Dubravka Djuric
 
Fragments on Writing Poetry in Postcommunism

from 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium
edited by Charles Bernstein
in boundary 2 26:1 (Spring 1999)

...
The castle is the whiteness of the screen
poetry takes place between new technologies
– new realities – VR – MTV – Postcommunism
Poetry is the passionate body – Sex Screen



...
Postcommunist reality in Serbia
chokes the wish for poetic Eros
it is hard to find a way out from the mud of the collectivism of One:
One Nation, One Religion, One Ideology
Therefore a critic hates when the Other speaks the language of the One
and inserts the language of the Other – the language of his/her
(multiple) identities
Identities are interwoven
since the Politics of the poem is the politics that escapes the control
MERRY critics are like MERRY POLITICIANS
they control all space of the POETRY THAT BECOMES
POSTCOMMUNIST OTHER
The Other is sacrificed, the Other is killed, the other is expelled
from our Heavenly postcommunism



...
The veil of lies waves on the wind she stood and thought
this world seen in virtual reality of postcommunism is really
wonderful
the catastrophe is realized in tectonic dislodges that
destroyed millions of human lives, corps are an everyday image
but no one is disturbed – because the future is realized in front of
our eyes at the moment when we look at that reality on the screen
butchered bodies, butchered minds
that beauty of the decomposed, of disease
– but is there the reality that the West could read
as the Code of East Europe
 


...
This context that is empty, uncertain
zero departures, discontinuities
the things that disappear



...
to turn your head around and to see
waves, wind storms, fires that endeavor (engender) small
pushed angles
at the end of all worlds
and there are the names that in microcosmos of the place
and time do exist or maybe don't
the figures that build this destroyed contexts
And where is there poetry if not in resistance



...
I is the eye that writes. i is the non–eye that writes. i is the writing
and the language
i is the geopolitical space:
balkan: balkanization