Guido Monte
& Francesca Saieva

Swans

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One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.
--Gerald Brenan

Abandoning rhyme and fixed rules in favour of other intuitive rules brings us back to fixed rules and to rhyme with renewed respect.
--Jean Cocteau

Guido Monte was born in 1962. His books and translations have been published by the Italian houses Rubbettino and Ed. Della Battaglia. He teaches Italian and Latin literatures at an High School Liceo of Palermo.

He was friend of the famous Italian writer and journalist Sergio Quinzio (see: Guido Monte, Ultima lettera, in Sergio Quinzio — profezie di un'esistenza a cura di M. Iritano; about it: estovest.net/letture/iritano_quinzio.html ); his first poetry book was Tremila mondi in un solo istante di vita (Three thousand worlds in just a flash of life, 2000), with Vittorio Cozzo (web.tiscali.it/dellabattaglia/collana_di_poesia.htm); his first translation is of the English writer Patrick Waites, Palermo beat (mobile.goo.ne.jp/search.jsp?MT=Waite&from=dicjnt&PT=dicjnt).

In his most recent works, he employs linguistic blending in the search for new and deeper relations between different cultures (see wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=Genesis, mid.muohio.edu/segue/4.2/4-2index.htm, happano.org/pages/fragments/63.html). About his vision of linguistic blending, see happano.org/pages/fragments/63-2.html#63-japanese.

Francesca Saieva was born in 1972. She teaches philosophy and pedagogy, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Palermo. Her Ph.D. work was Il Viaggio - ricerca del sé e dell'altrove (The Voyage - In search of the self and the somewhere else, Graduate School of Pedagogy, University of Palermo, 2004). She has published articles on Italian university pedagogical reviews (see for ex.: Il viaggio altro, or Film Blu).

Their work can be accessed in the yearly archives, at:

2006 || 2007 || 2008

A couple of examples...

•  Polyhedron n.3: Moenia Mundi (June 2007):  A "polyhedron" of linguistic blending, by Saieva and Monte, between forgotten sounds, world walls and grateful memory.

•  Aha n.4: The End (September 2006):  Experimental poem in Italian, Greek, and English: The Sanskrit term "aha" embraces all the letters of the alphabet in her depth, symbolically embracing the whole universe.

•  There Are No Right Wars (May 2006):  In the reality of war, there are no right wars... A linguistic blending experiment on death and war.