Poet and publisher Maurizio Spatola dies at 76

Maurizio Spatola, Italian experimental poet and publisher, died on March 29, 2022, in Turin after a battle with tongue cancer. He had been hospitalized at the Molinette hospital and shared a final social media message thanking his family and vowing to fight. Spatola, who lived in Sestri Levante, was a key figure in Italian avant-garde poetry. In 1968, he co-founded Edizioni Geiger with his brother Adriano Spatola, a leading neo-avant-garde poet who died over thirty years ago. The publishing house, active between Emilia and Turin, produced limited-edition books and magazines, most notably the poetry periodical Tam Tam, directed by Adriano Spatola and Giulia Niccolai. Born in 1946 in Stradella, Pavia, Spatola grew up near the Osteria di via dei Poeti, a hub for Bologna's literary avant-garde. He abandoned university studies in philosophy and pursued journalism in Turin, working for La Stampa and later as a freelancer. Despite losing his sight in 2001, he continued to engage with visual poetry and visual arts, maintaining an online archive of rare materials on experimental poetry and avant-garde art collected from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s. His poetry appeared in the anthology Il peso del concreto and in newspapers and poetry journals worldwide.