Episodes
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Music, poetry and sound are deeply interconnected. But what do spoken word, rap, songs or even everyday noises have in common with poetry, and where are the boundaries between them most distinct? I spoke with two poets, Andrés Sánchez ‘Andrelo’ and Primož Čučnik, who both experiment with music and sound.
Andrés Sánchez ‘Andrelo’ is a Spanish music therapist, poet and rapper who recently released his first album, HILO, through his project Desatado. On the album’s 13 tracks, he blends poetry, hip-hop and electronic music. The political energy in his work arises from his candid personal experiences.
Primož Čučnik, one of the leading voices in Slovenian poetry, also loves to experiment with sound. Along with Ana Pepelnik and Tomaž Grom, he forms the experimentaltrio CPG Impro, creating soundscapes using a double bass, household items and spoken word.
When does poetry become music? How do they complement each other, and when can verses be heard in even the most ordinary sounds?
Andrés Sánchez ‘Andrelo’, music therapist, cultural agitator and accelerator of cultural particles. In his poetic work, for 15 years, he has toured venues and festivals with his perfopoetry shows Poesía UZI: Homenaje a Oyetu Miramipito; Poesía Automágica and Astroesía, a show that combines poetry and astronomy. Stage animal. Frontman for seven years of the plankton music band WavesOlasOndas. He is also a member of DESATADO, selected in the Artistic Residencies of La Laboral Centrode Arte de Xixón. A spoken word, poetry and electronic project, together with EzParx, both from the MidSide Noise Collective, and whose album Hilo was released in 2024.
Primož Čučnik, poet, writer, translator, editor. He has published ten poetry collections, some essays and prose, including the books Two Winters (1999, Debut Award), Delo in dom (2007, Prešeren Foundation Award), Kot dar (2010, Jenkova Award), Mikado (2012, Veronika Award) and finally Not a Dream (2022). He (co)translated several contemporary authors from Polish and English (Białoszewski, Sommer, Świetlicki, Wiedemann, Sosnowski, O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, Cage, Whitman, Auden). For many years he was the editor-in-chief of the Literatura magazine, where he now edits poetry, and he is also the founder and editor of the Šerpa publishing house (since 2003). He participated in the music compilation Košček hrupa in ščepec soli (2002) and is still an activemember of CPG (a trio with Tomaž Grom and Ana Pepelnik).
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What is the poetry scene like in Latvia and Lithuania? What trends are discernible in the writing of younger generations and how accessible is it to publish a first book in those countries? Lastly, how important is the literary scene for smaller countries with a smaller number of native speakers, and why? This year, the poetry festival Days of Poetry and Wine in Ptuj hosted its first literary residency for two guests, already well-established artists in their respective countries: Dovilė Bagdonaitė from Lithuania and Artis Ostups from Latvia. We talked about their experiences with the residency, the solitude of living abroad for a month and discussed their recent projects. We found that Slovenia is not the only country that is being hailed as the country of poets.
Dovilė Bagdonaitė (1991, Lithuania) is a visual artist and poet. A graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Bagdonaitė earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in monumental painting before pursuing a doctoral degree and receiving the title of Doctor of Arts in 2022. She’s active in the field of visual art and has created works fordisplay in the public spaces of Vilnius. Her second book Tracks_in_the_grass was published in 2022 and short-listed by the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore among the Top 12 Most Creative Books of 2022 and the Top 5 Poetry Books of 2022.
Artis Ostups (1988, Latvia) is a poet, critic and researcher. He is employed at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia, and since 2014 he has been the editor-in-chief of the online magazine Punctum. Currently studying comparative literature at the University of Tartu, he previously studied philosophy at the University of Latvia. His first poetry collection Biedrs Sniegs (Comrade Snow, 2010) was nominated for Best Debut. His second poetry collection, Fotografieja un skäres (Photography and Scissors, 2013), received many responses from literary critics and devoted readers.
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I talked to the two guests of honour of the Days of Poetry and Wine 2024, Pia Tafdrup and Valzhyna Mort. They explained how fairy tales sparked their interest in reading when they were young and how they inevitably serve as early confrontations with death. Pia Tafdrup explained how the senses are used to evoke emotion. Good poetry springs not from misery, but from the tension between love and sadness, the rubbing of opposites. The artist is someone who is acutely aware of how much other people’s thoughts she wears on herself, but is still crazy/brave/patient enough to get to nakedness, the white page within. An enlightening conversation by two masterful storytellers.
Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s most important and widely translated poets. She grew up in rural environment in the north of the island of Zealand. She received her MA from the University of Copenhagen in 1977. She has written more than twenty works, mainly collections of poetry, but also fiction. She makes her living exclusively from writing, and since 1999 has received a lifetime grant from the Danish National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 she was a guest at Vilenica, and in 2005 she appeared at the Trnovy Tercets. She is the recipient of several literary prizes. In 1999, she was awarded the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary prize. She is a member of the Danish Academy of Literature and a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog.
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator who has lived in the USA for almost twenty years. She has been writing and publishing in both her native language and English, in which three acclaimed collections of poetry have been published: Factory of Tears (2008), Collected Body (2011) and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020). The latter was named New York Times Poetry Book of the Year. She is the recipient of numerous international prizes, including the Vilenica Crystal, the Griffin Prize for Poetry and the Rilke Prize. Valzhyna Mort teaches at Cornell University in upstate New York.
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What exactly is autofiction? Why is this buzzword being used so often when talking about literature and why is it dividing literary criticism? Is autofiction the same as confessional or narrative poetry? While some critics reject sincerity itself as having literary qualities, it is easy to make the case that fiction always has an element of auto- to it.
The Finnish poet Susinukke Kosola thinks that sincerity is not interesting without artistic vision and that quality writing should offer more than reproducing the world. Many trendy books have little to offer, and Finnish literary critics are hungry for some real fiction.
Veronika Razpotnik, a poet from Slovenia, says that sincerity is second to genuineness. She points out that a poet doesn’t have to leave her room to write well, and that autofiction is important in reflecting societal structures of late-stage capitalism.
Susinukke Kosola is an author of four books of poetry, a teacher of creative writing and a spoken word poet, founder of the Kolera Collective publishing house, which focuses on poetry and political literature. In 2021, his book Turquoise Zone was nominated for the Dancing Bear Award and nominated for the 2022 Runeberg Award.
Veronika Razpotnik is a poet, writer and a master’s student of French. Her poetry debut Krekspot na požarnih štengah was nominated for Debut of the year in 2022, while her second poetry collection, Sršena pičim nazaj, was published in 2024. In 2023, her short story titled Patrimoni mundial won AirBeletrina’s short story contest.
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Homoerotic poetry boasts a rich and extensive history, stretching from the works of Sappho, Virgil and Michelangelo to the oft-questioned sexuality of Shakespeare. In the modern era, poets like Federico Garcia Lorca, Allen Ginsberg, Brane Mozetič and many more have continued to explore homoerotic themes, captivating readers worldwide. As we progress into the 21st century, LGBT poetry remains vibrant and resilient, though the fight for acceptance and equality persists.
Joelle Taylor, a UK-based playwright and poet, says, ‘Once there are rainbow flags on banks and you can buy gay sandwiches,’ she’s not sure there is true toleranceeverywhere. ‘Rainbow flags used to denote places of safety,’ she continues, but now they are hijacked by the identity politics of a hyper-consumerist society. Pino Pograjc, a young and upcoming poet from Kamnik, agrees that corporations are out to get the queer dollar and worries that the particularisation of queer activism undermines the struggle as a whole. He believes queer spaces should not merely be devoted to partying and dancing, but also offer opportunities for thriving literary creativity.
Examining the poetry of both Joelle and Pino, we see that the concept of the body is fundamental to Joelle’s work. Her cycle of seven cantos delves into the life of a young lesbian, marked by sexual abuse, loss and protest. In contrast, Pino’s minimalist poetry explores the quest for meaningful connections in a world lacking intimacy and understanding.
How can heterosexuals offer support to the LGBT community? ‘Read LGBT poetry,’ Pino suggests, adding that if you’re only going to read things you can relate to, that misses the point of literature. ‘That’s exactly why we write,’ he says and continues, ‘not only because of our innate need to express ourselves, but also to show this experience that might be foreign to some people.’
Joelle Taylor is a London-based poet and playwright, author of four collections of poetry. Her collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Pino Pograjc from Kamnik is a poet with two published poetry collections. His first poetry collection Trgetanje was awarded the best debut prize at the Slovenian book fair. In June 2024 he was awarded the Mlado pero (Young Pen) award for best young poet awarded by the Slovenian newspaper Delo.
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Why are so many poets heavy drinkers? Over the centuries, many writers have been addicted to alcohol, some of them write about their problems in compelling and memorable ways. Hemingway drank ‘to make other people more interesting’, while F. Scott Fitzgerald came out with the famous line, ‘first you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you’. From Steinbeck to Joyce to Bukowski, the fate of many writers is epitomised by Brendan Behan’s comment that he is a ‘drinker with a writing problem’. In this episode, we explore how the altered states of consciousness are connected to artistic expression. How is alcohol entangled in our culture and spiritual life? What are some of the healthier alternatives that promote creativity? Ramunė Brundzaitė is a Lithuanian poet, whose second poetry book titled Fellowship of Empty Bottles (2022), delves into the questions of overcoming the thirst for alcohol, looking for an ‘… attempt to establish a real, honest, sincere connection with other people, a fellowship that can replace any bottle, empty or full’. Also joining her is Sergej Harlamov, a Slovenian poet, who says he was ‘a nasty drunk’ while writing his first poetry collection, but that the problem was not seen as grave in the context of his working-class upbringing.
Ramunė Brundzaitė is a poet, philologist and translator. In 2013, her first collection of poetry titled Drugy, mano drauge (Moth, my Friend) was awarded the Young Yotving’s prize. In 2015–2016 she had a graduate internship in Trieste. Brundzaitė published her second poetry book Tuščių butelių draugija (Fellowship of Empty Bottles) in 2022, which was selected by Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore as the Most Creative Book of 2022.
Sergej Harlamov is a poet, sociologist and literary comparativist. As the winner of the Slovene Literary Festival for Young Authors Urška, he released his debut collection Jedci (Eaters) in 2011. In 2019, his second poetry collection Mnogoboj mitologij (Melee of Mythologies) was nominated for the Jenko Award and the Slovene Literary Critics Association Award. In 2022 he was shortlisted for Velenjica Award and released his third poetry collection Hypomnemata that was nominated for Veronika and Jenko Award.
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Chinese contemporary poetry is flourishing. The most exciting poetic voices come from the 200 million migrant workers working in China. This phenomenon is still largely unknown, even though some of these workers come west to pursue their creative pursuits. The Chinese Swiss-born poet Yang Lian is one of the seminal voices of Chinese contemporary poetry from the 1980s onwards, when his work with the Misty poets combined traditional Chinese poetry forms with western modernism. He posits that every poet is the centre of the concentric circle that radiates outwards and intersects with his peers, family and society at large. Yang rejects the simplistic individual-collective dichotomy of society and states that poetry should be intimately connected with life and language. What if all poetry is in fact just one large piece of art, transcending languages, traditions and cultures? What if at the centre, this project is nothing more but an endless pursuit of a conscience’s perpetual questioning of itself?
Yang Lian is a poet and writer, who has published fifteen collections of poems, two collections of prose and one selection of essays in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than twenty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and many Eastern European languages. His work has been reviewed as ‘like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!’, ‘one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature’ and ‘one of the great world poets of our era’.
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Icelandic literature may be insular but is not a monolith. Even though the nationalistic movement in Iceland eliminated dialectical variation, the language is evolving in interesting ways due to an increased influx of immigrants. Dr Lara Hoffmann, a sociologist and a postdoctoral researcher, focuses on the linguistic and creative aspects of human migrations. The number of immigrants in Iceland increased nearly 5-fold in 19 years and for many, literature is one the seminal ways to retain their sense of identity and build community. Through participation in the multilingual collective and publisher Ós Pressan, writers from different cultures meet to share their prose and poetry. Also joining the podcast is Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, an Icelandic poet and writer, whose participation in the Nýhil collective helped spark the Icelandic ‘pans and pots revolution’. Although activism and poetry have fundamentally different goals, Eirikur’s poetry demonstrates that dadaistic experiments may be more effective than mere political slogans.
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic experimental poet and novelist. His books have been published in over a dozen languages. For his novel Illska (Evil, 2012) he was awarded The Icelandic Literary Prize and The Book Merchant’s Prize, as well as being nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literary Award. He lives in Ísafjörður, Iceland, a rock in the middle of the ocean, and spends much of his time in Västerås, Sweden, a town by a lake.
Dr Lara Wilhelmine Hoffmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Iceland with a PhD in Sociology from the University of Akureyri in Iceland and an MA in Art Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests revolve around human migrations, particularly linguistic and creative aspects. She has been an active member of the literary collective and small publisher Ós Pressan since 2016.
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Much renowned literature was written behind bars by illustrious writers from Marquis de Sade to Dostoyevsky, from Nazim Hikmet to Vitomil Zupan. How is literature, written in a confined environment, different from literature written in the free world? Why is tuberculosis closely related to the history of Swedish literature? Who was Helge Dahlstedt and what was so revolutionary about his idea to offer humanistic healing, alongside the medical? On the other hand, what is it like to mentor literary workshops inside Slovenia’s largest and most secure prison? How is it possible to separate an artistic soul from a criminal one? Is the feverish soul the only one that creates great works of art? These questions are addressed by Erik Jonsson and Matjaž Pikalo in their conversation with Mitja Drab.
Erik Jonsson was born in Vännäs and now lives in Umeå. He is a cultural writer, literary scholar and festival organizer for Littfest - Umeå International Literature Festival. He is writing a book about the history of tuberculosis from a literary and northern perspective.
Matjaž Pikalo is a Slovenian writer, actor and musician. He is the author of more than 30 works of poetry, prose, drama and children’s literature. In 2020 co-wrote and performed in the documentary film The Valley of Tears about the lives of three inmates inside Slovenia’s largest prison Dob. He was a mentor of literary workshops inside the same prison in 2019.
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Poetry Expo is a unique digital platform which can be attended by Literary institutions, organisations, collectives, associations, festivals, etc. This year’s theme ‘Versing Futures: Unravelling Unity Through Poetry’, Poetry Expo aims to inspire societal change by promoting the potential of literature and art to address the pressing issues of our time, such as the climate crisis, technological advances, mental health and social inequalities. These questions are addressed by Marko Pogačar and Pep Olona in their conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.
Marko Pogačar is one of the most important poets and writers to emerge from Croatia in recent years. He has published fifteen books of poetry, essays and prose, for which he received Croatian and international awards. His books and texts have appeared in more than thirty languages. Marko is also the director of Goran’s spring.
Pep Olona is the coordinator, curator, and ideologue of Arrebato Libros, a project that in 2023 celebrated its first 20 years, and who runs the Arrebato Libros bookstore. Organizer and coordinator of 16 editions of the POETAS festival. Pep is also behind the digital project Universal Poem (found at universalpoem.com).
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Since 2003, the Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF) has been tending to Australia’s budding literary talent, establishing roots between writers, nurturing their professional development and introducing them to new audiences. This year, the festival ran from 14–24 June and featured more than 50 in-person and digital events and more than 150 performances. How did a small zine fair become one of the largest and well-respected writing festivals in the world? What is its legacy and outlook in the year of its 20th anniversary? How does it draw crowds and bring poetry to the foreground with its many playful events like readings in a greenhouse and the planetarium? How important are literary festivals for fostering community? These questions are addressed by Dr Mitja Drab in conversation with Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh and Jes Layton.
Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh is a writer, artist and arts worker living and creating on unceded Wurundjeri Land in so-called Australia. Writing primarily creative nonfiction, poetry and criticism, Ruby’s essay Death & The Devil was longlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize in 2021. The essay was published in the subsequent award-winning anthology Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory (2022). Currently the Artistic Director and co-CEO of Emerging Writers’ Festival, Ruby is also a co-founder of the Latinx arts collective, Yo Soy.
Jes Layton invented writing, the airplane and the internet. He was also the first person to reach the North Pole. Jes is an author and illustrator currently living and working on Wurundjeri Land. He is the current co-CEO and Executive Director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival and is represented by Alex Adsett Literary Agency. Jes’ work can be found with SBS, Junkee, Voiceworks, Kill Your Darlings, Archer Magazine, The Big Issue, BlackInc, Pantera Press, Fremantle Press, Allen & Unwin, and scattered elsewhere online and in print. You can find Jes @AGeekWithAHat.
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The unanimous opinion is that Slovenia more than impressed the visitors at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. The highlights of the Slovenian programme – under the motto Honeycomb of Words – were poetry, philosophy and deep reading. Apart from a total of 250 events at the fair, the largest selection of Slovenian poetry to date was published in German translation. The role of poetry was apparent in Frankfurt with well-attended readings, demonstrating that poetry, while often not at the forefront of the scene, still finds its place in a digital, instant-solutions-oriented age. How was poetry highlighted in this year’s edition of the fair? How does poetry enforce deep reading and critical thought that is declared in the Ljubljana Manifesto on Deep Reading? These questions are addressed by Dr Mitja Drab in conversation with translator Amalija Maček and poet José F. A. Oliver.
Amalija Maček is a Slovenian translator and scholar. Together with Matthias Göritz and Aleš Šteger she edited the largest selection of Slovenian poetry in German translation My Neighbour on the Cloud. In 2021, she received the Fabjan Hafner award for the translation of the novel Moje leto v Nikogaršnjem zalivu by Peter Handke (Beletrina, 2021) and the Faculty of Arts award for her pedagogic work in the field of translation.
José F. A. Oliver is a poet, writer, the president of the German PEN and one of the most significant inter-cultural writers of German language today. He writes predominantly in German but is also influenced by Spanish poets such as Federico García Lorca. To date he has published more than 20 volumes of poetry and essays, and has received numerous awards. He was awarded the Basel Poetry Prize in 2015 and the Heinrich-Böll-Preis in 2021.
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Poetry communities have played a vital role in the cultural and artistic development of societies throughout history. Modern poetry communities of the 20th century like The Harlem Renaissance and The Beatniks used poetry to express countercultural and anti-establishment sentiments. Today, online poetry communities and social media platforms have democratized poetry, allowing poets to reach broader audiences and receive instant feedback. The Wordcraft Collective is a community of Brussels-based authors writing in English. It is a place for poets, novelists and storytellers, for everyone with a creative spark and an itch to compose with language. In this episode, Dr Mitja Drab hosts its two co-founders, poets Emma Woodford and Katja Knežević.
Emma Woodford is a Belgian/Brit who is passionate about reading and writing poetry, finding communities of poets and hosting the occasional poetry workshop. She is a Gingko Environmental Prize runner up and has been published in online journals such as Quarter(ly) and Academy of the Heart and Mind. In addition to be a Wordcraft Collective co-founder, Emma is an active member of Poets for the Planet and often writes nature poems as well as poetry about family, travel and belonging/not belonging. She lives in Flanders with her Dutch/Belgian family and works in Brussels.
Katja Knežević is an award-winning poet and short story writer. She holds a Master’s degree in English and French literature. In 2012, she won the Sea of Words literary competition organised by IEMed and the Anna Lindh Foundation with her short story, Invisible mother. In 2014 she won the Croatian national award, Goran for young poets within the festival Goran’s spring, with the manuscript Staklene breze (Birches made of glass). The collection was subsequently published in April 2015. She writes in English and Croatian. Her poetry and prose have appeared in anthologies such as 2019 Brussels Writers’ Circle and So Long as You Write, as well as literary magazines Tether’s End, Thimble, Popshot Magazine and Molecule Lit Mag.
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Literary translation is a creative genre distinctly different from other art forms. Unlike music, painting, sculpture or dance, the literary work is accessible only to those who know the language in which it is written. Why is preserving a multitude of languages crucial in our globalised world in which the dominant lingua franca tends to homogenise foreign literature into the category of ‘International Fiction’ on bookstore shelves? Is there variation in the expressive power of languages and why does it need to be preserved? Through the international translating workshop,LitTransformer, Professors Aron Aji and Matthias Göritz create spaces of linguistic hospitality where translators can experience another language viscerally, forging connections through the unfamiliar.
Dr Aron Aji is the Director of MFA in Literary Translation at theUniversity of Iowa, the largest programme of its kind in the United States. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, Latife Tekin and other Turkish writers, including Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats (2004 National Translation Award) and A LongDay’s Evening (NEA Literature Fellowship; shortlist, 2013 PEN TranslationPrize). Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association from 2016 to 2019.
Dr Matthias Göritz is a poet, translator and novelist. He has written four poetry collections: Loops, Pools, Tools and Spools; four novels, including Der kurze Traum des Jakob Voss (The Brief Dream of Jakob Voss) and Parker; and three novellas. He has received the Hamburg Literature Prize, the Mara Cassens Prize, the Robert Gernhardt Prize, the William Gass Award and the International Pretnar Award. He teaches at WashU. He is Professor of Practice of Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Poetry as an act of writing demands a sensibility for contemplation that is often drowned out in our information overload culture. Billy Collins said that poets are people who get paid to look at clouds and watch chipmunks, because someone has to keep an eye on these things. Why is physical relationship with nature important for writing? Are we living in a cottage-core trend in which poets are leaving bohemian urban centres to connect with the local communities of their childhood? Why are teenagers on TikTok obsessed with Kafka? These questions are explored by poets Dr Paige Quiñones and Frank Keizer in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.
Dr Paige Quiñones is the author of The Best Prey, which receivedthe 2020 Pleiades Press Lena Miles-Wever Todd Prize for Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Center for Mexican-American Studies, the Academy of American Poets and Inprint Houston. She earned her MFA from the Ohio State University and her PhD from the University of Houston, where her doctoral thesis explored confessionalism in 20th century American poetry.
Frank Keizer is a poet and essayist from the Netherlands. He is theauthor of five books of poetry, an editor at the Flemish literary magazine nY, co-founder of the online magazine Samplekanon and co-host of theliterary criticism podcast Links Richten. His latest book, titled TheIntroduction of the Plot is an adventurous exercise in collective thinkingabout ‘how can we stop the capitalist exploitation of our bodies and the Earth?’
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Does a great poem always present us with a crumb of philosophical insight or is it the other way around, can reading philosophy facilitate writing verses? Why has science replaced philosophy in discovering the bigger questions of life today? How can the gaze in the philosophy of Michel Foucault be related to the lyrical subject? Why is boredom important and how can we use it to battle burnout? These questions are explored by poet and writer Aušra Kaziliūnaitė in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.
Aušra Kaziliūnaitė is a writer, poet and a philosopher from Lithuania. She is the author of five books of poetry. Her selected poems, The Moon is a Pill, was published in 2018 and listed among the five best works of Baltic literature recently translated into English. Her works have been translated into fourteen languages and received numerous Lithuanian national awards including the Young Artist Prize from the Ministry of Culture (2016). She actively participates in international literary festivals and book fairs, showcasing her poetry on a global stage. Her poetry has been called post avant-garde, active, sharp, polyphonic, often featuring surrealist, dream-like imagery. Aušra holds a PhD in philosophy with a focus on Michel Foucault’s panopticism and hosts a podcast titled Writing room.
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Identity lies at the heart of poetic expression, but what if the writer feels most at home when he or she is homeless? For poet and writer Nikola Madžirov, one of the leading voices of contemporary European poetry, living in a cave of non-belonging comes naturally. Madžirov calls himself ‘an involuntary descendant of refugees’, referring to his family’s flight from the Balkan Wars a century ago: his surname derives from mazir or majir, meaning ‘people without a home’. How can poetry transcend borders and national histories and connect us like the mycelium connects the trees in the forest? Nikola explores these questions in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.
Nikola Madžirov is one of the most powerful voices of new European poetry. His award-winning work has been translated into more than forty languages and published in collections and anthologies in the US, Europe and Asia. He is a recipient of the Miladinov Brothers poetry prize and has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. He is also an international co-ordinator for Lyrikline.org and a 2023 member of the jury for the world’s largest international prize for a single book of poetry, The Griffin Poetry Prize.
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The climate crisis can be a source of both indifference and anxiety. What is poetry’s role in navigating through it? Can environmental poetry evolve into a political movement that invigorates climate activism? What can we learn from non-Western cultures, and what is deep ecology? How can we restructure our societies beyond the myths of the individual and the collective to create a ‘new tribalism’, akin to what was once found on pirate ships? These questions are explored by poet and writer Jan Škrob in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.
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How does living in exile influence the creative processes and themes in poetry? What challenges are encountered while trying to establish yourself as an artist in a new country? How to maintain the balance between cultural identity from your home country and new country in your art? These questions are explored by poet and interdisciplinary artist Merima Dizdarević in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.
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Why were Poets exiled from Plato’s Republic? Why were Shelley and Byron cancelled in their time? How, if at all, can we separate the art from the artist? Can the political potential of poetry be usurped to facilitate hate, division and violence? Is Instagram poetry by the likes of Rupi Kaur a gateway to more ‘serious’ poetry? These questions are explored by poet Monika Herceg and philosopher Dr Eric Powell in their conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.
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