18 Poems 1956-1986

9780962511974

0962511978

Italian artist, poet, anarchic humanist, hobo. "There are those of us who think of him as a modern anti-hero in the style of Joyce, for others he is a crook after Genet, a violent & corpulent ham..." TANO FESTA refused to adapt to any system's conditions & ratifying powers - his work is deep-founded & complex, filled with an irony of the subconscious, arming drama with detachment - for years he survived on the support of a few admirers - but, above all with the connivance of the slums of the ancient city - Rome. Tano Festa loved to say his life was marked from birth by the ambiguous power of contradiction. Born, 1938, on November 2, the Day of the Dead, the word Festa: "Fiesta"... "I don't like to be classified as a successful artist, which means you have a regular studio with perhaps the address in Art Diary, & stay there, surrounded by groups of possessed admirers, doling out inspired brush strokes with tortured kidneys...no I like to 'commit the crime' in promiscuous places, in the alleys of Rome, & then having filled my pockets with enough to live for one day, flee as fast as possible, like a guilty man."