Mario Petrucci is an Italian-born British poet, winner of many contests, environmentalist, physicist, and avant-garde essayist. His materials, including ‘Letters to Ukraine’, are printed monthly by the Ukrainian weekly The Day, which has interviewed him.
Petrucci, author of poems on Chernobyl and co-author of the documentary ‘Heavy Water’ devoted to the Chernobyl tragedy, is well recognised in Ukraina: “Talking with Ukraine, through these letters, is a little like being able to converse with an old friend down the phone, one who is mostly silent but receives everything that is said. It was an opportunity to share my deepest philosophical and spiritual questions in public in the most intimate way. I have always felt a deep affinity with Ukraine, as I did when writing the Chornobyl poem which later became Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl”. The poet explains his interest in the Eastern European country: “Ukraine is experiencing – as it has through much of its history – major economic, political, and cultural upheaval; this is an opportunity to embrace a collective and individual clarity as to what you are, or to dive more deeply into the illusion of historical progress towards some economically and politically manufactured goal”. Despite the distance, there is very much in common between Ukrainians an Italians: “Italy, like most nation states today – says Petrucci – is embroiled in the flux of expectations and problems that arise through identifying ourselves with Ôeconomy.Õ
A human being is not an economy or an economic unit. We are creatures not of consumption but of something timeless. In the press of day to day activities, in our obsession with material Ôprogress,Õ and the news has become what is happening with Berlusconi or the Euro when the real news is within, between ourselves and those we love. There are no Ukrainians and Italians but just human beings – explains Petrucci -. What we have most radically in common, in that case, is not so much a cultural affinity or a certain overlap in attitudes and attributes, but consciousness itself, the compassion which derives from that consciousness fully known, and the opportunity to explore what we can be together when we are no longer sleepwalking through life as a unit of ÔeconomicsÕ.
MARIO PETRUCCI, NOT ONLY A POET
Mario Petrucci born in 1958. He trained as a physicist at Selwyn College, Cambridge, later gaining a distinction in teaching and a PhD in optoelectronics (both with UCL) and a degree in Environmental Studies at Middlesex University. Petrucci is now a freelance poet, poetry organiser and performer, essayist and songwriter. He is the only poet to have been resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. Since 2000, through consecutive Fellowships with the Royal Literary Fund (mainly at Oxford Brookes University), he has implemented public resources of real practical significance for education, creative writing and study skills, including exciting new forms of creative dialogue between science and poetry (such as his unique contribution to creative writing strategies using science). Between 2003 and 2005, he was a judge for the Poetry Book Society. Since the late eighties, Petrucci has co-founded the London literary organisation writers inc., the experimental collaborative performance poetry group ShadoWork, and Perdika Press. He has also brought a number of new concepts into poetry criticism, including
