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During the restoration of the independent Lithuanian state, a few factors substantially changed the life of Lithuanian literature: the dissolution of ideological censorship, freeing of creative self-expression, as well as the formation of commercial principles of book publishing and dissemination, influencing the relationship between literature and its audience. Lithuanian poetry, carrying out a spiritual mission of consolidating the nation during the decades of occupation, publishing unique print runs in tens of thousands, lost its status as the discourse of truth in Lithuanian culture in the years of freedom, along with the mass reader. However, despite these circumstances along with the intensifying creation of Lithuanian prose (especially essays), poetry, as in earlier decades, has remained the part of Lithuanian literature that is the most representative, rich, and of a high aesthetic level, in which the art of the Lithuanian word is most originally expressed.
After the restoration of independence, three generations of writers created Lithuanian poetry – an older one, debuting in the 60s and 70s, forming their artistic touch and creative nucleus during the Soviet years; the middle generation, arriving in literary life in the 80s, obtaining a clear creative profile by independence, but already in an independent Lithuania reaching a creative maturity and spreading it with a showing of mature poetry collections; and the younger one, debuting at a time when political changes were about to take place, and later on. In terms of the literary process, a tension in this period of poetry developed between the earlier decades’s refined principles of a ripe modernism of literature and world outlook, distinguished by an intensive intellectual as well as emotional confrontation of consciousness with the world, and the postmodern feeling of the self and the search for self-expression.
One of the most popular poets from earlier decades is Justinas Marcinkevičius (born 1930 and debuting in 1950, receiving the National Literature Prize in 2001), a writer who is engaged in society and feels responsible for the community of people, who in his texts raises an existential tenderness, a respect for life as ethical attitudes. In his original poetic journalism collection Poems from the Diary (Eilėraščiai iš dienoraščio, 1993) that come from the time of the movement for independence in the late 80s, attitudes are conveyed discussing real topics of society, pondering the fate of the nation, reflecting on the experience of a turn in history. The collections A Step (Žingsnis, 1998), Carmina minora (2000), and The Day’s Canvas (Dienos drobulė, 2002) show the qualitative renewal of Marcinkevičius’ poetry, in which his distinct ideology of ecological humanism is laid out, with moments of the present, poetics of concreteness, originally creating a minimalistic poem structure, using characteristic possibilities of making prose from poetry that are common for this period in time.
Marcelijus Martinaitis (born 1936 and debuting in 1962, receiving the National Literature Prize in 1998) is a poet using mythical/national stylistics, and who has created original poetics of the paradox. The modern feeling of the self and the cultural situation (concrete realities, like the departure from the countryside, the disappearance of the traditional agrarian lifestyle, the public absurdity of Soviet life, also the objective of the autonomy of art, and the intellectual reflex of a person’s existence) in his poetry is unveiled with a reconstructed and stylized view of the elemental and naive consciousness. This style continues with the collection Gailile raso (1990); a new direction in his work is displayed with With Locks Unlocked (Atrakinta, 1996), The Disappearing in the Distance (Tolstantis, 2002), and K.B. Suspect (K.B. Įtariamas, 2005). Here plot-like poems dominate, a characteristic multi-faceted reconstruction of a repressed or twisted memory in an occupied culture. A different kind of experience is expressed in creating a new poetic persona, “K.B.”, which takes the place of the famous folk character “Kukutis” (The Ballads of Kukutis, 1977) of Martinaitis’s poetry. “K.B.” is the consciousness of the character – the same naive anonymous consciousness, but which has already attained a curious superficial sense of culture, influenced by commercial as well as popular culture. This new poetic mask allows for the unveiling of a person’s situation in a quickly changing (and intricate) world with an ironic distance. Another published collection of poetry is A Homecoming (Sugrįžimas, 1998).
Sigitas Geda (born 1943 and debuting in 1966, receiving the National Literature Prize in 1994) is an especially productive writer of the older generation and continually reinventing himself creatively. His general principle of poetry is a modernizing archaism; the objective is to return to the elements: the world, things, language, history. Creating a poem is like an intricate zone of archaic mythical and modern consciousness and the crossing of different cultures and layers of time, unveiling the very earliest situations of a person’s existence, giving back a primordial elementariness to the culturally saturated modern consciousness. During the years of independence Geda has remained a continuously provocative poet, as if creating his poetic world from anew in each collection. Seven Summer Chants (Septynių vasarų giesmės, 1991) sets itself apart with its dramatic and ironic reflection on the death of high classical culture, stated in the form of sonnets and hymns. Rebuilding of Babylon (Babilono atstatymas, 1994) is an original effort in poetry to rebuild the original “flooding” situation of language itself. In the collections The Jatvingian Mass (Jotvingių mišios, 1997) and A Casket for Catching Souls (Skrynelė dvasioms pagauti, 1998), the mythical return to sacred principles is intertwined with daily sensing and profane experiences. In 2001 the collection Socrates Talks with the Wind (Sokratas kalbasi su vėju) was published.
Tomas Venclova (born 1937 and debuting in 1972, receiving the National Literature Prize in 1994) is a poet of a dissident attitude, immigrating to the United States in 1977. His intellectual poetry had a huge influence on the Lithuanian poetry tradition, establishing a many-voiced “dense” discourse of culture, political coercion in a world confining silenced voices, their dialogue, and consequently the forms of sense and idealness. It is dialogue-like poetry, characterized by intertextual allusions to classic and modern Russian (especially the Acmiest poets) and Western poetry, its fabric of quotes, disciplined, with refined forms, and a delivery of an intricate metaphorical structure. In the Lithuanian poetic tradition, where the traditional agrarian world-view dominates, Venclova’s work is set apart as authentically urban; his poetic imagination is fed by the rich resources of art and cultural history, with the distinctly transforming aesthetic of classicism and poetic principles close to him. This poetry, spread by copies and by illegal means after the writer’s emigration, returned to Lithuania with an original selection of writing and translations Winter Dialogue (Pašnekesys žiemą, 1991), and new collections of poetry A View from an Alley (Reginys iš alėjos, 1998), and Crossroads (Sankirta, 2005).
I would like to mention still a few of the significant poets of the older generation. Vytautas Bložė (born 1930), with polyphonic ways of writing, a poet of continual avant-garde-like searches, actualized the experience of Hinduism and Buddhism philosophies and world-view in his newer collections Of Something Completely Different (Visai ne apie tai, 1998) and Void (Tuštuma, 2001). Judita Vaičiūnaitė (1937–2001) published seven collections of poetry after independence, among them Shadows´ Watch (Šešėlių laikrodis, 1990), Earth’s Wreaths (Žemynos vainikai, 1995), When Papyrus is Unrolled (Kai skleidžiasi papirusas, 1997), Light of an Old Picture (Seno paveikslo šviesa, 1998), and The Arch of Clouds (Debesų arka, 2001). A poet of epic poems, city experiences, an aestheticized imagination, infused with vivid language. After independence the earlier and later works of émigré poets began to be published in Lithuania. Significant publications – Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas’ (born 1919) Poems 1937–1996 (Eilėraščiai 1937-1996, 1996), a work of modern poetic phenomenology and an existential world-view; the reconstructions of traditional a Lithuanian agricultural understanding of the world close to Marcinkevičius and Martinaitis with the poetry of Kazys Bradūnas (born 1917) (Bread and Salt, Duona ir druska, 1992; About the Earth and Sky, Apie žemę ir dangų, 1997, Selected poems, Sutelktinė, vol. 1 and 2, 2001).
The poets of the middle generation arrived in literature with an avant-garde attitude, with the objective of widening the horizons of culture in poetry narrowed during the Soviet period. A complication of the direct, personal self-expression of the subject, a covering up, and rejection distinguishes itself in the poetry of this generation.
Opposite to the common trend of the generation, Onė Baliukonė (born 1948 and debuting in 1971, receiving the National Literature Prize in 2004) is set apart as distinctly continuing the lyrical tradition of a poetry that is an open statement. The most distinct collections after independence, Towers (Bokštai, 1996), and Begging Sun (Elgetaujanti saulė, 1998), are characterized by a dualistic poetic world-view being dramatically lived out, and drastically expressed with a tension between two indivisibly connected poles of existence – the high and the low, the bodily and the spiritual, the profane and the sacred, the temporary and the eternal, etc. The basis of this poetry is experiencing the strain of extremes, and by this one can penetrate the subsoil of the Baroque-Romanticism-Symbolism stylistic paradigm. Baliukonė is one of the most important mouthpieces of a woman’s experience as well as understanding of the world in contemporary Lithuanian poetry, her work and art of the word as the motion of embodiment and idealism against the harmony of the circle of life (birth-death-rebirth).
Antanas A. Jonynas (born 1953, receiving the National Literature Prize in 2003) after independence published a collection of earlier and new poems Waterfall Under Ice (Krioklys po ledu, 1997) that most tellingly reflects the principles of this poet’s work. It is a dizzy array of feelings close to the bohemian-hippy attitude of the kids of the 80s, a poetry of emotional intoxication, accused of being “apolitical” during the Soviet years, connecting the sentimentality of the love theme with a playful irony. Characteristic of the poems is an especially subtle intonation as well as a fabric of light literary allusions concealing an intellectualness (there are ties with images of Verlaine’s and Baudelaire’s poetry). The poetic dizziness brings pop elements into the texts, which get under the imagery of the poem, the rhythm, and intonations (for example, the jazz-rhythm imitating poems absorbing song quotes from the Rolling Stones). Jonynas’ poetry is described by critics as “making music by ear” by the poems’ subtle melodies and intonational refinement of the poetic language, close to the principles of poetic jazz.
Kornelijus Platelis (born 1951 and debuting in 1980, receiving the National Literature Prize in 2002), a poet close to the creative line of Tomas Venclova, creating culturally packed poetry, whose constant sources are ancient mythology and modern English poetry (especially T.S. Elliot). The structure of the poems is rational, seeking to feel the archetypical experience of the person and structures of the psyche encoded in the secret of life through symbolic-mythological story plots. A vitalism of creation and eroticism (one of the poetic identifications of the “self” is Pan) is the main value of the poetry. It is reached by way of a palimpsest – writing on the top of what is written, allowing for the earlier text to be brought to light, and “scratching” it off, destroying it, looking for an unblemished space for the word. In 1995 the collection Orations to the River (Prakalbos upei) was published. The later collections A Belt of the Low Tide (Atoslūgio juosta, 2000), and Palimpsests (Palimpsestai, 2004) maintain the main direction of Platelis, and together in those express the disappearance of time, culture as the death of the world, and an understanding of the word as the mortifying of experienced reality, and a sense of the meaningful contrasts and stresses that are dying out, all of which are close to the postmodern world-view.
Donaldas Kajokas (born 1953, debuting in 1980, receiving the National Literature Prize in 1999) defines the principle of poetry eloquently with the collection Meditations (Meditacijos) that came out in 1997. Direct expressions of the “self” are renounced, approaching poetry as a spiritual exercise, and allowing a moment of brightness in meeting with the Other – through a fragment of silent existence. The poems are roads of finding wisdom, in which one peers meditatively into nature and things, fixing moments of the illumination of a detail, revealing the unity of the world, the realization of harmony, and the experience of happiness and beauty. The texts are often short, created using Japanese, Chinese and Persian forms of poetry (for example, distinctly resonating with the tradition of the haiku), maintaining pauses of silence. His newest book is The General is Tired of Winning (Karvedys pavargo nugalėti, 2005).
Nijolė Miliauskaitė (1950–2002, debuting in 1985, receiving the National Literature Prize in 2000) takes one of the most important positions in contemporary Lithuanian poetry, which is consolidated by the last of her publications – The Labyrinth of Soul (Sielos labirintas, 1999), a collection of earlier and new poems. Poems of a spare, minimalistic style display a primordial experience of material reality, through which a metaphysical secret is brought to light. This experience in poetry is given meaning by the symbolic subjects of the search for home and remembrance. It involves cultural memory (the old dilapidated estates of Lithuanian barons, and the small town homes with their own traditions, a material receipt and with the rhythm of life), and expresses a psycho-analytical portrait of the individual (characteristic of the womanly world-view are the images of the house as a womb, a nest, also the home as the material form of a person’s innerness – a “mirror of the soul”). The image of the house offers a search for the secret of existence, and the opening-up of plots (a labyrinth of rooms, being taken into a “room where entrance is forbidden”). There is a distinct child-like and girl-like relation with the world conveyed in Miliauskaitė’s poetry, of which gullibility, humility, and a connection of quiet comfort and care is characteristic.
An important publication was the posthumous collection of poetry Not Even Stones Lie (Ne akmenys guli) published in 1994 from the never-before published poet Antanas Kalanavičius (1949–1992). Written while living in complete isolation in a one-house village in the forests of southern Lithuania, this poetry comes from the direct experience of a natural environment, from a conversation with things, from a feeling of being accustomed to language as the very first substance from which an original and avant-garde-like poetics is formed, revealing with secondary discourses of culture a sense of being that is not concealed.
The poets of the younger generation debuting after independence experienced the interruption of cultural tradition more dramatically and with more intensity than the earlier generation. This intensity is especially distinctly revealed with the poetry of Aidas Marčėnas (born 1960, debuting in 1988), distinguished with a classical mastery of form, a rich intertextual playfulness, including texts of modern Lithuanian and Russian poetry, a concept taken from tradition of poetry as the illumination of truth. However, a feeling of the “bad student of tradition” is characteristic of Marčėnas’ attitude, experiencing, and with irony expressing the word as an empty experience, the ever-strengthening feeling of a virtual sign ever-multiplying itself, expressing culture as noise and trash, the world and the consciousness of man being contaminated. One of the important themes and problems of Marčėnas’ poetry in the seven collections which are of special note are Year Without a Grasshopper (Metai be žiogo, 1994), Poor Jorikas (Vargšas Jorikas, 1998), and Secondhand (Dėvėti, 2001). The newest collection is Worlds (Pasauliai, 2005).
Sigitas Parulskis (born 1965 and debuting in 1990, receiving the National Literature Prize in 2004) opened a new direction of development with the collections Of the Dead (Mirusiųjų, 1994) and Mortui sepulti sint (1998). Parulskis created a poetic discourse on death, in which first of all the traditional agrarian world-view, feeding a big part of poetry from the last century, is dismantling the main symbols that were made sacred and values (the home becomes a coffin, the homeland as a land of graves, the agrarian way of life embodying the cycle of life, re-explained as being dependent on death and its processes). Surrealist poetics are used in the poems, not avoiding the aesthetics of ugliness, with this method refusing an inert language and a dead symbolism – a “civilized pile of shit”. This ritual-poetic “murder”, a cursing, savage treatment of tradition, which is like a ritual of initiation, having to elevate to another level of understanding the self.
Eugenijus Ališanka (born 1960, debuting in 1991), an author with a postmodern poetic style, releasing the structure of the poem, and liberating the relations between images. The poetry collections Equinox (Lygiadienis, 1991), City of Ash (Peleno miestas, 1995), and Godbone (Dievakaulis, 1999) become significant as an indulgence with a search for an unattainable meaning, the attempt to make the “I” disappear in the flow of language, feel the void and space of silence through language, and reach a pure state of representation – a spontaneously spreading poetic language of an unstructured subjective purpose. In the newest collection from unwritten histories (iš neparašytų istorijų, 2002) a new eros of language appears, a dotted line of playfulness, joining language to poetic narratives.
One of the most significant positions in poetry of this generation has been taken by Gintaras Grajauskas (born 1966 and debuting in 1993), especially with his later collections Catalogue (Katalogas, 1997), A Bone Pipe (Kaulinė dūdelė, 1999), The Newest History: A Textbook for Beginners (Naujausių laikų istorija: vadovėlis pradedantiesiems, 2004). The feeling of an existential void in this poetry transforms into a space of poetic play; observing the emptied and trivialized world, from a distance of humour, where the pulsing and universal experience of a person – intimacy, the fear of death, and the yearning for sacredness - is allowed to be felt in the banality of the everyday. The poetic language approaches oral intonations, a materialistic imagery, with the poetic emotion minimal and disciplined.
Daiva Čepauskaitė (born 1967 and debuting in 1992) creates poetry like a parody of poetry itself. In the collections I’ve Eaten a Cranberry (Suvalgiau vieną spanguolę, 1998) and It Doesn’t Have to Be Probably (Nereikia tikriausiai būtina, 2004), the poems are written in classic four-line form; however, this form, like other traditional poetization, are used for making a small performance of the everyday way of life, with irony for the staged poetic subject of “drama”. However, it is together with the undiluted experience rendered with this play. This “double game” is the interesting intrigue of Čepauskaitė’s poetry.
Neringa Abrutytė’s (born 1972) poetry (the collections The Autumn of Paradise (Rojaus ruduo, 1995), Confession (Iš pažintis, 1997), By Neringa M. (Neringos M., 2003)) is distinguished by a refreshed poetic style, restoring lively intonations modeled on a personal voice. The everyday mode of life, dionisticpleasures, recollections from childhood, the experience of a modern traveller’s life weaving into an unrepeatable, intimate and poetic storytelling – girlishly naive, erotically secretive, and a little comical and not puffed up.
Laurynas Katkus (born 1972) has published the collections Voices, Writings (Balsai, rašteliai, 1998) and Diving Lessons (Nardymo pamokos, 2003). He creates poetry as a flow of free experiences and images, of unhindered historical experiences, and of cultural identity. This flow enables a distinct poetic eros – an unforced glance, attention, attraction of the body, being conveyed with language. The poetry becomes an erotic adventure of the imagination and the language.
In the poems of Rimvydas Stankevičius (born 1973, the collections Eye (Akis, 1996) and Scar (Randas, 2002)), lonely consciousnesses are conveyed, imprisoned in themselves, the metaphysical feeling and efforts of discovering the exit to the other side, to meet with the Other.
In the poems of Gintaras Bleizgys (born 1975), the vital origin of man’s existence is poeticized originally, revealing a melancholic experience of death’s presence in an influential way.
The poets Darius Šimonis (born 1970, the collections Hive (Spiečius, 1997) and Plague (Rykštė, 2001)), Marius Burokas (born 1977, collections Ideograms (Ideogramos, 1999) and Beings (Būsenos, 2005)), Gytis Norvilas (born 1976, the collection Stone Tools (Akmenskeltės, 2002)) create poetry as a postmodern linguistic performance, getting involved in neo-avantgarde linguistic games.
Translated by Jayde Will
Encyclopaedia of Lithuanian Literature, Vilnius 2001, and The Newest Lithuanian Literature (1998–2002), Vilnius 2003, were used in this article. |
