An authentic masterpiece of Futurism, inventions expressed with figurations, paroliberism and poetic rarefactions.
"In Rarefazioni , Govoni, while referring to Futurism, differs in the unmistakable way of If that of Marinetti and his Futurist followers is a snappy, aggressive and dynamic style, that of Govoni is instead a childish drawing accompanied by an equally childish writing, which are part of his training crepuscular. The term "rarefactions", which appears in the title of the collection, constitutes the indicative indicator of a poetics still attentive to the static nature of suspended and somewhat evanescent atmospheres. It is a visual poetry, which this means that it is made up of drawings and captions associated with each drawing. The text would have no meaning without the part depicted and vice versa; Govoni makes use of different typographic points, eliminates verbs, punctuation, conjunctions and arranges the text and representations in a totally free way. The drawings of domestic and family objects offer the author inspiration for captions which, by interpreting the details in an analogical sense, also offer an ironic or degrading vision. Among the most famous texts in the collection there is undoubtedly "The diver", in which the central figure of the composition is the diver, enriched with well-defined adjectives: at first they are good (bogeyman, puppet, deep acrobat) and then they become hostile ( masked undertaker, hermetic assassin, submarine executioner). Something can be deduced from the etymological root of the word: palombarius, the sparrowhawk (= bird of prey). The diver and the sparrowhawk share the image of those who rush or dive to reach their prey. He is a bogeyman because he is a source of constant and always looming terror; he is a pneumatic man because the diver's diving suit is full of air; hermetic killer because the same is hermetically sealed; he is a submarine executioner because with an ax he looks like an executioner! But is it really so? "The Palombaro" alludes to something else: he is not exclusively a man in the middle of an ocean limited by living marine creatures. It's much more. "Il Palombaro" is like poetry itself: he represents all the literary production of free words, which menacingly immerse themselves in the world literary scene. These deny all the previous poetic production, from Homer to D'Annunzio. With the "free-word tables" it is thought to bring progress through the awareness that poetry in verses no longer has any use (pneumatic, that is, aware of itself, of its goal). This "pneumatic man" is seen by the entire poetic field as a murderer (because he massacres all previous literature), hermetic (because he is full of analogical and symbolic expressions, not always easy to interpret, therefore enigmatic, strange, alien) ." (Tactile Literature, on line bibliography)


Claudia Salaris, «Bibliography of Futurism», Rome, Biblioteca del Vascello, 1988 : page 41.