Artikel
Sensibility and sharp intellect
18 januari 2006
Marzipan is a remarkable feast of language. Its poems seem to abide by the most precious tenets of modernist poetry, following the ‘advice’ of both André Gide and The Counterfeiters – that a poet should at first let him/herself be guided to the greatest possible degree by language – and that of Octavio Paz, that a modern poet has to break out of the conventional bonds of the inherited language, remoulding it in the form of his/her own individual poetic expression. Marzipan is precisely that: poetic language unheard before.
The Sea Says, by its very title, suggests that Kramberger is still guided by ‘automatic writing’. But the collection boasts a fair number of poems pointing in the direction of a major shift: away from the field of predominantly language poetry into the realm of a more existentialist orientation. “I step into my life,” writes Kramberger in a line that could very well serve as the motto of her most recent collection, Velvet Indigo. (Poems of stepping into life can also be found in her German book Gegenströmung/Protitok).
And yet, Velvet Indigo is by no means only intimate poetry, although it contains a few excellent intimate poems, for example the long poem ‘Ottensheim: Riverside Journal’, not to mention the fine love poem ‘Eye Swop’ or the one from which the collection takes its title and in which Kramberger opens up the most intimate of places – the place of writing poetry – and allows the reader to enter it. “Those who wish to make love to me – / after the reading . . .” runs the first line of her ‘Velvet Indigo’ cycle of poems. This is not merely an expression of confidence about one’s own writing; it also reveals a deep awareness of the poet’s place in the world. It is only from the point at which the poet stops bemoaning his or her fate and is prepared to take on the social dimension of his/her writing that any authentic poetic stance in harmony with itself can emerge, enabling the poet to make clear proclamations about matters that do not fall directly within intimate experience but nevertheless deeply affect him/her. Here, we reach the opposite pole of Velvet Indigo, those poems that focus on the social context of poetry-making. And not just of poetry, but of any intellectual work. For Taja Kramberger, poetry is very much also a thing of the intellect – it is, in fact, intellectual work par excellence. Though clearly partly triggered by personal distress at Slovenia’s attitude towards critical intellectuals – under the neo-liberal banner (or precisely because of it) – but not in any self-indulgent or petty manner, Kramberger delineates with the precision of a surgeon the background that generates such an attitude towards intellectuals and intellectual work. But once again: we are not witnessing personal grudges transposed into the public sphere, but rather a strongly engaged and self-reflexive position in language. These poems, along with the more intimate ones, map out the coordinates that constitute the entirely unique and distinct terrain of this collection.
From Marzipan, where Kramberger surrendered herself to language and where the surge of words often explodes beyond the poem, to Velvet Indigo, where she has drawn the language under control, making her poems tight and finished, like Cezanne’s paintings, Taja Kramberger has walked a long but consistent path. And what is truly wonderful is that she has been able to retain an erotic attitude towards language, feel it as the other and have the courage to surrender to its force.
Translated by Ana Jelnikar.
This is a slightly expanded version of the text published on the flap covers of Velvet Indigo, Literatura, Ljubljana 2004.
Emerging into prominence over the past decade, Taja Kramberger reveals, in successive collections, a movement from language poetry to more existentialist concerns. She trains her incisive intellect on the conditions that limit intellectual life, while retaining and surrendering to an erotic sense of language.
Taja Kramberger’s is one of the strongest and most accomplished poetic voices in the Slovenian poetry of the last decade. Her debut collection, Marzipan (1997), was nominated for the prestigious Jenko Award in 1998, her second book of poems, The Sea Says (1999), received wide acclaim, and her work is increasingly anthologized both in Slovenia and abroad. It is, of course, the inner dynamism and ‘development’ of poetry, rather than its external or social commendation that matter most, as these can only come about as a consequence of the poet’s personal investment in the text itself. From the start, Taja Kramberger has left no doubts about such an investment. The last few years have also seen the publication of a book of her poems in German, Gegenströmung/Protitok (Counter-current, 2002) and of her latest collection, Velvet Indigo (2004). A Slovenian-French-English-Italian book of poems Mobilizacije/ Mobilisations/ Mobilizations/ Mobilizationi is due to be published shortly. Marzipan is a remarkable feast of language. Its poems seem to abide by the most precious tenets of modernist poetry, following the ‘advice’ of both André Gide and The Counterfeiters – that a poet should at first let him/herself be guided to the greatest possible degree by language – and that of Octavio Paz, that a modern poet has to break out of the conventional bonds of the inherited language, remoulding it in the form of his/her own individual poetic expression. Marzipan is precisely that: poetic language unheard before.
The Sea Says, by its very title, suggests that Kramberger is still guided by ‘automatic writing’. But the collection boasts a fair number of poems pointing in the direction of a major shift: away from the field of predominantly language poetry into the realm of a more existentialist orientation. “I step into my life,” writes Kramberger in a line that could very well serve as the motto of her most recent collection, Velvet Indigo. (Poems of stepping into life can also be found in her German book Gegenströmung/Protitok).
And yet, Velvet Indigo is by no means only intimate poetry, although it contains a few excellent intimate poems, for example the long poem ‘Ottensheim: Riverside Journal’, not to mention the fine love poem ‘Eye Swop’ or the one from which the collection takes its title and in which Kramberger opens up the most intimate of places – the place of writing poetry – and allows the reader to enter it. “Those who wish to make love to me – / after the reading . . .” runs the first line of her ‘Velvet Indigo’ cycle of poems. This is not merely an expression of confidence about one’s own writing; it also reveals a deep awareness of the poet’s place in the world. It is only from the point at which the poet stops bemoaning his or her fate and is prepared to take on the social dimension of his/her writing that any authentic poetic stance in harmony with itself can emerge, enabling the poet to make clear proclamations about matters that do not fall directly within intimate experience but nevertheless deeply affect him/her. Here, we reach the opposite pole of Velvet Indigo, those poems that focus on the social context of poetry-making. And not just of poetry, but of any intellectual work. For Taja Kramberger, poetry is very much also a thing of the intellect – it is, in fact, intellectual work par excellence. Though clearly partly triggered by personal distress at Slovenia’s attitude towards critical intellectuals – under the neo-liberal banner (or precisely because of it) – but not in any self-indulgent or petty manner, Kramberger delineates with the precision of a surgeon the background that generates such an attitude towards intellectuals and intellectual work. But once again: we are not witnessing personal grudges transposed into the public sphere, but rather a strongly engaged and self-reflexive position in language. These poems, along with the more intimate ones, map out the coordinates that constitute the entirely unique and distinct terrain of this collection.
From Marzipan, where Kramberger surrendered herself to language and where the surge of words often explodes beyond the poem, to Velvet Indigo, where she has drawn the language under control, making her poems tight and finished, like Cezanne’s paintings, Taja Kramberger has walked a long but consistent path. And what is truly wonderful is that she has been able to retain an erotic attitude towards language, feel it as the other and have the courage to surrender to its force.
Translated by Ana Jelnikar.
This is a slightly expanded version of the text published on the flap covers of Velvet Indigo, Literatura, Ljubljana 2004.
© Peter Semolič
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