Preface of Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti

What strikes one most immediately in Morrocchi's discourse is the continuity of word and sign such as rarely occurs in reality for any other visual experience. The fact is that nothing is farther from the poetic operation which Morrocchi has achieved than the play of signs as a purely ornamental or compositional display in which the taste for abstraction, for abstract structure of for combination costantly prevails. It is rather the pure suggestion of a visibility which relegates the "visionary" to a kind of almost totally industrial advertising design with the albeit fragile and precarious alibi of the universality of the sign compared with the linguistic limitation of the word. Morrocchi's position is just the opposite; what counts in his discourse is the attempt to unite with the greatest care and with the most strict and sure effectiveness the peremptoriness of the word and the collaboration of the sign stressing to the extreme the active, admonishing explicative, deforming, destructive funtion of the text and at the same time constituting the sign as a resonance chamber, so to speak, of the word in such a way as to renew and reinforce its meanings with decisiveness and clearness.

The instrument which Morrocchi uses constantly is irony by means of which he founds and determines his intentions. But with exceptional innovation, the irony is not exclusively construction or play or verbal structure, but also a daring and very effective operation on the sign, not only on the more specifically graphic part, on the "bottom" that is of verbal expression, but also and above all on the arrangement and gradation of the meaning of that very discourse which takes shape in dizzyingly inventive juxtaposition of words transformed into signs with a constantly recreated and shifting inlay, itself full of unpredictable and very intense possibilities of interpretation and meaning of the function of words and the functions of the sign which the words express. This is an extraordinarily vivid means toward the highlighting of meaning via the graphic sign and towards the construction of a discourse in which the lines of force are at the same time established by gradations, by the relations of graphic signs and by the vastly intensified thrust of the meanings.

Irony as sign and meaning becomes in this way singularly complete while involving the right amount of the consumable and menageable which can exist in the graphic construction, most of all in the arrangement of spaces in the background of compositions in their relation to the text. Thus, the intention of the discourse acquires extraordinary relevance as effectively of the formal instruments with which it is constructed.

The fundamental problem of the avant-garde and above all os visual poetry, is that of rendering intention and judgement by means of formal tools which are new compared with those available to twentieth century formulations or even compared with those of the historic avant-garde. This problem is splendidy resolved by Morrocchi by his extreme forcing of a signifier which is contemporary and equal to the intensification of the signified.

Poetic discourse thus avails itself of both functions perfectly coordinated, the signs and intentions (ideas). All the declarations subtly and acutely developed regarding the deformation, deceits, oppositions, insanities of the system and of the bourgeois world acquire a bitter force by the constant sollicitation of surprise itself, by the unexpected and unforseen, by the peremptoriness which results from the inventiveness of the sign itself uninterrupted, and moreover free of gaps, breaks and uncertainties. But the sign plays its cards on both sides, the sides of both graphic composition and background thus further enriching its function and effects and above all vividly furnishing the total composition with very effective and rich variety, according to the urgencies of meaning which never repeats its own structures, but adapts itself intensely each time as signifier to the verbal intention which in turn never proposes the identity of verse and exposition in as much as it is closely bound to the different intensifications and valorizations which the sign achieves on the verbal material.

We find ourselves, in other words, before a poetic operation which gathers image and word together in a perfect mutual functionality contained by a purpose of speech which splendidly deploys the most lively and violent ironic aggression of the givens and of the expositions of the ways and structures of bourgeois communication.

Word and figure, sign and verse interact toward an outcome which represents the sole, authentic invention of new formal tools for poetry which has issued from the experiments and attempts of recent years.