PIEDMONT

Giuseppe Zoppelli

After the essentially provincial experience of the Generazione del "Birichin," (a publication dealing with dialect poetry that lasted from 1887 to 1927), the poetry in Piedmontese of the twentieth century opened with the rivalry between Nino Costa (1886-1945) and Giuseppe Pacotto (pen-name Pinin Pacò, 1899-1964), though generationally not too far apart. The self-awareness of both could not be more explicit. The former writes about the latter: "It's not popular poetry, and in fact it's not even dialect poetry"; and the latter about the former: "he represents the end of an epoch and we claim to be the beginning of another."
But, boutade and provocations aside, the true distinction lies in the linguistic consciousness. Costa wrote in his collection Sal e pèiverì (1924): "The author of this volume has at times, but rarely, used assonance instead of rhyme, comforted by the example of Italian and dialect classics, but even more by hearing the songs and speech of the master of all poets: the people." In the preface to his last posthumous collection (Tempesta, 1946), he presented his poems as the "expression of the sentiment of the people of Piedmont." And Pacòt, many years later, during the sixties, wrote almost in reply to him: "The poet expresses above all his inner world, and if this world is made of feelings and sensations which are particular or decadent, the poet, if he is sincere, must express it as it is ... So be it if poetry is in contrast with the true sentiment of the people, who identify only with dialect and express their very soul in dialect! It means that if it's not one poet it will be another who will interpret the real soul of the people." This last comment, beyond the obvious differences between the two, acknowledges at least the presence or possibility of two different, but complementary and parallel, poetic modes. In fact Pacòt himself had maintained that Costa was "the column on which the past rests and from which it will fly towards the future," only to disavow him as a master in 1937, at the height of their dispute. After his death, having overcome certain misunderstandings, he gave him back the title of magister.
But the poetic history of Piedmont in the twentieth century seemed characterized more by continuity and gradual reforms than by dramatic and radical breaks, and Costa again, in the preface to Arsivòli, mentioned among others Giovanni Gianotti (1867-1947) as the immediate precursor of the young Pacòt. To his name we can add, as a forerunner of the new generation, that of Alfonso Ferrero (1873-1933), about whom Pacòt would later say: "a poet with uneven results, but with an often high and powerful inspiration" (Ij Brandé, n.1, September 15, 1946).
In reality, the real precursor of twentieth-century Piedmontese poetry in dialect was Costa himself, and in fact he was "the line of demarcation (and suture) between occasional versification and the poetry of the 'young people' who write in the Armanach piemonteis published 'a l'ansêgna dij Brandé".¹ And it is not so much a problem of filiation as one of complementation, as Pacòt himself had understood. In the end - as we shall see - Costa and Pacòt point to two paths which in the final analysis are complementary, without mutual exclusion.
This does not save Costa's poetry from belonging to an anachronistic and belated cultural climate, with everything this entails in terms of what is conventional, merely descriptive or inspired by folklore or local color, all of it accompanied by a rather superficial metrical adroitness. He was still tied to la veja religion dla faseusa e dla sartoirêtta (the old religion of the milliner and the seamstress), with tuta soa nostalgìa bicerin-a (with all its liqueur-glass nostalgia). Yet he was able to bridge the gap with the newest poets, adapting his rugged Piedmontese to the "taste for rhyme and harmony," following Pascoli's example of a melancholy tone, whispered, muted in a language of a lightness and delicacy uncommon in the vernacular Piedmontese tradition. Maybe there were no rifts, revolutions, dramatic and traumatic breaks in twentieth-century dialect poetry, but certainly a turning point came with the young poets of Ij Brandé, so much so that, although the disagreement with Cost was patched up, the sense of Pacòt's (and Olivero's) polemic remains.
If for historiography the twentieth century is the short century, it is more so for Italian poetry in dialect, at least for its terminus a quo (with the exception of the forerunner Di Giacomo, the first fully twentieth-century authors are Marin from Grado with Fiuri de tapo of 1912, and Giotti with Piccolo canzoniere triestino of 1914), and in particular for Piedmontese poetry, whose beginnings fall well within the century, a decade after the Great War. The closing of the weekly Birichin in 1927 and the publication the same year of the first issue of the journal Ij Brandé can with good reason mark, in the mid-twenties, the date of the passage from nineteenth-century dialect poetry to twentieth-century poetry in Piedmontese dialect. Between Birichin and bicerin-a poetry there was the subalpine fin de siècle. If twentieth-century poetry in Piedmontese came later than that in Italian, the new squisìa poetry in dialect initiated by Pacòt did succeed in crossing regional boundaries and acquiring national status. Having abandoned nineteenth-century vernacular tradition and the successful satyrical genre of previous centuries, what was new and modern in Piedmontese poetry in dialect, although thirty years late with respect to the precocious Di Giacomo (Ariette e sunette, 1898), was due to Pacòt (Arsivòli, 1926). But for Pacòt it is not a question of lateness if compared with other regional areas, because in the end he represents a key figure, establishing himself, along with the Sicilian Vann'Antò (Voluntas tua, 1926), the Ligurian Firpo (O grillo cantadö, 1931) and the Milanese Tessa (L'è el dì di mort, alegher!, 1926), as the terminus ad quem of early twentieth-century dialect poetry.
The Piedmontese landscape, however, is so different that not only did Pacòt's dispute with Costa in the Armanch Piemontèis in1937 make sense, but so did Luigi Olivero's (1909-1996). He was more of an iconoclast than Pacòt in his battle against the worn-out vernacular tradition and was armed to the end with an aggressive and vigorous vis polemica against the vej abacuch (old fools). From the thirties on, joining Pacòt in the attempt to deprovincialize Piedmontese poetry, he represented the most conscious break with contemporary dialect poetry, without any possibility of compromise between the old and the new (unlike the more moderate tone of his friend, without rifts or traumas): writing in the Piedmontese dialect could no longer mean "rhyming sartina with scarpina, sorrisino with bacino, cuore with dolore." As the defense of a folkloric, provincial dialect poetry, with a facile use of rhyme, persisted into the forties and fifties, so did Olivero's polemical stance.
While less sarcastic and inclined to soft-pedal disputes and look for compromise, even Pacòt took part in this common battle, coming out in favor of an Elògi dla polèmica al servissi dla Poesia (Praise of the Dispute in the service of Poetry), but above all he steadfastly took the side of dialect as language of poetry, with extremely clear comments in Ij Brandé during the fifties, going so far as to formulate a complete poetics centered on Piedmontese as a literary language, tied to the regional koinè but also to single cities or villages. Because doctrines and theories do not count for Pacòt, and the only thing that counts, as Croce teaches us, is poetry, it is useless to raise barricades and fences; so the pages of his journal, in the name of a certain ecumenicalism, became the meeting place for Costa's, Pacòt's and Olivero's generations. There are even the poems of Arrigo Frusta (1875-1965), maybe the oldest, author of the collection Faravòsche (1901); of Mario Albino (1880-1946), whose Canto 'd cò mi was published posthumously; of Giulio Segre (1881-1952), author of La poesìa dla montagna (1949); El progress 1952). And Ij Brandé published poems by Domenico Buratti (1882-1960), Carlo Baretti (1886-1946), Alessio Alvazzi Delfrate (1890-1982).
If Pacòt, unlike Olivero, allowed Piedmontese poetry to make huge strides "more through continuity than rupture" (G. Tesio), then, all polemics aside, even Costa's reappraisal and rehabilitation became significant. For this reason, instead of disavowing the master's lesson, he payd tribute to it. At any rate, if Pacòt's poetic line seemed to prevail in the second half of the century, it is nevertheless true that it combined with Costa's durable example in many authors, such as Camillo Brevo, Gustavo Buratti, Domenico Badalin, Antonio Bodrero. On the other hand, Costa's, Pacòt's and Olivero's generations coexisted with the so-called first generation of Ij Brandé, represented by Oreste Gallina (1898-1985), Alfredo Nicola (1902-1995), and Armando Mottura (1905-1976).
With Oreste Gallina, a fine Latin scholar, literature professor, high school principal, founder with Pacòt and Alfredo Formica of the first Brandé in 1927, "we have - writes Pacòt himself - a farmer, totally and only a farmer, writing about his land" (Ij Brandé 1947). In reality his first book, Freidolin-e (1926), contains urban and occasional verses (to which he would return in Mia tera in 1960) that shift from center to fringe, even linguistically, with a local koiné of the Langhe, in a sort of pendular motion. If anything, the world of town and country is at the center of his second book, Canta, Péro (1933), whose persona however "does not belong entirely to himself and has the sentimental and nostalgic spirit the poet gives him" (G. Tesio, op. cit., p. 65)..
Alfredo Nicola, one of the founders with Pacòt of Companìa dij Brandé, besides being a poet (he signed his name Alfredino in Piedmontese journals), was a trend setter and founder in 1959 of the quarterly Musicalbrandé (which he edited until his death), with the precise intent to continue ideally the work of Ij Brandé. A musician, he collected Piedmontese songs and poems of the most important subalpine writers for singing and piano and for choir. In 1929 he published Penombre, influenced by the Crepuscolari and Pacòt, and in 1933 Primavere, metrically much more experimental, showing echoes of Ungaretti and Palazzeschi, and the treatment of words as music, from which Costa distances himself in the preface. But not so Olivero who, in the preface to the third book (Nivole, 1951), praised its songlike quality, its musicality and melody, more than its poetic quality. The "harmony between music and poetry," Tesio writes, would take place in his subsequent works: Spers (1969), Arcodanse (1970), Samada (1982), Cartolin-e (1986), which alternate between a D'Annunzio-style musical quality and a more intimate and existential diction, but always through a refined selection of words and allusive verse.
Armando Mottura, born in Turin, was one of the founders of Companìa dij Brandé (with Pacòt, Bertolotto, Nicola, Brero, Spaldo, and others) and an assiduous contributor to the journals Ij Brandé, Musicalbrandé, and Ij Brandé, Armanach êd poesìa piemontèisa, besides being the author of numerous plays in dialect. His poetry contains simple themes, tones, and language, and uses a plain style between elegy and Arcadia, revolving around a stereotyped image of his "small homeland" of Turin, as in Reuse rosse (1947), Paisagi 'd Val Susa (1949), La patria pcita (1959), and the anthology Vita, stòria bela (1973).
The twentieth century is rich with names for Piedmontese poetry, at least quantitatively, more so than the siglo de oro par excellence of Savoy literature in dialect, i.e. the eighteenth century. For Pasolini, in his mid-century anthology, the other Piemontese gravitating around Ij Brandé besides Pacòt, were only "regional Arcadia," between popular poetry in Pascoli's mode, following Costa, and refined poetry following Pacòt (but of much poorer quality). Only Olivero stood out by combining, as Pasolini noted, Symbolists and Provençals, D'Annunzio and aero-poetry. It must remembered that, despite such a harsh polemic on the one side (Olivero) and the calm consciousness of representing the new (Pacòt), despite proclamations and charges of worn-out versifying, dialect poetry in Piedmontese did not experience a true revolution, neither with Pacòt nor with Olivero, or great metrical innovations.
The first generation was followed by what has been called the second generation of Brandé, poets loyal to the koiné whose legacy they uphold: Camillo Brero (1926), the leader, who edited the annual almanac of Piedmontese poetry after Pacòt's death (1964), and the slightly younger Gustavo Buratti (1932). Brero, after teaching for a few years in the elementary school of Pinerolo and in the professional middle schools of Turin, worked as a FIAT employee. Besides his intense militancy in favor of Piedmontese language and culture, his activity as poet and journalist, his works of prose and his essays, he is also known as a scholar and anthologist, as the author of a Gramàtica piemontèisa (1967), an Italian-Piedmontese dictionary (1976) and Piedmontese-Italian dictionary (1983), a Letteratura in piemontese dalle origini al Risorgimento (1967), with Renzo Gandolfo, and above all Storia della letteratura piemontese in three volumes (1981-83).
The major themes of his poetry are l'ànima mia and la tera (soul and land), beginning with the first collection Spluve (1949), still green, naively enthusiastic, in praise of his land, but already imbued with religious feeling and displaying the typical themes developed in subsequent collections, beginning with Stèile ... steilin-e (1957). The recurrent motifs here are childhood, regret, attachment to his region, the nostalgia piemontèisa, religious prayer, which reappear in Breviari dl'ànima (1962). The poetry is somewhat mannered, hackneyed and stereotypical. Nevertheless, this collection marks a progress, and his poetry grows in strength and shows greater stylistic maturity. In the two subsequent works the themes of soul and land seem to go in different directions: the former embodied in L'ànima mia a s'anàndia (1968), undoubtedly his best collection, steeped in meditation and lyricism; the latter in Bin a la tèra e l'autra bin (1977), about roots and reclaiming a lost identity, with its trite tòpoi (the land, tradition, religion, the "elders"). The two motifs later converge in Ma 'l sol doman a vent! (1986), in a mix of Piedmontese roots and lyric-religious verse, and prayer and poetry have never been so close as in the recent collection of 1996, An brassa al sol.
After Brero, the banner of Ij Brandé passed to Buratti (Tavo Burat), born in Stezzano (Bergamo) but from a family from Biella, where he resides. His connection to Pacòt is evident, as he programmatically uses as language of poetry not the dialect of Biella but the regional koiné. A teacher, journalist, author of essays and studies on Piedmontese culture, editor of several journals of Italian linguistic and ethnic minorities, active in politics, militant critic, not a "dialect" poet but, as he is fond of calling himself, "a poet in the Piedmontese language." At any rate, in his critical reflections he is capable of combining a micro view (his interest in what he calls the dialects of the Piedmontese language) with a macro perspective (a Europeanist vision of ethnic groups in which the defense of Piedmontese is part of the broader safeguard of all threatened minor languages). It is not by chance that he is involved with the Association for the Protection of Threatened Languages and Cultures, which he helped to found in Toulouse in 1964 and in which he represents Italy as secretary. With Pacòt, in 1961 he founded in Crissolo Escolo dòu Po, after establishing a relationship with the Provençal félibres for the renewal of Provençal culture this side of the Alps.
He has written three collections of poetry in Piedmontese Prusse mulinere (1960), Finagi (1979), and Menhir (1992), in addition to the multilingual anthology, with Albert Maquet, Dal creus dêl temp/d'å fond dè timps (1993). The first collection is the poetry of a cheur masnà (a child's heart), full of childish candor and enchanted dreams, the robin that sings, all played in minore; within the microcosm of a circumscribed natural habitat, with its tiny bestiary, he enjoys l'anima cita (the small soul), which however does not exclude the soaring flight, panic mysticism, the shiver of the infinite, the exotic dream, the longing for freedom ("freedom/first love/of my childlike heart," Masnà). Everything is expressed in polished, light, refined diction, in charming images, in frail and luminous verses, as a "refinedly archaic poet" (G. Spagnoletti - C. Vivaldi, Poesia dialettale dal Rinascimento ad oggi, Milan: Garzanti, 1991, p. 11), at the edge of lyric dissolution. According to Brevini, he is a better poet "when he yields to his dream of flight and freedom," giving vent to "the cultural myths of his small homelands," be they the Gaelic world, Japan, the Saxon world or, obviously, his Piedmont" (Le parole perdute, Turin: Einaudi, 1990, pp. 276-77.
It is the risk he runs in Finagi: the excessive refinement borders on virtuosity and shades off into music as in D'Annunzio, but he is saved by his very concrete reclaiming of a totally Piedmontese identity and the presence of "an entire universe of banks, embankments and boundaries, the last defense of a civilization that by losing its words is losing itself" (G. Tesio). Menhir, a Celtic title, stands at the crossroads of the pair villaggio/viaggio (village/voyage), only apparently an oxymoron: 'L piemontèis a l'é mè pais/tuta la resta a l'é mach d'anviron. All the rest is surroundings and thus proximity, but also distance to be crossed, voyage to undertake adventurously. The village is simultaneously the local microcosm and the global village ("this soiled world is really all our town"), in which a sense of belonging and estrangement coexist: the menhir are the passà lontan (remote past), witnesses of a remote past - rooted in memory - which does not pass. The homeland is anywhere roots sink in the humus.
As mentioned before, a parallel to Pacòt's poetry in the twentieth century was the work of Costa, followed in various ways by authors such as Antonio Bodrero (1921), herein included, Vincenzo Buronzo (1884-1976), and Domenico Badalin (1917-1980); but also removed from the regional koiné is the poetry of Giovanni Rapetti (1922), who wrote in the idiom of Villa del Foro, a town near Alessandria, and above all in the idioms of marginal areas, such as the districts of Alessandria, Monferrato, and Mondovì. Understandably, the acknowledged leader of the new poetry of the district of Mondovì was Tòni Bodrìe, the poet of Frassino and Val Varaita, a notable poetic personality from the outskirts and on the border (although, after considerable travail, he accepted the koiné).
Another member of Costa's generation was Buronzo (teacher, leader of the Italian artisan movement, senator, also a writer in Italian) who, however, followed a marginal path that took him far from the regional tradition and the contemporary experiences of other dialect poets. His first work was Al me pais of 1962, a collection of "songs from Monferrato," original for its literary echoes and models: from Leopardi to the Latin classics (Horace and Tibullus above all), with an epic-elegiac cadence, which foreshadowed subsequent developments. In fact, he achieved his best results in Al litaniji di giòbia (posthumous, 1977), Thursday being a market day in Moncalvo Monferrato (his native town), a day for encounters and apparitions. As a key to reading these litaniji, mention has been made of a personal Spoon River Anthology in which death "moves in living figures, in lines of shadow and in idyllic caresses, in metaphysical sweetness, in evangelical and rustic meetings. Characters who emerge with their gifts of dreams and eccentricities: mirages, sagas, amusing expressions; an atmosphere in which it is easy to pass from reality to dream, lives wrapped in light webs of madness, redeeming drunkenness; a language that rises in poetic images, at once concrete and dreamy; a deeply rooted humor, at times grotesque, at time surreal" (G. Tesio, op. cit., p. 67).
Another poet from the Monferrato area is Badalin, a native of Turin whose family came from Monferrato and who has always written in his mother's idiom, faithful to the themes and speech of that impoverished land, of the Varèi, a real and at the same time mythical place that he describes in recited monologues, giving voice to various characters. His best book of poetry is Listeurji dij Varèi. Poesie paisan-e dle tère ròve dêl Monfrà (1978), with a preface by Davide Lajolo (the following year he published Doe minute pêi ti. Paròle d'amor sitadin-e e paisan-e dle pêr tute j'età.) The most distinguished exponent of the Alessandria district is Rapetti, teacher, draftsman and sculptor, active in the Centro di Cultura Popolare "G. Ferraro," a partisan, student of the rural world, for whom poetry is an anthropological commitment to recover what has been lost and to preserve the little that has survived of that world. His poetry is written in the Alessandria dialect: Er fugaron (1973) and above all I pas ant l'èrba (1987).
With his second collection, Rapetti "has given us just a sample of a potentially endless rural and working-class epic, conceived in the form of bosinada: a poem with rhyme and assonance in which the story-tellers would comment in a plain manner on everyday occurrences and the impact of historical events on the small community" (G. Tesio). The poet from Villa del Foro has continued making an inventory of his anthropological universe threatened with extinction - anxious to compile a comprehensive census (a sort of poetic Ark) of men, plants, things, animals, in short a whole world of vanquished things to remember - contained in the collection Ra memòria dra stèila (1993). A memory of the star (and utopia) to understand, still, obstinately, the sèins a ra listòria, in the hope of finding the sense of history, despite the inexorable passing of time and so much easy forgetfulness. Rapetti has erected a poetic monument dra lèingua ch'a parlavu (in the language we used to speak) to the gèint mòrt sèinsa glòria (the people who died without glory), whose epigraph could be: Que ra memòria 'd cui sèinsa memòria (Here the Memory of those without memory).
But the district that seems to have produced the greatest innovations and the best poetry in recent years, even giving rise to a "new poetry" that has transformed it from a marginal area to a regional center, is no doubt Mondovì, in the Cuneo area. In fact, the poets of the Mondovì district (above all Carlo Regis, Domenico Boetti, and Remigio Bertolino, included in this anthology) have given life to a sort of Piedmontese Sarcangelo (Bàrberi Squarotti), which however is rooted in a solid twentieth-century local tradition, more than respectable, with its own continuity despite the diversity, so that a thread runs through the three generations of Mondovì poets, creating, for instance, an Antonio Giordano (1898-1981)-Boetti (1947)-Bertolino (1948) line. On the other hand, the fact that these authors have a clear consciousness of their identity and poetic individuality as a group is attested by cultural and publishing initiatives as well as the anthology Nen viré 'l cher êndrè (Mondovì, 1982), edited by Bertolino and Carlo Dardanello and presented under the label Nuova poesia in lingua piemontese. This anthology gives a great deal of space to the poets of the province of Cuneo and in particular to the district of Mondovì, as if to say that a good part of the new poetry is born in the outlying areas. A decade later another anthology, edited by G. Tesio and Bertolino himself, I poeti di Mondovì (1991), drew a more detailed poetic map of that territory and that province, including the latest work of the promising fourth generation.
The two most significant collections by Carlo Regis (Mondovì, 1929) - who holds a degree in chemistry and is a business manager - Ël ni dl'ajassa (1980) and Lun-e (1980), reveal a witty and subtle poet, graceful and light, ironic and cheery, amused and amusing with a lunar and nostalgic vein, and a cumulative, formulaic style (the magpie's nest is his symbol for poetry). After the conventionality of his early work (Cantoma pian, 1960, and Mia gent e mie montagne, 1970), still grounded in local tradition and family, he has achieved a refined and rarefied diction, all centered on the musicality of the word and its phonosymbolic value, "often used with magical intents, as evocation through sound of metaphysical situations and images" (G. Bàrberi Squarotti) Storia della civiltà letteraria italiana, vol. V., tomo II, Turin: UTET, 1996, p. 1086). His poetry displays a taste for the bizarre, the surreal, the strange, the hallucinatory, the unforeseeable, played with a few objects that seem to come to life.
Brevini detects a turning point in Regis' poetry with the long poem Via Vì doi (1989), in which his phonic experimentation is applied to autobiographical material, in such a way that it is no longer and end in itself, "but functional to the evocation of a historical climate, confirming once again the remoteness and estrangement of his poetry going back to the Crepuscolari and Gozzano (op. cit., pp. 307-8). His last book, Bleupom (1997), between reality and fantasy, reveals the magical world of the most common objects, filled with emblems, created in a poetic structure made of mobile layers, continually sliding into one another (from reality to fantasy, but also to dreams and memories, from the hic and nunc to the elsewhere and the past, from yesterday to today, but with a privileged movement: "to bring along in the head/what is fading on the earth."
The lapidary Domenico Boetti (1947), a self-taught barber, who publishes with the pseudonym of Barbafiòre, combines a satirical, moralistic vein with popular wisdom in his epigrams, but in reality in order to reverse it into its opposite, with irony and against all tradition; in fact, in order to show, with some bitterness, all the unreliability of good sense and popular common sense. His best aphoristic poems are included in the recent anthology Viragalèt (1997), which assembles two decades of numerous and now unfindable chapbooks: from Set-te lì, parloma un po' (1979) to poems selected from Na pentnà a l'ànima (1984), Vita bela dësmora (1985), Frise (1987), Për quatr di che j'oma da vive ... (1988), Fosëtte (1988), Lòsne e tronì (1989), Ël gust ëd na vita (1991), Gòj (1993).
With some risk, I would like to conclude by noting that perhaps Piedmontese dialect poetry of the twentieth century postulates its own type of poet (not even very ideal), endowed with a specific character, even in those moments of greatest experimentation (but at any rate never as pronounced as they are in Italian, as attested by Bodrero's polemic against the "avant-garde trends in Italian poetry"). In the Piedmontese poets, as Costantino Nigra suggests in another context, "form is always subordinate to thought" and "words are more obedient to consciousness." It is a constant beyond which he does not go, harbinger as he is of a culture of the limit, which is overstepped neither by Pacòt's refined poetry, nor Olivero's experimentation, nor Bodrero's homo ludens, nor the "new poetry" of the Mondovì district, nor the harshness of diction and places of Dorato (included). Beyond, perhaps, there is the marsh of Italian poetry: that limit is the boundary - more and more crossable - which still separates poetry in Piedmontese from poetry in Italian, and for which it has made sense to write in dialect in this century.


^1G. Tesio, "Le parole ritrovate. Proposte per un itinerario nella koinè e nei dintorni," introduction to Poeti in Piemontese del '900, edited by G. Tesio and A. Malerba, Turin: Ventro Studi piemontesi, 1990, pp. 20-21.



Anthologies and Dictionaries
G. Castellino, ed., Parnas piemontèis, Turin, 1943.
C. Brero and R. Gandolfo, eds., La letteratura in piemontese dalle origini al Risorgimento, Turin: Casanova, 1967.
R. Massano, Piemonte in poesia, Turin: Famija Turinèisa, 1976.
A. and G. P. Clivio, Bibliografia ragionata della lingua regionale e dei dialetti del Piemonte e della valle d'Aosta e della letteratura in piemontese, Turin: Centro, Studi Piemontesi, 1971.
R. Gandolfo, La letteratura in piemontese dal Risorgimento ai giorni nostri, Turin: Centro, Studi Piemontesi, 1972.
L. Bàccolo and E. Caballo, eds., Poesia della provincia Granda. Antologia di poeti piemontesi contemporanei, Cuneo: Pro Cuneo, 1976.
R. Bertolino and C. Dardanello, eds., Nen viré cher ëndré (Nuova poesia in lingua piemontese), Mondovì: Amici di Piazza - Edizioni ël Pèilo, 1982.
G. Tesio and A . Malerba, eds., Poeti in piemontese del Novecento, Turin: Centro Studi Piemontesi, 1990.
G. Tesio and R. Bertolino, eds., I poeti di Mondovì, Mondovì: Edizioni "ël Pèilo," 1991.
M. Pcich, ed., Pcita antologia dla poesia piemontèisa dëel Neuvsent, Ivrea:, Tipografia Ferrara, 1998.

Regional Studies
L. Collino, Storia della poesia dialettale piemontese dalle origini sino ad Angelo Brofferio, Turin: Ed. Tip. G. B. Paravia, 1924.
E. Bottasso, "La tradizione letteraria in Piemonte," in Il Ponte, V, August-September 1949.
G. Bàrberi Squarotti, "I Piemontesi," in il Belli, VII, n. 1, April 1958.
G. Pacotto, "La letteratura in piemontese," in AA.VV. Storia del Piemonte, v. II, Turin: Casanova, 1960.
C. Brero, ed., Storia della letteratura in piemontese, Turin: Piemonte in Bancarella, 1981-83 (the 3d and last volume is dedicated to twentieth-century poetry).
R. Massano, "Dialetto e scrittori nostri," in Almanacco Piemontese, Turin: Viglongo, 1983.
G. Tesio, "Dialetto e dialettalità nella letteratura piemontese dall'Unità a oggi," in Studi Piemontesi, v. X, fasc. 2, November 1981; now in La provincia inventata, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983.
G. Tesio, Piemonte, Valle d'Aosta, Brescia: La Scuola, 1986 G.
Bàrberi Squarotti, "La poesia dialettale," in Storia della civiltà letteraria italiana, v. V, Il secondo Ottocento e il Novecento, tomo II, Turin: UTET, 1996.