Lives and Works in Italy

There was a fairly long, period of time in which Franco Verdi was primarily known as the author of a form of visual poetry that had considerable points of contact with concrete poetry; and it has to be admitted that concrete poetry was an international movement built on verbal motifs and dedicated to researching the internal structure of the word. This internationalism is something that had never been achieved by the movements that took place before the 1950s. Futurism was Italian and Russian, and Dada was limited to Zurich and Berlin since in Paris it was nothing more than a preparation for Surrealism. Surrealism, in turn, was finally almost exclusively Parisian, except for a few examples to be found in Prague. It was thus through concrete poetry that Franco Verdi became aware of a possible internationalism. All of this gave him the ambition to go still further, to go beyond the reasoned and essentially intellectualism art that was typical of the last phases of this form of concrete poetry that was so anxious to create a new image for itself. But if poetry was to find rejuvenation, it also had to accept new vehicles: and this was the beginning of the appropriation of electronics. And all of these instruments were things that Verdi wanted to make use of, even though he was initially a little hesitant because of his background and training as a philosopher and linguist. For quite some time, Verdi remained a poet with a good deal of respect for the word, and that continued until he began to make cut-ups. And in addition to cutting up words, Franco Verdi goes the limit and cuts up the entirety of an old and dilapidated world. This his religious chant, the deferent Venetian lilt of his speech, and his linguistic researches on the Italian language, Franco Verdi presents himself as moving beyond all frontiers with an irony that’s "vertement Verdi" and full of a constantly renascent force and vigor. With his great big body and a voice that’s gifted with an almost unctuous and grating texture, Franco Verdi becomes a Pantagruelian sound poet who devours the word and then spits it out beyond us, out beyond the words of the past, out beyond the uses and customs of a Judeo-Christian civilization that has long since faded away. Franco Verdi goes to the bottom of the rediscovery of what can constitute the freedom of us all, the freedom of the poets.
The Sound Poet as Philosopher and Linguist by Henry Chopin