ever more incisively trying to re-establish the language, to appropriate it, to play on the thread of syncretisms capable of containing the most remote past and an idea of ​​the future aimed at hope ; a "word world" that finds the right tool to convey in the work of poets: this is the intent of the XXVII edition of the Oil of Poetry.

The Oil of Poetry to Vittorino Curci:

In the 2023 edition, on the centenary of the birth of Rocco Scotellaro – we choose to make a strong reflection on poetry in the South, in southern Europe, in the Mediterranean, awarding, for the first time in the history of the Oil of Poetry, an Apulian poet: Vittorino Curci.

Simone Giorgino writes about him in the Notebook which will be donated to the public on 30th July, in Piazza Lubelli in Serrano: «Curci's writing has found, over time, its stigma and its fulcrum in verses with a very cadenced rhythm, sometimes jazzy, sometimes chanting, always personal and very recognisable, which seem to attack from the inside, tearing them apart , the links of traditional metrics. (...) Curci does not assume priestly postures but presents himself as a simple witness, a "verbalizer", intent on recording on paper the havoc and ruin of our times. (...) The moments in which Curci pauses to reflect on his profession/destiny as a poet, on the meaning - or meaninglessness - that writing can have in such 'unpoetic' times like the ones we are going through are not rare. (…) In the fiery twilight of our decadence, there is still a way, Curci seems to suggest, to counteract the drift, to resist humanly, and it is the daily, obstinate practice of poetry. Poetry is the only torch that can pierce the thick incipient darkness; it is our last chance for redemption, for a new palingenesis."

Poet, musician and visual artist, Vittorino Curci lives in Noci, in the province of Bari, where he was born in 1952. He collaborates with the magazine Nuovi Argomenti and the newspaper Repubblica Bari where since 2019 he has curated the "Bottega della poetica", a true observatory of the dynamics and of the protagonists of making poetry in the South. In '99 he won the Montale Prize for the “Unpublished” section. He is present in various anthologies of contemporary poetry published in Italy and abroad. In the role of cultural organizer he created and directed the Europa Jazz Festival in Noci and the Noci-Cinema festival. In 2002, with Pino Minafra, Roberto Ottaviano and Nicola Pisani, he founded the Meridiana Multijazz Orchestra. In the past he also held the position of Mayor of the Municipality of Noci and Councilor for Culture of the Province of Bari.

His most recent books: Liturgies of silence (First prize of the XV Edition National Poetry Competition City of Sant'Anastasia 2017) – La Vita Felice, Milano 2017; The wound and obedience (new expanded edition) – Spagine, Lecce 2017; Notes on poetic art – Primo Quaderno, Spagine, Lecce 2018; Closing time – La Vita Felice, Milano, 2019; Hemingway's lesson and other literary writings, Macabor, Francavilla Marittima (CS); Notes on poetic art – Secondo Quaderno, Spagine, Lecce 2020; Poems (2020-1997) – The Happy Life, Milano 2021, with a preface by Milo De Angelis (Viareggio Jury Prize and finalist in the “Viareggio-Rèpaci” Prize 2021); One day, two or twenty years, Lyriks, Cittanova (RC) 2023; Cadenze for the end of time, Musicaos, Neviano (Lecce) 2023.

The other awards of the Oil of Poetry:

Millennium Award

The 2023 Millennium Prize, organized by the municipal administration of Cursi, is assigned to “I Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni” by Stefano Donno for the research and international caliber of his poetry editions created in close collaboration with La Casa della Poesia di Como and for having published, in 2023, the anthology of Ukrainian poetry "Solar Clarinets" created by the poet Dmytro Tchystiak with Laura Garavaglia and Annarita Tavani. A work that allows Italian readers to come into contact with the living reality of a literature that has given the world writers as diverse as Gogol, Bulgakov or Shevchenko. The anthology allows knowledge of contemporary trends in Ukrainian poetry, starting from the founder of new Ukrainian literature Taras Shevchenko, passing through the great representative of modernism Pavlo Tychyna, who had a great impact on the generation of neo-modernists of the 60s , the restorers of Ukrainian archetypal structures (“Kiev School”) until the generation of the 2010s.

Salento d'Amare Award

The Salento d'Amare 2023 Award goes to the Art&Lab Association, Lu Mbroia of Corigliano d'Otranto. Musical aggregate of great importance, point of reference for Songwriting and musical research underway in Salento in a constant and continuous comparison with the national and international scene. A place of exaltation of authorial autonomy - born from the initiative of singer-songwriter Massimo Donno - which gives value to cultural initiative in the spirit of creative adventure and doing together. Music, the lever of a work on the poetic word, which meets the public in the wake of a tradition capable of inflecting the human, its most intimate feeling, the need for dialogue to give perspective to Experiences, to Time and to History. A place of resistance Lu Mbroia, which has given itself an important function: to re-establish the relationship between the artists and the public who are always fully involved, listening, in a dimension of intimacy, a proximity, from an ancient farmyard, as in a patrol where restlessness is healed by sharing.