Fabrizio Venerandi’s Electronic Poems: An Attempt to Analyze Digital Works

Electronic Literature (e-lit) is a literary phenomenon shaped by the introduction of computers and digital means. Since its language is “code native,” e-lit is an international (even global) literature; however, e-lit has quickly acquired local features, reflecting the culture, the heritage, and the language of individual countries, as all literary phenomena do. In Italy, e-lit is a niche phenomenon related to newborn communities such as LEI (Letteratura Elettronica Italiana, “Italian Electronic Literature”). Despite this there are already some Italian authors, such as Fabrizio Venerandi, who are exploring the extended opportunities given by the electronic page. In this essay I will discuss Venerandi’s digital publishing projects and specifically his work Poesie elettroniche (“Electronic Poems”) and reflect over his ability to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the electronic book within the EPUB 3 format—opportunities that are not available on paper, which is a closed and static medium. Starting from the textual analysis of one of Venerandi’s poems, my purpose is, on one hand, to analyze the literary aspects of the electronic text and, on the other, to underline the importance of the supporting device where this text has been published. In fact, the Italian publishing market, in order to meet the demands of an audience with poor digital literacy, offers low-complexity e-book formats, such as PDFs, which are nothing more than the simple transposition of traditional books onto digital devices, retaining the closed and static format of the paper page. This causes a barrier between e-lit and its potential users, who are not used to works that are fluid, “open,” and interactive. I will try to contextualize this situation within the Italian e-lit scenario, dwelling on video poetry as the widest spreading genre of Italian e-lit.