Here are some of the most popular reasons. The first is the lack of advertising. We remember constantly heard names and faces that are everywhere, so in physical and virtual bookstores, our eyes inertly turn to books whose authors’ names we have heard somewhere. Others deliberately look for such books only, because if the book is advertised, then it should be good or at least somehow interesting. Otherwise they wouldn’t advertise?
True, poetry books are the least advertised of all genres. This genre is too niche, so it is simply not worth it for publishing houses to invest in poetry, in other words, to buy advertising for these books. Why put money where there will be no profit anyway?
Therefore, when choosing and evaluating poetry books, the symbolic capital surrounding the name of the poet is extremely important. The size of the symbolic capital is determined by the poetry prizes (therefore, a considerable number of poets attach great importance to the prizes) and the popularity of the poet or poetess in general.
Here is poet Rimvydas Stankevičius, answering the questionnaire of “Metai” magazinecompares receiving the Maironis Prize to entering Heaven and admits that he has repeatedly carefully studied the lists of award-winning colleagues: “You have no idea how much time I have spent analyzing the list of “Poetry Spring” laureates even before I entered it myself – I counted the living and the dead, I considered each crowner worthiness to be called such, I once even crossed out with a red bullet those who, as it seemed to me at the time, appeared there only due to conjuncture, acquaintances or unfortunate coincidence… The possibility of being included in that list among such “superhumans” of poetry as Justinas Marcinkevičius, Sigitas Geda, Marcelijus Martinaitis, Jonas Strielkūnas, Vytautas P. Bložė – it always seemed to me like a written confirmation that I will go to Heaven after death.”
If the author has received significant awards, it is likely that critics and subsequent books will evaluate them more favorably or at least notice and mention them. Readers will also buy books by well-known authors out of inertia.
Readers who are not professionals in the field of literature (literary researchers, critics, etc.) rely not so much on literary evaluations received by the writer, but on a familiar face, a recognizable surname. A television or especially social media star, a popular priest, an actress or a member of a musical group will buy a book – usually in such cases it doesn’t even matter if it’s prose or poetry – because they are curious about what a famous person, a visible face, writes about.
If the author has received significant awards, it is likely that critics and subsequent books will evaluate them more favorably or at least notice and mention them.
In my review, I present two books of poetry that were not advertised, and the faces of their authors are hardly recognizable to those who do not follow poetic life closely. Literary critics have also reviewed these books, I think. Nevertheless, both collections of poems are exceptional, worthy of attention.
Empathetic poems
Diana Paklonskaite. “Flowers like dogs.” Artist Ana Mana. – V.: “Scrolls”, 2023.
The third book of the poet Diana Paklonskaitė – author born in Kaunas, who lived in Ireland for 18 years – is the truest poetry of empathy. Empaths are people who are able to empathize with another’s emotional state, understand and even absorb other’s feelings. The poet’s gaze directed at another does not dissect, scan or analyze, but seeks to meet and touch.
In addition, the other, who is looked at, in the poems is usually powerless, vulnerable, small: nature and its objects are destroyed (a reed hen, a worm, picked roses, a cut down tree), people balancing on the border or crossing it (a homeless person, a prisoner, dead relatives ), everyday household items (worn slippers, wooden chair, cup, radiator).
Even when talking to personalities of the poetic world – intertextuality is important to D. Paklonskaite, she often quotes and paraphrases other poets – it is believed that situations where “eyes meet” (p. 23) are a source of meaning, precisely because of these moments we live.
Flowers like dogs
Diana Paklonskaite
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We die (spiritually and physically) when we are left alone, crazy, abandoned:
flowers like dogs
after the master left
curls up into a ball
and quietly dies (p. 67)
Empathy in D. Paklonskaitė’s poems is mature and controlled. You can’t save the world, you can’t help everyone, you can’t defeat death, so you decide to do what is possible in a specific situation. The sober attitude that it is more meaningful not to cry because of the suffering of the whole world, but to pet a bird, say hello to a homeless person, be next to someone who is leaving and remember those who have left, is refreshing, fresh.
It allows you to distance yourself from the poetic arrogance and self-importance that is still popular in Lithuanian poetry. The themes of aging, entropy, saying goodbye to things, people, places and feelings are also conveyed in a subtle, controlled manner.
D. Paklonskaitė’s poems do not tear up, do not get hysterical, avoid omniscience and the role of a martyr. Maybe because of the reviews for the book “Flowers like dogs” you can feel the attitude of the critics that what the poet writes about, even if it is not significant enough, is important. Topics, problems are not big enough, significant. But it doesn’t always hurt the person who screams the loudest.
Hypertrophied sensuality, liminal experiences in literature are too often used by the author in order to draw attention to himself, besides, they are intoxicating and addictive like sugar, fat or junk, so it is increasingly difficult to admire “liminal registers”.
The poems in “Flowers as Dogs” are laconic, logical and consistent, which is a sign of poetic mastery.
The poems in “Flowers as Dogs” are laconic, logical and consistent, which is a sign of poetic mastery. Refined metaphors and similes are charming: “the bumblebee catches like a distant / distant highway” (p. 40); “insomnia comes on suddenly / like touching a bare electrical button” (p. 82); “earthworms / the most faithful pink ones / earth’s angels” (p. 88); “the rowan berries / sharp red // but fair” (p. 89).
The weak side of the poems in the collection “Flowers like dogs”: empathy is sometimes overshadowed by monotony, even silent moralizing (the verse “the tree does not think”). However, metaphors, similes, polished phrases and a clear structure of the works more than make up for this shortcoming.
I recommend it to those who are tired of poetic egocentrism and enjoyment of externality.
Publisher’s photo/Ieva Rudžianskaitė. “The Thirteenth Month”
An untamed world
Ieva Rudžianskaitė. “The Thirteenth Month”. Artist Inga Paliokaitė-Zamulskienė. – V.: “Kauko’s stairs”, 2023.
I read almost all the poems in the collection “The Thirteenth Month” several times. Original visuals, interesting connections require attention. The complete opposite of popular poetry, where everything is in the palm of your hand.
On the other hand, the attentive reader receives a reward, not a disappointment – I. Ružianskaitė’s poems open up. Their structure, when you learn to orient yourself in it, becomes clear and motivated. Expedient.
What made the biggest impression was that the poems do not target the feelings of the perceiver, but the mind. It invites thinking and does not create the illusion of a simplified world.
Unlike D. Paklonskaitė’s empathic subject, the speaker of I. Ružianskaitė’s poems is closed, hermetic. Even a bit misanthropic. Untamed words (“I don’t tame words – they wander / like monkeys asking for a nut”, p. 26) refer to an untamed and probably untamable world.
The poet’s voice is quiet, sometimes angry, irritable. A lot of unpleasant, everyday destruction, which is both annoying and repulsive. You want to believe that the world is or at least should be good, but it is not. Although at the same time it is. A paradox.
a woman in a white glowing stall
sells fruit –
they are like from a still life –
I don’t want to eat just to watch
and think about the expansion of the universe
a body touched by oblivion
starts another rotation cycle
on this damn merry-go-round
which you would love to blow up
with all the children sitting in it
parasitic smiles
you would handle the outstretched pieces of meat
like red currants
that once shone so brightly
that he didn’t want to get too close to the bush
September 2021 (p. 20)
The dates under the poems are a subtle hint that the texts were written in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The choice to date the poems is an interpretive key (more precisely, one of the keys) that explains anger, destruction, anxiety.
Personally, this kind of talk is much more effective for me than war-themed poetry that fetishizes pain and destruction, written by authors sitting in safe houses.
Personally, this kind of talk is much more effective for me than war-themed poetry that fetishizes pain and destruction, written by authors sitting in safe houses. There is a sense of repulsion when reading accounts of a war that one has not personally experienced, because the theme of war allows the poet to accumulate symbolic capital and sympathies of the readers by appropriating foreign experiences.
Tom Venclova in the poem “Azov Campaign” juxtaposes the exalted student smoking on the boulevard under the linden trees (“How sweet it is to hate the homeland”) and at the same time the nameless soldier dying somewhere far away in battle (“and the soldier – his friends will not be able to remember – / still breathes the remaining air into the stuffy labyrinth .”).
Most of our authors of “war poetry” are just such students, drawing inspiration from the atrocities of war and the suffering of others. I. Rudžianskaitė, as well as Jurgita Jasponytė in the collection of poetry “The universe sits in the wrong place” (LRS publishing house, 2024) are much more sincere and authentic in this sense. The poets do not fetishize the atrocities of the war and do not make other people’s experiences public, they write about everyday life, the dull feeling of injustice in living everyday life, but knowing that the war is going on.
I.Rudžianskaitė’s metaphors are visual, she belongs to the same paradigm of high modernist sensuousness that values vision, as the one cited by T.Venclova.
I.Rudžianskaitė’s metaphors are visual, she belongs to the same paradigm of high modernist sensuousness that values vision, as the one cited by T.Venclova. However, high modernism is not blindly admired, followed or imitated. Rather, he changes the tradition in his own way by adapting it to his own voice and poetic vision. Everyday details cling to strange, detailed, almost surreal pictures of everyday life, which seem to drag the reader away from the safe position of omniscience.
watch the sky-sweeping maples
marvel at their tenacity
sometimes as if teasingly bruised
adorns itself with bands of clouds
it seems that the twigs are reddened from fatigue
fanning a giant tiger (p. 75)
Observing the clouds, the perceiver imagines a tiger. To his or her consciousness, the tiger is real, visible, in that moment. But at the same time, it is an unreal, imaginary image-idea, just like the thirteenth month. Fantasy, ‘appearance’ or ‘appearance’. But if we can imagine something, maybe that means that something exists? At least in our minds. And in books.
The tiger that appears in I.Rudžianskaitė’s poem subtly evokes the problematic of Jorge Luis Borges’s poem “One More Tiger”: the boundary between what is real and what is imagined is fragile, and what exists only in language, but transcends language, rises above it.
I.Rudžianskaitė’s “religious poems” – I use quotation marks, because these texts are not religious in the traditional sense, they do not contain adoration, demonstrative piety, godliness and the feeling of supremacy arising from it – remind of dialogues, conversation. However, this is not a dialogue between equal or similar interlocutors.
If we can imagine something, maybe that means that something exists? At least in our minds. And in books.
The “you” addressed remains forever implied. We don’t know if “you” are listening or when you will answer. We don’t even know who “you” is or if it even exists. Imagery, used to define the identity of the interlocutor, often rough, domestic (“have you ever thought that you are / the biggest weed that you don’t have enough strength to pull out”, p. 31). This is probably aimed at breaking through, overcoming abstraction.
tell me how you feel
when I’m angry with you when I say
that you may not be there
(…)
I don’t understand anything
I can only think of one more metaphorical possibility
it is no longer necessary to refuse it and say that it is enough
check the facts decide:
You are not there to ask again:
how are you feeling (p. 71).
I hope that Diana Paklonskaitė’s “Flowers like dogs” and Ieva Rudžianskaitė’s “The Thirteenth Month” will be a discovery for you as well. Not necessarily big, turning the world around in one fell swoop. Small discoveries, quiet, strange voices are no less significant and profound.
#Virginija #Kulvinskaite #Overlooked #Underrated #Books #Poetry #Worth #Reading #Culture
2024-08-16 21:07:43
