Avant-garde and Experimentalisms in Poetry for Children from Rodari to the Present Day: a Travel between Authors and Works

Abstract

In 1985 Franco Fortini wrote provocatively that poetry for children does not exist, arguing that it is alien to their ability to fully grasp its expressive significance. However, there had already been the experience of Gianni Rodari, from whose contribution the critical and historiographic reflection on an authorial (and quality) poetic word addressed to childhood cannot be ignored: he had placed linguistic game at the center of poetry for children, combining the lesson of French surrealism with the Italian futurist experience of Palazzeschi and he consciously placed himself along that modern poetic line that sees a flowering of great importance especially in the post-war period. It is a type of poetry that is enriched by the contribution of a playful and divergent dimension and that knows how to speak the language of children: the rhythm, the assonance, the rhyme, but also the associative procedures grafted through the surrealist techniques naturally meet the child animus and at the same time open to an articulated, plural dimension, rich in ethical and political tension. Along this trajectory of linguistic experimentalism masterfully inaugurated by Rodari, the contribution intends to identify the paths of other authors in the proposal of a poetry aimed at children that is innovative and valid on a content and formal level: the reference is to Roberto Piumini and Pietro Formentini in particular, who have recognized, in poetry for children and young people, a vast and welcoming space for exploration and expressive freedom, but also, more recently, to the refined research of poetesses such as Chiara Carminati and Silvia Vecchini, whose poetic production is constantly embellished by a reflective work of undoubted charm and of notable interest for the investigation on a literary, aesthetic, educational level.