‘Poetry as medicine for the soul’, Jovanotti takes fans on a journey of verses

“Poetry makes my day,” says Lorenzo ‘Jovanotti’ Cherubini. “I use it like medicine, like a gym.” And he says it with that enthusiasm of a cosmic explorer that he has always had: someone who goes from a poem by the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross (titled “Way to get to everything”) to a pop song without setting boundaries. For him, poetry is “rhythm, breath, images that explode”. “It’s the secret mother of songs,” he ventures. “Music is full of thefts from poetry,” he laughs. And in fact his stories seem like cultural freestyles: he talks about metrics, sonnets, verses read aloud in private, because “poetry must be felt in the body”. He says that often only one sentence survives from an entire poem that inspired his music. Or a title. Or a spark. “Songs don’t have a magic formula, it takes work.” But then he admits that “To you” came out all at once during a plane flight, as if someone had whispered it in his ear.

Jovanotti – dressed in white as a Navy captain – speaks fast, but never runs away from important things. Indeed, it enters into it. He says that in Italy the bookshelves in homes “are emptying” and that “social media alone is not enough”. “I do my best to make others read”. And there the audience applauds loudly, because it doesn’t seem like a slogan: it really seems like a personal mission.

Next to him, Nicola Crocetti observes with the gaze of someone who has been fighting this battle all his life. And at a certain point he finds the perfect image: “Poetry was waiting for a Trojan horse. Jovanotti was it.” The room laughs, then is moved. Because it’s true: “few like Lorenzo Cherubini have managed to bring poets out of the elite and into the square, concerts, Instagram, television, everyday life”.

The journey continues among Jovanotti’s literary loves. Walt Whitman, “who makes you see a different America”. Dino Campana, recently discovered and immediately became “a shock”. And then the quotes for “the masters”, the Italian singer-songwriters who transformed words into high music: Francesco De Gregori, Lucio Dalla, Paolo Conte, Fabrizio De André, Luca Carboni and Franco Battiato; without forgetting among the foreigners Bob Dylan and Patti Smith.

Nicola Crocetti was thrilled by the contagious enthusiasm of the audience in the room: “Poetry deserves all this and much more. We needed someone like Lorenzo for poetry, which has always been read by a few and written by many. No academic has done what Lorenzo did for poetry.” The publisher also read a poem, “Ithaca” by the Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis and at the end was almost moved to tears. “At the end of life you understand what life is,” he commented to supportive applause from the audience. (by Paolo Martini)