Foreword to 'Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry'

I wrote the Foreword to this anthology, just published by Diálogos Books of Lavender Ink
ISBN: 978-1-935084-08-6  // 7"x10", 560 pages: $29.95
•••
We come old into a world newly born.

            Poets I mean.

            Conditions change so fast on the ground and yet we are walking receivers of traditions that defy objective temporal markers. Poems mark an intersection of the new, the news, and something outside that pressure of reality, something that resists such presence. The more resistant they are to the present, the more a perfect voicelessness emerges. In other words, it’s not what poems say, it’s what they do. And for those of us who prefer to read between the lines, it’s also what they don’t do, either by refusing or by chronic (and enabling) disability.

            This book charts, for English language readers, an almost completely unknown poetry culture, unknown even to those most attentive to contemporary European poetry. Serbian poetry is the site of many competing political currents, from ultranationalist and patriarchal to antifascist, feminist, anti-war, and queer; from Roman Catholic, Moslem, Serbian  Orthodox to secular. In terms of poetic form, this translates into a recent history that goes from traditional lyric to confessional to formally innovative, from socialist realism to abstraction, from mystical to conceptual, from folkloric to modernist. The poems in this collection filter, through both adaption and rejection, literary movements from Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Surrealism, Dadaism, New American Poetry, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. (The anthology excludes more conventional styles of Serbian poetry.)

            The two generations of poets gathered here came of age in the 1960s to 2000s.  The older group started to publish during the heyday of Tito’s Yugoslavia and pretty much all of these poets were around for the demise of Tito’s “non-aligned” Communist amalgam of different ethnic groups. The older poets, the same generation as the American Baby Boomers, were born immediately after the Second World War (with a few exceptions of poets born during the war) and began publishing during the Cold War, while the younger poets lived through terrifying civil wars and regime changes of the post-Communist period (the youngest poet in the anthology was born in 1981). Whatever tumult we have experienced in North America and Western Europe in the postwar years, the world these poets found is something far more wrenching (although with some parallels to the experience of their fellow Russian poets).

            Serbia is on the border of West and East. For poetry, perhaps nothing better exemplifies this than the fact that Serbian can be written with both Cyrillic and Roman letters. The presence of Slavic culture is a crucial background. But the 1980s in Yugoslavia was a culturally open time, including the strong presence of American and Western European pop culture. It’s impossible for an outsider to fully understand the poetry politics of post-Communist Yugoslavia, but this anthology gives a ring-side view and maybe not having a score card is an advantage, since if there are sides, you can’t immediately see how that plays out.

            The most frequent word in the poetry collected here is dark. But there is also love, eyes, light, god, nothing, everything, water, words, and window. There are 71 poets, half women. The poems range from the more image-based, quasi-surrealist, yet conventionally legible work, associated with Charles Simic and the startling Radmila Lazić, on one end of the spectrum, to the formal/conceptual radicalism of Judita Šalgo and Slobodan Tišma, who declares “Writing is always connected with thinking, alas / With philosophy, that goes for the scribbling as well.” [1] There is often a foreboding, biting humor and sense of engaged distance, self-observation. The poetry is sometimes sexually explicit. The grotesque and the diasporic dance deep into the night.

            I was first in touch with Durbravka Djurić in the mid-1980s. My first poem, translated by Nina Zivancevici nto what was then called Serbo-Croatian was published in Polja in 1987 and Djuric edited a selection related to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in Delo in 1989. James Sherry and I visited Djurić in 1991, reading in both Belgrade and Novi Sad. And Djurić and Miško Šuvaković spent a semester at SUNY-Buffalo the following year, as Poetics Program International Fellows. We have been in frequent correspondence for thirty years^[2]. Djurić has been a strong advocate of both feminism and poetic innovation, which is made explicit in her many translations of contemporary American poets. This anthology should be read next to Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, edited by Djurić and Šuvaković (Boston: MIT Press, 2003).  

            There are around 10 million speakers of Serbian, 16 million if we say Serbo-Croatian. That’s comparable to Dutch but greater than Hungarian or Greek. For an outsider reading this collection, what is most striking is not the many ways that the poems resemble what is familiar to us, and take up similar styles or attitudes, but the way the poems are unfamiliar, slightly off synch, approaching, and falling off, different edges. Of course, reading this book entirely in English, without any sense of the sound of Serbian, or the history of Serbian poetry, makes for an experience that the poets themselves cannot have. It is a work of English language poetry in its own right, thanks especially to the remarkable work of the lead translator, Biljana D. Obradović. The poems come to us shorn of some of their history but taking on new meanings for this new context.  This is yet another new border, another new intersection, for these poem. Perhaps the ideal reader would come to all these poets fresh, hearing this book as a conversation over time: a plotless novel in verse. It’s not just what the poems say or do, it is what they become.

            The poetry is what is found in translation.