Professor Castiglione, a researcher in the field of English stylistics and an Italian poet, shares his secrets of balancing between multiple projects and uncovers the sources of poetic inspiration: ‘Life itself, and especially its various crises and contemporary loneliness, is the most fruitful source’.

Dr Castiglione, the versatility of your professional interests is truly impressive. What are the biggest challenges in balancing your research and teaching activities with writing poetry? 

Excellent question! And one I’ve often asked myself too. Doing research, teaching and writing poetry are three activities that, while rewarding in different ways, are attention-intensive and occasionally even mentally draining. Each of them requires time and serious dedication to be carried out at a satisfactory level – that is, at a level at least on a par with one’s past performance and not too far from one’s self-assessed potential. Translated into everyday lived experience, this means that two of these three areas tend to be temporarily sidelined. For example, my teaching load is much lighter in autumn than in spring, which allows me to dedicate more time to poetry writing OR research from September to January: over the last three years (2022-2025) I have experienced a prolonged creative outburst resulting in a new poetry collection that is now almost ready. This was not only a writing project, but an existential exploration of my own past and of a given historical period, roughly from the 90s to the early 00s: a memoir of sorts in which I have stayed constantly in touch with my former self and with the environment that shaped it. Regrettably, this has left me with little energy or time for academic research, which has again become my top priority (after a post-doc in 2020-2022): in August this year, I submitted a book proposal, and in 2026 I should have two academic articles coming out, which were written slowly and laboriously in 2023 and 2024. Once the poetry demon is satiated, then, the research demon is back to reclaim attention. Teaching is intensive as a performance – after all, you are leading various classes and have a responsibility in front of your students: to be knowledgeable, organised, engaging, fair. From February to May there’s almost only teaching. Luckily, preparing myself now requires less time than it used to, since I already have plenty of teaching materials I reuse every year – although, in fairness, they still require constant updating: I do not know if I am a perfectionist, but I feel less motivated when using materials that no longer satisfy me. All in all, it’s a complicated coexistence, but so far it has worked out reasonably well.

Some projects might be more rewarding and/or exciting than others. Do you have a favorite one? 

I have been lucky to work on projects entirely conceived and planned by myself, be they poetic, academic, or more broadly cultural. I find all of them equally exciting, each in its own right, but of course I tend to feel more strongly about the latest ones (it is only fair to say that, while I am good at starting new things, concluding them is not my forte…). For example, now there’s this new academic monograph to write, described in the book proposal mentioned before, and which itself stems from my revised stylistics course: proof of how developing new teaching materials and testing them in the classroom can provide the impetus for new research. The excitement lies in the discovery or creation process itself; the reward, however, partly hinges on how these projects will eventually be received by their intended audiences: poetic readerships, academic colleagues, institutions, the broader public. Speaking of outreach and volunteering, on 27 November I am also starting an eight-week online creative writing course for students in Gaza. This opportunity came about thanks to the support of colleagues at the University of Northumbria, UK, who already have experience in collaborating with professors and students at the Islamic University of Gaza. It is an act of solidarity made all the more urgent by the fact that education in Gaza has been systematically destroyed. 

What motivates you to write poetry? Where do you find inspiration?

Introspection, memory, and direct observation are the cognitive paths I walk most often when writing poetry. These paths are all rooted in silence and solitude, so inspiration often thrives in this kind of ambience (no wonder I wrote a lot during the pandemic!). Life itself, and especially its various crises and contemporary loneliness, is the most fruitful source. In my third collection, Doveri di una costruzione (Duties of a Construction), there are poems about break-ups, miscommunication, mundane epiphanies, a dog in an oncology ward, toxic masculinity, the relationship between urban places and the lives they shape, even an ekphrastic attempt at capturing live electronic concerts with their technological hymns to chaos and their primordial vibes. In short, anything that interrogates me at a certain point in life but that, unlike academic research, elicits a synthetic rather than an analytic response. Just like fiction, poetry is a kind of knowledge that is accessible via intuition and embodied experience, rather than via the careful argumentation and verifiability at the core of academic research. My ultimate motivation, however, is simply to create something that I can enjoy as a reader myself: verbal constructions with a distinctive style and a sensuous rhythm, capable of inviting (and withstanding) several re-readings. A place for someone to pause and learn or marvel, just like the church depicted in a memorable poem by Philip Larkin.

You live and teach in Vilnius, but your poetry is mostly in Italian. What helps you stay connected with the cultural space of your native country?

That’s true. Although my academic work is mostly in English, my poetry is written almost exclusively in Italian. English is my professional language, but of course it was acquired later, and it does not seem to tap into my emotions as deeply as Italian does. At the same time, my geographical – and partly social and sentimental – distance from Italy means that poetry also becomes an intimate space for me to take care of my native language, to not lose touch with it, to evoke it in the absence of overwhelming stimuli from loud passersby or vendors. Whenever I return to Italy, I realise how many words are not immediately available to me; this situation would only worsen if I stopped writing poetry in Italian! In addition, my readership is mostly Italian: I keep in touch with some fellow poets but also follow the work and updates of many other poets on social media, review their books (especially in the past: now time is too limited!), and I even toured various cities in Italy to present my last book in 2023. In 2022, I also invited four Italian poets to Vilnius using Erasmus funds and with the support of the Italian Institute of Culture. A very intense (and intensive) experience, which taught me at least one thing: never again organise a festival alone if in the meantime you also have teaching commitments!

You have translated several of your poems from Italian into English. Was it an easy task?

I did! And I am planning to translate more in the upcoming months. It was not an easy task: the first translations probably felt a bit stiff, too faithful to the original but quite unnatural in English. After a bit of practice, however, I allowed myself more creativity and flexibility, to the point where my translations became partial recreations, ways of exploring the hidden or unexpressed potential of the original poems: translating them into English gives them a second chance and hopefully will earn them a wider readership. One of my friends, who is Italian but has been living in London for over twenty years, even confessed that  my poems in English sound more direct than in Italian; maybe this is because in English I am more cautious than in Italian with syntactic experimentation. Lately, I have asked native speakers of English who are also colleagues at Vilnius University to revise them: no matter how fluent I am in English, a native speaker’s sensibility will always make a difference. I am also planning to submit my self-translated poems to various UK- and US-based journals and magazines: so far, my submissions have all been declined except for one. It is a very competitive environment – even for poets who are native speakers of English – and promoting your work is… well, yet another very time-consuming activity that adds to teaching, doing research, writing poetry (and doing shopping, cleaning your house, living your life).

You write in Italian, English, and Lithuanian. Multilingual speakers sometimes compare using multiple languages to having separate personalities. Can you relate to this comparison?

In reality, I only write in Italian and English. My Lithuanian emails are machine-translated, I am ashamed to say, and the Lithuanian versions of some of my poems are by Ramunė Brundzaitė, a translator and award-winning poet. I agree, though, that whenever I  write (or talk) in different languages, different personalities or sides of myself seem to emerge: I already discussed the division of labour between my analytical and professional side, channelled into English, and my private, emotional and synthetic side, dominated by Italian. I also used to be fluent in Spanish, over 15 years ago: in that language I could be much more dramatic and theatrical than I am in Italian!

Of all the research opportunities in literary and linguistic studies, you chose stylistics and, more specifically, literary and aesthetic effects. Do you use the findings of your studies while creating poetry?

Initially, it was probably the other way around: I chose stylistics to try to unlock the ‘magic’ of poetry. I wanted to validate my intuitions more than to gain any practical knowledge. It is poetry reading and poetry writing that have always driven my stylistic research, not the opposite. But then, my stylistic research does inform my creative writing teaching – I suspect that what works for me as a writer may not work for others, whereas stylistics guarantees more impartiality. Of course, having extensive technical knowledge about linguistic structures and their effects can be valuable in writing – for example, it teaches you to avoid cheap rhetorical flourishes or assists you in polishing your drafts. More importantly, it helps you to find the form or strategy for what you want to express, which is typically still fuzzy and elusive at the ideation stage. At the same time, this knowledge should never become so overwhelming as to inhibit the bold, intuition-driven act of writing: ideally, one’s technical knowledge should be so internalised that it becomes as natural as breathing itself. It’s a bit like dancing: when you start learning, you are overly conscious about your steps and movements, and may come across as clumsy, rigid, or mechanical. But as you gain confidence and experience, dancing becomes just a more elaborate way of walking, a flow that feels spontaneous and allows you and your dancing partner to enjoy the process. Writing proficiency, whether academic or poetic, is like that. 

One of your projects is the Stylistic Reading Group that takes place at VU and online. Is there anything in those discussions for you personally? Do they inspire your own writing, for example?

I am honestly very proud of the Stylistic Reading Group, mostly because it’s an occasion for social cohesion in which staff and students meet and exchange intellectually stimulating ideas. I am proud of it also because I would like stylistics to become well established at Vilnius University beyond me, and this reading group is creating the preconditions for this to happen. Having said that, I regard this group as a professional activity and one that pushes me – via the implicit accountability tied to leading a reading group – to keep up with new research in stylistics even when (and especially when) it is not directly related to my niche area (stylistics can be very broad!). But I would not claim that it inspires my writing; at least not in so far as I am aware.