Peter Semolic (born in 1967) is a Slovenian Poet and translator. His poetry has been translated into many languages. He has received many awards like Jenko Award, Preseren Foundation Award and Vilencia Krystal Award. He is the founder and Editor of the first Slovenian Online Poetry Magazine POIESIS.
Questions:
1.
You have said: ‘A poem has to surprise the author in the first place’. Can you explain that?
A poem is a matter of technique, culture, that is, something we have to learn, just as we have to learn language, writing, etc. However, the poem must also be an expression of the deepest, unconscious layers in the poet. The combination of both, mastering the technique and the poet's maximum sincerity, can produce a good poem, that is, such a poem that will touch others, surprise them, maybe even change them. Since I am the first reader of my poems, the poems must surprise me first. If I notice that in a poem I have said only what I know, and not what I do not know on a conscious level, i.e. that the poem is only a confirmation of the existing state of things, then I am not interested in it and I will not publish it. Poetry is for me a journey into the unknown, a journey beyond culture.
2.
Do you have any preoccupations as a poet?
I am very interested in different genres within poetry, such as a love poem or a travel poem. Lately, however, I’ve been devoting myself to Found poetry. In my writing, I have used quite a few insights and achievements of this perhaps the youngest poetic genre. By including parts of non-poetic texts (newspaper and scientific articles) in my poems, I expanded the field of poetic expression and the poems opened up on a completely surprising direction in terms of both form and content. Incorporating the findings of found poetry into my own poems, however, forced me to rethink some of the things I took for granted: I had to ask myself again questions about the authorship of a poem, about the author, about the relationship between poetic and non-poetic language, and so on.
3.
What do you think is the role of poetry in the world today?
The great French anthropologist Paul Veyne said that the sources of poetry do not lie in society. I agree with that. The sources of poetry lie beyond society and culture, at a time and place when language was not yet born in man, when we humans were one with the world. I think this is also the central role of poetry: to lead us to that time and place with its forms and contents, with its sound and rhythm. In this way, for a moment or two, we transcend our own mortality, we touch eternity. This role does not change, but it is not the only role that poetry has in a particular society and culture over a period of time. Poetry thus assumes various roles, from the role of history (it is the memory of the community) to the role of religion (religious poetry). Today, poetry is marginalized in the West, it is a leisure activity. However, I think that by its nature, poetry transcends such a role and that it still offers answers to some fundamental human questions. I think that's why poetry is experiencing a renaissance in many parts of the West - more and more people are reading and writing poetry and thinking about it. Perhaps just to alleviate the anxiety caused by the modern world. But by reading it, they are also reading it in its other dimensions. The action of the poem is not fast, the poems act slowly, they slowly open our eyes to aspects of the world that would remain unknown to us without reading the poems. I think that poetry plays an important role in modern societies – they comfort us, but it also shows us the way to the unknown.
4.
Do you think poetry can serve as an important facilitator of inter-cultural dialogue?
I think so. Poetry is closely related to language, for some poets poetry is even the same as language. This means that it is closely connected to us as individuals and to the community to which we belong. Therefore, at first glance, it seems that poetry will be limited to the community within which it originated, that the poem will be understandable only to members of that community. However, this is not the case. A poem written in India, in one of the Indian languages, can touch me as much as a poem written in Slovenia and in the Slovenian language. At the same time, the poem, written in India, also brings me valuable insight into the culture of the community where it originated. And such an insight into another culture as that offered by a poem cannot be offered by either a newspaper article or a scientific discussion. That is why translating poetry is so important and good translations of poetry are so valuable. Of course, something is always lost in translation, but even more remains, and what remains is an important part of intercultural exchange.
6.
What have been some of the most interesting ‘findings"’ for you, as you set about exploring how poetry can connect with urban life?
I grew up in a village, behind the house was a forest, in front of the house was a bog, and images from nature automatically imprinted themselves very deeply on me. I grew up in a traditional Slovenian family, where nature was celebrated and romantic literature, including poetry, was read. That’s why my early poems were also full of images from nature. The words in the poem, as Octavio Paz pointed out, are not just words, but at the same time things themselves - the “table” is both a word and an object. So it took me quite some time to be able to use words from urban life in the poem, as I felt them as something foreign. But when I first managed to write the word “car”, for example, I felt liberated from a certain romantic tradition. A good part of my poems are distinctly urban poems, as in them I talk about the city and life in the city. Last but not least, I have spent most of my life in cities - from Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, to Koper, a city on the Adriatic coast, and Paris. I think the city, with its features, not only offered me new themes and images, but also the opportunity to start incorporating different voices and ways of speaking into my poetry. Of course, this is nothing new, but it was something very new for me and in many ways it also changed my perception of the author, the poet, as a romantic genius who writes only from himself, from his wuthering soul.
7.
What led you to decide that you didn’t want to “play the part of the poet” for some period?
I think my decision not to accept the role of a poet has three starting points: I grew up in a working class family, where intellectual work was not appreciated, even if poetry was read at home, and I had to apologize again and again to others and myself if I spent time writing poems. At a very young age, at the age of seventeen, I entered the Slovenian poetry scene at the time; I expected poets to be, so to speak, enlightened people, and when I saw that a lot of poets were very selfish and perceived writing poetry as a business career, and not as a way of life, it hit me hard and repulsed me - I didn’t want to be a part of this kind of the scene and I still don’t want to be part of it today. That’s why I also live on the margins of this scene. However, it took me quite some time to start distinguishing between poetry and the people who write it - the rejection of people who merely abuse poetry for social gain (and there are still many of them in Slovenia today) does not mean that I have to stop writing poems. The third premise, however, is that I am the type of poet who writes only occasionally - sometimes I do not write poems for years, and when this poetic silence first occurred to me, I was convinced that I would never write poetry again.
My perception of myself is that I am first a human being, only then everything else, including a poet. Poetry is an essential part of my life, but what matters is life, not poetry.
8.
There has been a transition from Communist regime to Democracy in your Country. Has it affected the poetry? If so, how?
Poets played an important role in the transition from communism to democracy and in the process of Slovenia's independence. But as soon as the communist regime fell and Slovenia achieved independence, politicians and businessmen made it clear that they no longer needed poets. Poetry as well as any intellectual work was ridiculed, poets were labeled as parasites on the body of society. The result was the marginalization of poetry. This process took place throughout the 1990s. Let me give you an example: in 1997 I received the Jenko Award, the highest recognition for poetry in Slovenia, and still at that time all the main media in Slovenia, including commercial television, came to the award ceremony. Today, we may only find a sentence or two about a prize winner in a newspaper, but television, not even national, no longer reports on it. Nevertheless, poetry has survived, we poets have survived, and today poetry is slowly but steadily returning to public life, especially through new media. Slovenia has only two million inhabitants, but the online magazine Poiesis has around 10,000 visits per month - which is, of course, an exceptional number. Poetry has thus found new ways to reach readers, and traditional media, television and newspapers will have to slowly begin to realize this. Poetry is a matter of the public and therefore must exist in the public
9.
You have made a comment that the main stream Slovenian Poetry is nowadays, ‘Poetry of Experience’, which does not confront reality. And to make poetry more challenging, you moved towards ‘Found Poetry’. What do you mean by that?
“Poetry of experience” was a reaction to hermetic and very metaphorical poetry, which dominated Slovene poetry from the 1950s onwards. It appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and is characterized by non-metaphorical language, a language that is close to colloquial language and brings to the fore the so-called little stories and the poet's personal experience. After some time, this poetry has formalized, become predictable, and consequently is no longer able to face reality. I myself was among the pioneers of this kind of poetry, and a few years ago I noticed that I too had encountered its limits. Personally, the introduction of “found poetry” has helped me expand the field of “poetry experience” or let’s say my own writing and make it interesting, vivid again – at least for me. Many young poets, however, opted for a different path, returning to more linguistic poetry, while retaining an awareness of “the poetry of experience” as a response to the linguistic poetry of the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, their writing is not merely a repetition of poetry of the past, but they create something new, something that in its own way confronts reality and illuminates it in a different way. This poetry resonates very strongly among the readers and I am very happy about it.
10.
You said: ‘For me personally, poetry is a form of eroticism: here I’m a follower of Georges Bataille. Why did you say that?
Among the many definitions of poetry, the closest to me is Georges Bataille’s definition that poetry is a form of eroticism. Bataille sees eroticism as the force that helps us transcend our mortality. In the introduction to the book Eroticism, he wrote: "Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism - to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea. ”
11.
Slovenian critics say that you have started a new trend ‘the New Simplicity’. Do you think that, it is good for Poetry?
I admit that I don’t know what they meant by that, what that simplicity was supposed to be, perhaps that decades ago I started to use colloquial language in my poems and that I prefer to use metonymies rather than metaphors. It seems to me one of those labels that does sound good but says absolutely nothing about anything.
12.
Your poetry carries innocent looking images which conceal emotionally powerful meanings. How does it happen?
As I mentioned earlier, my early poetry was written within the tradition of Slovene neo-modernistic poetry - it was linguistic, hermetic poetry. However, I soon noticed that in such poetry I do not know or cannot articulate the contents that were important to me. It took me several years to find a new poetic language for myself, I finally found or formed it in the late 1980s - this language is very close to the colloquial language and it was this poetic language that allowed me to write for example a poem about childhood or a love poem. Of course, I followed the example of other poets too, and at the beginning of this journey I was mostly influenced by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and later by poets such as Zbigniew Herbert and some American poets. The poems I was writing at that time concentrated on a single theme, which I tried to express through different images, and I wanted these images to be as vivid, tactile and also refined as possible. Maybe these images therefore work in the way you have described very accurately.
13.
Your fellow poet Lidija Dimkovska has commented. ‘Women poets are more courageous, more radical, free to write about reality, the life itself, the social-economic-psychological-political problems, than many men poets, who prefer to continue with abstract and metaphorical poems.’ What is your comment on that?
I don't know if she meant Macedonian or Slovene poetry or poetry in general. In the case of Slovenia, I would agree with her - in the last ten years, most of the best poetry in Slovenia has been written by women. And in this poetry we can find a large number of such poems, of which Lydia speaks.
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