Daniela
Ripetti (full surname: Ripetti Pacchini) is a writer and
poet. In the past she worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist and
collaborated with various Italian newspapers and magazines. She has also dealt with theater and worked in Italy and France with Carmelo
Bene. During her university education and specialization, she
lived mainly in Rome until the early Eighties, when, due to a serious illness,
she returned to Pisa, her hometown.
As a poet, her verses have been published in literary magazines and journals including: “Nuovi Argomenti”, “Guida Poetica
Italiana”, “ClanDestino”, “Quinta Generazione”, the Mexican cultural magazine
“Altiplano” in Spanish translation, the international journal
of contemporary literature “The Literary Review” (1985) in English translation
by Pier Francesco Paolini, see also the books Twentieth-century Italian
Literature (1929-1997) in English Translation, by Robin Healey (1998) and Italian
Literature since 1900 (1929-2016) in English Translation by Robin Healey
(2019).
Furthermore, her poems can also be found in Italian anthologies and
texts such as Poeti Italiani al 2° Festival Internazionale dei
Poeti (1980), Letteratura degli anni
Ottanta edited by Filippo Bettini, Mario Lunetta, Francesco Muzzioli
(1985), La poesia nel Lazio edited by Fausto Pellecchia
(1988), Il Romanzo di Castelporziano edited by Simone Carella, Paola
Febbraro, Simona Barberini (2015). Regarding the reading and performance at
Beat 72 in 1977, see Il poeta postumo by Franco Cordelli published by
Lerici, 1978 and by Le Lettere, 2008.
A miscellany of her poems Dei trapassati intendimenti – Poems for three Festivals and three Concerts with a preface by Alberto Moravia was published in 1982-83. It collects verses taken from various collections, written and performed from 1974 to 1981.
In 1992, Forum/ Quinta Generazione published a new collection of her poems composed from 1981 onwards, entitled Marcia della prudenza 1981 with a preface by Giampaolo Piccari.
Una giovinezza rubata-Memorie di
Guerra Fredda, a volume between history and memory also including several poems by the
author, was published by Book&Company in 2019.
A vast miscellany of poems by
Daniela Ripetti in Italian and English entitled La poesia e il suo
Doppio (Poetry and its Double) was published by EdiPsy (Psychodream)
in 2021.The book contains compositions written from 1967 to 2016,
including the complete collection Apache tear (1981-1994) with a preface
by Romano Luperini. There are also some prose pieces and various critical
notes.
In 2022, Transeuropa published her plaquette of verses
entitled Poesia-Phoenix, the same publisher also published her new
collection Addio Roma e altre poesie (Goodbye Rome and other poems), released in November 2024.
In her absence, her verses were read by other actresses and actors (Maria Luisa Bene, Luigi Mezzanotte, Giuliana Adezio, Giovannella De Luca, etc.). At the International Poetry Meeting in Roma Festival Mediterranea, Rome 2010, her poems were read by Cloris Brosca. Not being able to participate in various cultural events, since 2011 Daniela Ripetti, in addition to writing on this blog, publishes some videos with her writings on the two YouTube channels "skindapsos" and "ilvelobarocco":
https://www.youtube.com/user/skindapsos
https://www.youtube.com/user/ilvelobarocco
Several of her writings of
various kinds can also be found on academia.edu at the following link: https://independent.academia.edu/DanielaRipettiPacchini
PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY: Daniela Ripetti Pacchini graduated with honors in Psychology (supervisor Prof. Giovanni Jervis) at the University of Rome and specialized in Psychotherapy. As a psychologist-psychotherapist her interests and writings have mainly concerned the phenomenology of consciousness in its multiple trans-formations (altered and/or alternative states, peak experience, hypnosis, etc.), mass psychology, psychopolitics, sport psychology and the multiple strategies to facilitate and regulate psychobiological processes and transitions, the changes in micro and macro systems.
She has worked as a
psychotherapist and hypnotherapist with an Ericksonian-systemic approach and
has collaborated with the CONI, the FIDAL. and FITARCO as a mental coach for elite athletes, but also in basic
sporting activity. As long as her health
conditions allowed it, she held lessons, seminars and workshops on Sport
Psychology and on the strategies for change adopted.
Publications: Attività motoria, rilassamento e sviluppo, CONI Ed. Pisa1985; Milton H. Erickson e
Wilhelm Reich: affinità e differenze in Atti del Congresso
Internazionale di Ipnosi e Terapia della famiglia (Roma 1985), Ed. L’Antologia
1987; Evoluzione del setting terapeutico e della teoria della terapia attraverso
l’analisi caratteriale reichiana, “Giornale Storico di Psicologia Dinamica”, 1986, 19; L’uso di strategie ipnotiche e autoregolative nell’emofilia in Atti del Seminario L’Attività sportiva
degli emofilici, Pisa 1987; Nuovi orientamenti nell’applicazione di tecniche
autoregolative allo Sport, in La
psicologia dell’atleta (a cura di M. Guicciardi e A. Salvini) Ed. Giuffré,
Milano 1988; Ipnosi e approccio multimodale nelle gare di
lunga durata, “Rivista
italiana di Ipnosi” (organo Ufficiale dell’AMISI) 1989, 3; Il training mentale del fondista, “Atletica Studi” Roma 1989, 4 ; Il training mentale del fondista, in Psicologia e Sport (a cura di F. Carbone e D. Luparelli) Ed. La
Casa Uscher, Firenze1991; Strategie autoregolative e peak performances,
in Atletica Studi, Roma 1991,5; Peak performance e ipnosi in Ipnosi
Oggi, Ed. AMISI 1991; Strategie autoregolative e peak performance, “Movimento”
, Sett.Dic.1993, Vol.9,3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_TLBaZFFxo
POEMS
MORAVIA AND THE NEED FOR
POETRY
“Perhaps poetry is
recognized above all in the ability to stop
at the
threshold of the sayable”1
You loved poetry
and you worried about it
you, master of prose and logical clarity,
you, who found me too passionate,
too concentrated on the multiple
universes of Delmas.2
“You move away from poetry, like this”
you said anxiously
and I
counter-sang:
"The brain is wider than the sky..."3
“deeper than the sea” Emily versified,
but you knew how the world of poetry
is not just made up of verses.
You, tempted to write poetry,
with your narrative metres
hidden among disturbing phanthoms
in your luminous clarity…
you had a great need of that living water
which flows right there where
the sayable stops.
1 From the preface written by Alberto Moravia in 1982 to my
first book of poems Dei trapassati intendimenti:
“Perhaps poetry is recognized above all in the ability to stop at the threshold
of the sayable…”
2 I refer to the French anatomist André Delmas and his
text Vie e centri nervosi, one of the texts I was studying during
the period when I was attending Moravia.
3 Emily Dickinson, the author of the two verses cited.
On moving towards
the centre of my lightness
when only the colour of the sky
marks the mutations of my inner being
and the shining ascensions
on the black pale
ocean
impale and burn
in sparkling flashes of Black…
Thus, I feel
in the changing tingles and blocks of my body
between sky and ocean
in a light rippling of the sheet…
YER BLUES
Then the lights quietly rest
as if by pretense
so, we do not rest
like strangers in our memories
finding other times among eucalypti
and magnolias…
unknown muses were flowers
that died soon after birth – memories
are not always true, yet more true,
more beautiful than themselves
they caress the vast deserts
between thought and thought.
Our temperaments caught a vague sense
of dawn,
and what else?
All time was constantly slipping away from us…
“This looks like mourning” we were reading.
CAMPO
DE’ FIORI (Roma 1975)
We went shopping by mistake
that morning
you bought half the market
put a fresh little onion in my
mouth
and a rose at my belt.
Then, drunk, you dragged along
falling yellow flowers,
yellow petals
decked your unredeemed soul
a long carpet of flower feathers
behind you…
And how people marvelled at
you
how baffled they trailed your
passing
under the supreme gaze of Bruno
who what others saw from afar,
he left far behind him.
You tasted of whisky – wine –
gay melancholy
of beautiful, fearful
adventures.
BYGONE
ENCHANTMENTS
There is not in any place
a place,
where our conflicts
where the false and the true
our Gods cease, with death
and everything returns
to a new beginning
to marry the dawn...
For thus we pass away
before saying an uninterrupted "Yes"
Ground level is our highest heaven
and at the idea of looking at it
at the idea of touching it
we are already lost.
TOWARDS THE
MAREMMA
As all the voids are
saturated
I am impervious to dust
and to all cold, unbreathable
atmospheres…
Had I become now
a single solid ancient clod
were the Maremma now
my definitive soul...
were life now
the center of my life,
a sort of rarefied life, imbued
with salt and water
water table of the earth.
*
………………………………….
but dust returns
to confuse the face
sirens and changes
of the hyperuranium-terraqueous
claws and nails
of the already millennia gone
palimpsests grayed by
inexhaustible
rainbows.
ARIEL (the spirit of air)
When I’m not so attentive to the
word
and pass between the lines
like a nova star
then maybe I'll live you in the
right note
and you will no longer be unknown
to me.
My verses about you
resemble life so much
that they stun me on contact...
It seems as if I am dumb
before your cheerful flesh,
yet, I made your flesh, sprite of the air.
You know not how much
everything of you I feel
like a prod that lasts
eternally, in my tired bark.
I no longer find the words that
rediscovering rhyme or blank
verse,
free the form into the possible...
Perhaps, beyond this wasted time
flattering ourselves with hopes,
there is a golden ratio in
life
which arises as invisible
music
and reveals the Paradise of
the meantime.
EXULTET
(O Vere Beata Nox...)
O truly Blessed Night
you pass and pass
over the chalices
in blood and manna...
you pass and find
the sober cell
all inebriated,
and through the Exultet
you sing
of Cross and Hosanna.
Empty time, yet full,
that fills the jars with the nectar of wine,
where there is
cracking and extinguishing
you ignite the
white lily
and the reddish rose of the wild.
Sweet time,
though very harsh,
amidst this Levantine curfew
you unveil the
moon
pregnant with
eternal sun,
whose fullness we fail to grasp.
And finally, an excerpt (translated by me) from the poem “Addio” in Elsa Morante's Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The World Saved by kids): "One can protest with indignation against certain trashy and infamous commercial press that, for profit,
insults the memory of Poets with biographical gossip”.
Performance del 1974 da
Virus e altre prosodie di Daniela Ripetti. Ultime scene: Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini
