.ART

We aim to provide short, clear, and memorable website names for our adopters to help them reinforce their digital presence. LETZWRITE.ART is a great example of a website delivering its creative purpose.

Davide Aldo Di Ronco and Ognyan Darinov (better known as Flame) met at the University of Luxembourg, where LëtzWrite was born out of their shared passion for the written word, the eagerness to share their thoughts with the world and, most importantly, to encourage others to read and write more.

The first time I had to remember who Davide was when a close friend of mine made him a birthday present (a poem, funnily enough). I don’t remember too much what it was about, but the title was Davide Pls. Fast forward, the months leading up to and following LëtzWrite, we were spending a lot of time at our local café on campus.

Flame and Davide began hanging out regularly at the local café and despite their often opposing personalities and their clash in humour, their shared interest in poetry helped to solidify their friendship. Davide was the one to eventually come up with the concept for their website, while Flame came up with the name.

“Lëtz” is the shorthand for “Lëtzebuerg”(“Luxembourg” in Luxembourgish).

At first, Davide was opposed to the idea of starting a website or even sharing anything he wrote. For Davide, art was just too personal to ‘cast into a vast microcosmos’. What changed his mind? A friend of his ran a Luxembourgish literature website which he had to close down due to time management constraints. Davide’s friend asked him to do the last honour for his website by giving an interview for its final post. They went over some poems that Davide had written; Davide offered up some insights and comments and they chatted about art. This was what sparked something inside Davide, and the idea of sharing his work with the world slowly stopped feeling so alien.

Davide says he remembers talking to a fellow writer who made a comment that stuck with him for some years. He said that maybe Davide should publish things for other people – for those who might have similar feelings but can’t put them into words.  

I really liked that idea, it felt like I was giving an ear to the voiceless.

One of the driving reasons behind LëtzWrite’s existence is to popularise English-language poetry in Luxembourg. Both recognized that there was virtually no outlet for people who like English-language poetry in Luxembourg. Davide also sought exposure, as he had never previously published any of my texts before. Over time, the purpose of the blog had somewhat changed. They now care less about exposure and more about showing people the importance of literature. The revised goal of the blog is to make people read and write more (including themselves). Davide says that yes, they wanted to create a platform where they could express themselves freely, but also one other people would want to use to share their works. 

I wanted to leave a mark, even if it is very minor. I want to show the world that poetry is loved by young people. 

 As for poetry’s place in the modern world, both Flame and Davide have a lot to say. “Poetry is primarily (but not exclusively) an exercise of expanding one’s worldview. It is an act of encoding and de-coding, obstructing and exposing, questioning and establishing. Every piece is rich in that it saturates us with the experience of a world that is not our own,” says Flame. Poetry tests the limits of language – the conventional brevity of the form requires us to focus more intensely on the language. Flame strongly feels that the real magic of poetry happens when it provokes a sensation that the reader has never had before, or when the reader is struck by the clear articulation of a complex experience.

Davide agrees, calling poetry ‘distilled emotion’. It takes a million things and condenses them down into conformed lines. As long as art can evoke emotion, it will never dwindle – even in the modern world. People are keen to express their thoughts and art will always be an outlet for this. “I really do believe that poetry has found a beautiful niche within our world that no other art can quite fill in the same way,” Davide says.

Why did the pair choose a website as an outlet for their work, instead of just sharing it on social media? Flame says that,

I would equate having a website to being hosted in a museum, a space where only one thing is meant to be observed.

Davide elaborates: social media has simplified poetry not for the sake of “complex and compact simplicity”, which you might find in a haiku, but for accessibility and the audience’s short attention, driving the need for likes. The average person, Davide says, spends no more than 10 seconds on a picture – we “consume” more media on a daily basis. As such, accessibility has killed the access – we don’t look at things anymore, we consume for the sake of consumption.

The reason why Flame and Davide were so keen to create a website is because they want people to engage with the matter at hand. Art is not and shouldn’t be a sort of quick, fast-food style mood-lifter. Poetry should not be quickly skimmed in between pictures of an influencer model and a dog. Art deserves room to breathe. “A website really is like a museum. You take the time to engage with the work and let it simmer in your mind.”

You can read Flame and Davide’s works over at LETZWRITE.ART