Everyone writes about themselves, and it gets tiring

"He was very lucky in the genetic code", he writes at the beginning of the song "One life, one career" by Zvonko Karanović (1959, Niš). That sentence could also refer to the author himself: it looks great and wears great, with style. In the latest book Box set 2 (PPM Enclave) Karanović collects songs from his last four collections published from 2012 to 2018: Sleepwalkers on a picnic, Cages, The Golden Age i Behind the burning forest. Karanović is also known as the founder and editor of the publishing house PPM Enklava, which promotes young poets. But above all, he is one of the indispensable figures of our literary scene.

photo: ivan mijatović

"WEATHER" One of the reviews says that you have always been "outside the official channels and the established matrix". Do you see yourself that way too??

ZVONKO KARANOVIC: As poetry itself is outside the currents and established matrices in our society, then the position of the poet outside the currents and established matrix within the larger marginalized matrix is ​​doubly marginalized, so that determination essentially means nothing. The positioning of the poet is done by the profession, the audience also gives its judgement, but the most important judge is time. It erases or elevates. A poet is alive as long as his work can communicate with new generations. When I write, I am focused on an idea, on challenging myself, on trying to conquer new territory with words, to write as well as possible, because the only task of a writer is exactly that - to write as well as possible. I'm not one of those people who write the same song all my life. It's a dead end. The world of words is infinite. The world of poetry is vast and full of possibilities. Playing, entertaining myself in the process of creation is one of the most important things for me. I didn't write any book out of pain, on the contrary, they all came out of enjoyment.

"There is no creation without audacity., love without exaggeration, you have to look like trouble is looking for you and you're avoiding it, one day you will find out how exciting it is to stand in front of the crowd... " you write in a poem "The road in the hills is wet.". Can this also be your life credo?

Those verses were not created as a program. I wrote the song in the early nineties. I was younger and more rebellious, and the song primarily expressed my political attitude. Only later did I realize that it also contains a kind of love and artistic statement. Poetry largely comes from the unconscious, and it happens sometimes that a poem says more than what you thought, that it has more unexpected meanings. I don't believe that Branko Miljković literally thought that everyone would write poetry, it was more of a catchphrase that sounds good, so characteristic of a young, passionate poet, but here we are, witnessing his prophecy come true. It is not for nothing that it is said that a poem is smarter than a poet.

You grew up on rock and roll and movies, your generation grew up on pop culture. Your expression owes a lot to rock and roll, but also to beatnik poetry. They were strong. "electricity" and movements. There is nothing like it today.. How to fill these "holes"? What a creative young man can rely on?

I grew up in a different time, where rock and roll and books meant practically everything. It was a real event when you get a record from England and you listen to it for days and you know every letter on the cover, books were borrowed, passed from hand to hand, had generational recognition codes. Today, everything is too accessible, there is no charm of discovery, there is no aura, the mystique that accompanied certain works. It's too easy to get to music, movies, books, give up too quickly and move on to something "new" and "different". That lightness gives birth to a mental oversaturation that eventually ends in indifference to everything that is not material.

photo: ivan mijatović

On the other hand, I don't think that young people today feel those "holes", rather we who remember some other times feel them. I would say that the new generations have much more opportunities for education and creative expression, as well as to travel, live and be inspired by the world, it's just a question of how much and in what way they do it. They have their own movements, role models, idols, social networks, their own language of communication that we often do not understand or lightly and unfairly deny. The world is never devoid of inspiration, it is always and at all times full of the energy of those who come. We are the ones who change as we get older and often have a tendency to lament how nothing is the same and how it used to be better.

For you, American contemporary poetry is the best thing happening right now. What are the reasons for that??

The United States is a poetic planet unto itself, certainly the leading nation in that field since the mid-fifties. He invests in poetry, from research and theoretical works to numerous poetry editions, anthologies and studies. Every university has its own literary magazine, a subject called creative writing, there are many public readings, diversity is nurtured, researched, supported. There are currently more than 1000 independent publishing houses. Creative writing classes began in the middle of the last century, and top poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath attended them with the also great poet Robert Lowell. Poetry movements and schools abound. Of course, there is also a great interest in poetry. And Charles Simić, when he was last visiting Belgrade, said in an interview that it was fascinating how many people write songs in America and that there are many young talents. Another thing is that we have insufficient insight into that market and that too rich offer.

Within the publishing house PPM Enklava, you work a lot with young poets. What do they bring?? How much quality and talent there is?

We are in a position where a kind of big bang of poetry is unfolding before our eyes, especially in Belgrade. Poetry is back in the open, many young people write verses, they are read everywhere, there are often more than a hundred visitors at the readings, and sometimes there is an entrance fee for these manifestations. Poetry is back in bookstores. Social networks are flooded with songs. An incredible turnaround has taken place, things unimaginable ten years ago.

In that mass of new voices there is quality and talent, and above all energy. It is not enslaved by canons, it often deals with fringe topics, those that do not exist or are present only in traces in the mainstream, such as psychological traumas, LGBT topics, dysfunctional families. The urge to present oneself, i.e. one's immediate intimate experience without necessarily having a specific poetic role model and knowledge of tradition, is highlighted. Therefore, the scene is in a state of swirling magma that will only give visible results if young poets realize that they should read and work on finding their own poetic voice.

What condition is it in?, generally speaking, domestic and regional literature?

According to the number of new editions in bookstores, it is evident that a lot is being written both in Serbia and in the region. A much more important question is what is written and in what way, i.e. whether some genres are "failing" or their formats are simply changing and whether the paradigm we are used to is changing at all. An example of this is fragmented, lyrical or diary novels that look more like random notes written down on paper for a month, two or three than serious work on what we used to call a classic novel. The flood of autofiction is a trend, everyone is writing about themselves and only themselves, which is becoming quite tiresome.

Literary criticism is almost non-existent or at an unenviable level, so there is no necessary filter, expert analysis, so that everything has come down to a frantic chase for attention on social networks, counting likes, grabbing for profit. The book has become a commodity that must be sold quickly as new titles arrive, old ones wither for half a season. This is where serious writers have the worst time, because the quality of the text itself seems to be of no interest to anyone if it is not part of the marketing machine. An example is Srđan Srdić, perhaps the best and most interesting Serbian prose writer in the last decade, whose high literary achievements remained unrecognized by a wider audience and a good portion of critics.

As a publisher and primarily a poet, I see a tendency to expand the field of poetry in the sense that more people have never written it. It used to be a kind of exclusive activity, today, thanks to the brevity of the form, it has acquired the status of expression accessible to everyone. And there is also that therapeutic moment of confession, releasing one's traumas through lyrics. That quantity certainly gives birth to quality, so the conclusion about the state of the literary scene is optimistic. Prose is in crisis, poetry has proven to be a tougher plant than thought. It also started to bloom, which still brings back hope that not everything has gone to the metaverse.

Prose was clearly an incident in your work, although you have published as many as three novels within the trilogy Diary of a deserter. Do you have a new novel in mind??

Writing three novels was a forced move, namely, through poetry I could not tell all those stories from the nineties that I wanted to save from oblivion. Too much happened every day, there was too much running, managing, putting away, suffering, gasoline in bottles, changing currency on the streets, hiding from the military police, selling and reselling everything from life necessities to morals and family honor. But there were also examples of the opposite – humanity, solidarity, sacrifice, examples of the vitality of life. It made for incredible novel material, especially if you had first-hand experience.

Telling a larger story appeals to me, but I don't have a classic novel in mind. With his collection of songs Cages (2013) I approached the novel in such a way that I introduced characters into the poems, treated them as chapters, had a prologue and an epilogue, a clear crime plot and resolution, introduced double identities, a dystopian future, a Lynchian surreal atmosphere, which resulted in a text that could be read like a loose psychedelic neon noir novel. I also introduced characters in the following two collections of poems - The Golden Age (2015) and Behind the burning forest (2018) – but, playing and exploring the possibilities of the form, the path led me to film, again to Lynch. After that I returned to pure poetry. I am currently working on the idea of ​​crossing five poems from the perspectives of several different voices.

The poet Irena Vrkljan once complained that "read too much and knew too little about life". What is your case??

I'm more for knowing life. Of course, reading is also necessary because literature, among other things, comes from literature. It is not enough to have life experience alone, one cannot write seriously without being aware of tradition, the importance of literary form, and having a craft. Truthfulness is not a criterion of literature, but it is a good starting point. The text shows whether you wrote from experience or from an armchair, surrounded by a home library.

Student protests and popular rebellion in Serbia are at their peak, how do you see all this happening?

I'm probably not the only one who spent the 2000s on the streets, and after XNUMX was disappointed with how things turned out, how our hope and energy dissipated in no time. We did not take advantage of the opportunity as a society, except for mercantilist-oriented individuals. We live in a society where too much misery, bile, injustice has accumulated in recent decades. Every social system, after all, like the political system, is similar to the human organism, and when too many toxins accumulate, it needs serious detoxification. We are currently witnessing that process.