Artikel
Gordana Benić and the Prose Poem
31 januari 2007
Over the last two decades, for various reasons and motives – perhaps because of a kind of fear of such freedom – Croatian-language lyric output has exhibited greater interest in traditional verse-forms, bound verse and free verse, with the result that books of poetry written in the genre of lyric prose are increasingly rare. (And incidentally, it is perhaps just this type of text that is fully entitled to use the term ‘lyric’ and its derivatives in place of the common and collective noun ‘poem’, texts or passages with a parodic or aphoristic intonation thereby merely supplementing that domain.)
Gordana Benić is one of the most distinguished names in this field. Since the publication of her first volume of poems in 1984 she has written her poetry in that way, driving the line to the edge of the page, using interpunctuation in a manner normally encountered in prose or essay writing, and for that matter any text that is not generally held to be poetry by its own sense of itself. To the degree that this is true – and there are yet more figures of major significance in contemporary Croatian literature working in this field as well as Gordana Benić – a number of intriguing questions can then be posed regarding what is constant and dominant, in other words the outlines and the situational relief of Croatian poetry today.
The cover of her book Dubina (Depth) shows a photograph taken in a sandy part of the cellars of the Diocletian Palace in Split. In Benić’s work the passage linking the Peristyle with the southern approach to the palace undergoes multiple transformations to become a place of transmutation for alchemical portents. In fact, her first lyric here, with the title ‘Zidanje’ (Masonry), seems to invoke the physical presence of a kind of rancour peculiar to these cellars, the most famous in Croatia. Moisture on the ancient walls, pale Roman brick, the vault of sky which simply verbally restates the builders’ perfection, patches of damp as a metatextual link with Leonardo’s musings on abstract painting, come to create a pregnantly constructed lyrical world, provisionally embodied. Reading further simply confirms that poetry of the type written by Gordana Benić leaves no room for chance.
An allusion to Salvador Dali stems from the manner of dealing with motive in a lyric text, in a certain analytical approach which allows an outpouring of magma from the subconscious into the controlled space of the poem; thus Rilke becomes an affirmation and a frame of reference for an obsessive return to the canons of the past, Aristophanes a fulcrum through which high and low literary expression and subjects are linked. Furthermore, proper names, emplaced as sliding signifiers in order to somehow, apparently paradoxically, anchor the predicates of the indeterminate which magnetically attracts the liberty of the lyric subject, thus forming the hidden topography of Dubina: the River Acheron, Aesop, the Gorgon, Cadmus and Harmonia, the chapel of St Arnirus, Olympia and Orpheus, Venus and Adonis, Raphael, Velasquez, Beckett, Horace, Abbot Dobrovit. Such a selection implies the intent for the signifiers, or proper names, to become grounded, almost for them to find themselves applied as attributes, which nonetheless retain their specificity, and for them to introduce their own solid yet mobile semantic content to the lyric texture in order to supply the desired redundancy. Samuel Beckett thus becomes closer to, say, the Gorgon, Raphael to Adonis, and not merely as an author, the River Acheron to the chapel of St Arnirus, Velasquez to Orpheus, with the reader being accorded complete freedom for other and different combinations or aggregations.
Regardless of whether we consider this an innovation by this poet, the gesture whereby Tonči Petrasov Marović** introduces Greek prospects and personages into his poetry, for example, being of a quite different nature, is not of such great importance here. What I find most interesting is how Gordana Benić succeeds in maintaining control over lyrical material which is in constant flight from her, or which occupies the hazardous edge where the predicates themselves accumulate. The very title Dubina seems to demand closer definition: depth of what? how great a depth? what kind of space is this? and similar questions. If we then compare the situation of the lyric subject, and he or she is surely distinguishable and present in the text, matters become even more complex.
In fact, if in the poem ‘Svjetlarnik’ (Skylight) the word ‘sinking’ is read as the subject of the sentence “Sinking through the skylight, what serendipity, matched like an enchanted sequence,” the direction in which the remainder of this lyric should be followed becomes uncertain. In ‘Prozor, zrcalo’ (Window, Mirror) the situation is similar: “Corroded by the crumbling dust of doves and the pallid tracks of seaweed is seemingly a quiet voice, embossed on the façade of an invisible temple. All observed beneath the sky flows by it. Stretched out like the high-tide on which they float, stuff and souls longing for the new day, escort it.” It would be possible here to select the direction of reading at ones discretion, placing as ‘keyword’ something that is immaterial, the voice, or something that is seemingly material, the temple, while the predicate is thereby denied a firmer footing.
Perhaps at these moments the particular code of this poetry is laid bare. Amalgamation, a poetic and alchemical process, strives to occupy the centre, on one hand aspiring to maintain its indeterminacy as process, change, flow, and on the other intending to pull the textual material into coherence. The true problem is perceived despite and in addition to the proper names already mentioned, and quite superbly used. Where, then, is the place of the lyric subject? The signals that the poet sends us can be decoded in such loci as: “awaits in silent ambush”, “I saw things you would not believe in”, “deep pockets full of dark and unexplored corners”, “I saw eternity”, “in the centre grows an ideal word”, “ an unreachable rose of glass”, and “a surreal memento, dual-visaged”.
The coherence of the lyric text here is thus attained by a dense associativeness under the aegis of the workings of the unconscious, and hence the area where the basic drives operate, perhaps the source of the invocation of ‘surrealism’ and of Dali, that subsequently condenses into the thick, pasty precipitates of the consummate themes of modernism; hence Rilke, Beckett; a multiple use of the topos of the isolated individual, the lyric subject.
It is also interesting that the main thrust of her effort is directed precisely at obliterating any perspective incongruent with a particular (lyric) abstraction. The textual experience of her lyric subject remains in the realm of ‘eternity’, we might say in the domain of the aseptic workings of desire influenced by unspoken aims and pursuits.
Accepting the lyric subject’s world of abstract desire as well as the aporia that inheres in it, Gordana Benić’s poetry relies in part on a literary procedure which resembles mythological expression and thinking in its structure. In ‘Povratak Meduze’ (The Return of Medusa) the sentence “The bell-tower is closed in by the bay, an insect placed on the water like the scenery on a strange stage” obliterates the border between the large and the small, what is close at hand and what is far away, the real and the unreal. In some places the attention is directed towards inexpressible, transcendental elements, whose traces can be discerned in almost every line, as though they have determined their inscription. Nonetheless, her poetry still halts at the limits of abstract determination. The lyrical voice is unsure of what to do with it: to stay in the realm of the indeterminate, where it would simply evaporate, or continue to gather material evidence of the presence of the there-that-is-the-here, the depths which are superficial, the absent which is present, etc.
Here too Gordana Benić shows herself to be a superb poet. She establishes a certain harmony, keeps close watch over realities in ceaseless transformation. The locations in Split can be recognised in several ways even when named, the Vestibule, for example, but the poet maintains control of her material without permitting her texts to loosen or relax, to descend even for a moment below the stylistic level created. Contemporary Croatian poetry has thereby gained another dimension, satisfying on one hand the criteria of the ‘high’ modernist lyric, but also departing from them, addressing an utterly contemporary content and subject in a new way.
* Antun Branko Šimić (1898-1925), poet and essayist, one of the most important figures in modern Croatian literature.
**Tonči Petrasov Marović (1934-1991), poet and dramatist, literary critic and journalist, born in Mravince near Split; among the leading Croatian poets in the post-World War II period.
Describing the textual nature of the prose poem in a letter to his friend Arsène Houssaye, which he later reworked as the preface to his book, Le Spleen de Paris, Charles Baudelaire asserted that the genre was predominantly receptive to following the flow of thoughts and emotions, despite, and almost in opposition to, the assumption of existing or given forms. The facility and flexibility of this new ‘form’ render it capable of accompanying “the lyrical movements of the soul, the undulations of reverie and the unexpected jolts of consciousness”. If we note that Baudelaire’s fondness for the leisurely inscription of sentences that stretch to the edge of the page found its antithesis in the strict form of the sonnet, in other words in the effort required to master the rules of creating this enduring form, his pleading for new fields of gratification for a (lyric) text become quite comprehensible. It is rumoured that, many decades ago, one respected poet confessed to A. B. Šimić* how his juniors had finally, by the inauguration of vers libre, liberated him from the painful discipline of counting syllables and the constraints of a given form.
But matters are quite otherwise in our time. Critics now hold that this type of verse, vaguely referred to as the prose poem, actually functions to allow the preservation of the lyrical substrate, and even its further development. To put it in simpler terms, they aver that vers libre was developed in relation to the rhythm and tempo of speech, and its limits are determined by attending to the breath, respiration, and length of utterance of some imaginary speaker. Any transgression of the limits of a line of verse thus established would in physical terms extend towards the edge of the page, most likely one of standard A4 format, and hence be about 220 mm in length, so that in terms of its physical description such a lyric text or inscription strays into the domain of prose. As various categories of transgression can be subsequently identified as those marked by a certain originality, so we can say with regard to the prose poem that by trespassing from the domain of one form to that of another it endeavours to condense the lyrical material, foregrounding it for the reader by laying it bare, stripped of visibly recognisable limits. Having been granted such a degree of freedom, the author then has to call upon on other resources, new methods of constructing the lyric subject. The consequences of this may be read in the fertile productivity in this field of literature of several generations of Croatian writers over the span of a century.Over the last two decades, for various reasons and motives – perhaps because of a kind of fear of such freedom – Croatian-language lyric output has exhibited greater interest in traditional verse-forms, bound verse and free verse, with the result that books of poetry written in the genre of lyric prose are increasingly rare. (And incidentally, it is perhaps just this type of text that is fully entitled to use the term ‘lyric’ and its derivatives in place of the common and collective noun ‘poem’, texts or passages with a parodic or aphoristic intonation thereby merely supplementing that domain.)
Gordana Benić is one of the most distinguished names in this field. Since the publication of her first volume of poems in 1984 she has written her poetry in that way, driving the line to the edge of the page, using interpunctuation in a manner normally encountered in prose or essay writing, and for that matter any text that is not generally held to be poetry by its own sense of itself. To the degree that this is true – and there are yet more figures of major significance in contemporary Croatian literature working in this field as well as Gordana Benić – a number of intriguing questions can then be posed regarding what is constant and dominant, in other words the outlines and the situational relief of Croatian poetry today.
The cover of her book Dubina (Depth) shows a photograph taken in a sandy part of the cellars of the Diocletian Palace in Split. In Benić’s work the passage linking the Peristyle with the southern approach to the palace undergoes multiple transformations to become a place of transmutation for alchemical portents. In fact, her first lyric here, with the title ‘Zidanje’ (Masonry), seems to invoke the physical presence of a kind of rancour peculiar to these cellars, the most famous in Croatia. Moisture on the ancient walls, pale Roman brick, the vault of sky which simply verbally restates the builders’ perfection, patches of damp as a metatextual link with Leonardo’s musings on abstract painting, come to create a pregnantly constructed lyrical world, provisionally embodied. Reading further simply confirms that poetry of the type written by Gordana Benić leaves no room for chance.
An allusion to Salvador Dali stems from the manner of dealing with motive in a lyric text, in a certain analytical approach which allows an outpouring of magma from the subconscious into the controlled space of the poem; thus Rilke becomes an affirmation and a frame of reference for an obsessive return to the canons of the past, Aristophanes a fulcrum through which high and low literary expression and subjects are linked. Furthermore, proper names, emplaced as sliding signifiers in order to somehow, apparently paradoxically, anchor the predicates of the indeterminate which magnetically attracts the liberty of the lyric subject, thus forming the hidden topography of Dubina: the River Acheron, Aesop, the Gorgon, Cadmus and Harmonia, the chapel of St Arnirus, Olympia and Orpheus, Venus and Adonis, Raphael, Velasquez, Beckett, Horace, Abbot Dobrovit. Such a selection implies the intent for the signifiers, or proper names, to become grounded, almost for them to find themselves applied as attributes, which nonetheless retain their specificity, and for them to introduce their own solid yet mobile semantic content to the lyric texture in order to supply the desired redundancy. Samuel Beckett thus becomes closer to, say, the Gorgon, Raphael to Adonis, and not merely as an author, the River Acheron to the chapel of St Arnirus, Velasquez to Orpheus, with the reader being accorded complete freedom for other and different combinations or aggregations.
Regardless of whether we consider this an innovation by this poet, the gesture whereby Tonči Petrasov Marović** introduces Greek prospects and personages into his poetry, for example, being of a quite different nature, is not of such great importance here. What I find most interesting is how Gordana Benić succeeds in maintaining control over lyrical material which is in constant flight from her, or which occupies the hazardous edge where the predicates themselves accumulate. The very title Dubina seems to demand closer definition: depth of what? how great a depth? what kind of space is this? and similar questions. If we then compare the situation of the lyric subject, and he or she is surely distinguishable and present in the text, matters become even more complex.
In fact, if in the poem ‘Svjetlarnik’ (Skylight) the word ‘sinking’ is read as the subject of the sentence “Sinking through the skylight, what serendipity, matched like an enchanted sequence,” the direction in which the remainder of this lyric should be followed becomes uncertain. In ‘Prozor, zrcalo’ (Window, Mirror) the situation is similar: “Corroded by the crumbling dust of doves and the pallid tracks of seaweed is seemingly a quiet voice, embossed on the façade of an invisible temple. All observed beneath the sky flows by it. Stretched out like the high-tide on which they float, stuff and souls longing for the new day, escort it.” It would be possible here to select the direction of reading at ones discretion, placing as ‘keyword’ something that is immaterial, the voice, or something that is seemingly material, the temple, while the predicate is thereby denied a firmer footing.
Perhaps at these moments the particular code of this poetry is laid bare. Amalgamation, a poetic and alchemical process, strives to occupy the centre, on one hand aspiring to maintain its indeterminacy as process, change, flow, and on the other intending to pull the textual material into coherence. The true problem is perceived despite and in addition to the proper names already mentioned, and quite superbly used. Where, then, is the place of the lyric subject? The signals that the poet sends us can be decoded in such loci as: “awaits in silent ambush”, “I saw things you would not believe in”, “deep pockets full of dark and unexplored corners”, “I saw eternity”, “in the centre grows an ideal word”, “ an unreachable rose of glass”, and “a surreal memento, dual-visaged”.
The coherence of the lyric text here is thus attained by a dense associativeness under the aegis of the workings of the unconscious, and hence the area where the basic drives operate, perhaps the source of the invocation of ‘surrealism’ and of Dali, that subsequently condenses into the thick, pasty precipitates of the consummate themes of modernism; hence Rilke, Beckett; a multiple use of the topos of the isolated individual, the lyric subject.
It is also interesting that the main thrust of her effort is directed precisely at obliterating any perspective incongruent with a particular (lyric) abstraction. The textual experience of her lyric subject remains in the realm of ‘eternity’, we might say in the domain of the aseptic workings of desire influenced by unspoken aims and pursuits.
Accepting the lyric subject’s world of abstract desire as well as the aporia that inheres in it, Gordana Benić’s poetry relies in part on a literary procedure which resembles mythological expression and thinking in its structure. In ‘Povratak Meduze’ (The Return of Medusa) the sentence “The bell-tower is closed in by the bay, an insect placed on the water like the scenery on a strange stage” obliterates the border between the large and the small, what is close at hand and what is far away, the real and the unreal. In some places the attention is directed towards inexpressible, transcendental elements, whose traces can be discerned in almost every line, as though they have determined their inscription. Nonetheless, her poetry still halts at the limits of abstract determination. The lyrical voice is unsure of what to do with it: to stay in the realm of the indeterminate, where it would simply evaporate, or continue to gather material evidence of the presence of the there-that-is-the-here, the depths which are superficial, the absent which is present, etc.
Here too Gordana Benić shows herself to be a superb poet. She establishes a certain harmony, keeps close watch over realities in ceaseless transformation. The locations in Split can be recognised in several ways even when named, the Vestibule, for example, but the poet maintains control of her material without permitting her texts to loosen or relax, to descend even for a moment below the stylistic level created. Contemporary Croatian poetry has thereby gained another dimension, satisfying on one hand the criteria of the ‘high’ modernist lyric, but also departing from them, addressing an utterly contemporary content and subject in a new way.
* Antun Branko Šimić (1898-1925), poet and essayist, one of the most important figures in modern Croatian literature.
**Tonči Petrasov Marović (1934-1991), poet and dramatist, literary critic and journalist, born in Mravince near Split; among the leading Croatian poets in the post-World War II period.
© Miloš Đurđević
Vertaler: Kim Burton
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