Page 152 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 152
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
drine: the visual poem that enlists typography and the containing visual
field among its formal poetic elements (Mallarmé 1985, 54–55).
A Throw of Dice… is the first realization of ‘pure poetry’ as defined by
Mallarmé’s disciple Paul Valéry. When Ottó Tolnai refers to ‘pure poet-
ry’, this is his source.
It is not by chance either that one of the defining figures of Vojvodin-
ian Serbian poetry, performance and postpunk, Slobodan Tišma referred
to the enigmatic masterpiece of Mallarmé on a number of occasions. Tiš-
ma’s poem Vrt kao to (Garden as It Is, 1977) is based on A Throw of Dice…
(the motif of a dice/cube recurs in several earlier poems by the author
that can also be linked to Kazimir Malevich’s black square). According
to Miško Šuvaković,
152 the poem of the late nineteen-sixties is still a symbolic body dragged out by
Tišma from the vortex of modernist questions concerning the boundaries
of language (for Mallarmé, it is the sound of accidental language searching
for its own tone, for Rilke it is the discrete tone of the inner sound of time
and space, for Wittgenstein these are questions related to language and its
beyond, which language grabs and then drops) (1997, 96).
In the case of the poem Vrt kao to, Tišma is concerned with decomposing,
preventing, problematising the linguistic subject.
Backgrounds differ elsewhere. In the Slovenian member state, the first
‘concrete poems’ by Aleš Kermauner, Franci Zagoričnik and Tomaž Šala-
mun were published in 1965 in the university journal Tribuna, and were
based on the avantgarde constructivist tradition (the konses of Srečko
Kosovel). Soon afterwards, the poetic, artistic and performing group
OHO was founded (Franci Zagoričnik, Iztok Geister Plamen, Marko
Pogačnik, Matjaž Hanžek, Milenko Matanović and Vojin Kovač-Chub-
by) and turned out to be a source of inspiration also for Croatian and Ser-
bian authors and artists (in Vojvodinian context: the groups KÔD, E),
Januar, Februar, Bosch+Bosch and others were inspired by the Sloveni-
an initiative).3 According to Croatian literary historian Branimir Bošn-
jak, radical experiments with language and visual imagery were realized
in their most consequent form in the Slovenian scene (n.d., 160). Slove-
nian theoretician Taras Kemauner called these experiments reisms (6–
7). Dubravka Đurić coined the term ‘cosmopolitan reservation’ for the
neo-avantgarde Yugoslav artistic phenomena:
3 About the ludism of the Slovenian group OHO, see Igor Zabel’s essay Uloga igre u
delu OHO (1996, 355—362).
drine: the visual poem that enlists typography and the containing visual
field among its formal poetic elements (Mallarmé 1985, 54–55).
A Throw of Dice… is the first realization of ‘pure poetry’ as defined by
Mallarmé’s disciple Paul Valéry. When Ottó Tolnai refers to ‘pure poet-
ry’, this is his source.
It is not by chance either that one of the defining figures of Vojvodin-
ian Serbian poetry, performance and postpunk, Slobodan Tišma referred
to the enigmatic masterpiece of Mallarmé on a number of occasions. Tiš-
ma’s poem Vrt kao to (Garden as It Is, 1977) is based on A Throw of Dice…
(the motif of a dice/cube recurs in several earlier poems by the author
that can also be linked to Kazimir Malevich’s black square). According
to Miško Šuvaković,
152 the poem of the late nineteen-sixties is still a symbolic body dragged out by
Tišma from the vortex of modernist questions concerning the boundaries
of language (for Mallarmé, it is the sound of accidental language searching
for its own tone, for Rilke it is the discrete tone of the inner sound of time
and space, for Wittgenstein these are questions related to language and its
beyond, which language grabs and then drops) (1997, 96).
In the case of the poem Vrt kao to, Tišma is concerned with decomposing,
preventing, problematising the linguistic subject.
Backgrounds differ elsewhere. In the Slovenian member state, the first
‘concrete poems’ by Aleš Kermauner, Franci Zagoričnik and Tomaž Šala-
mun were published in 1965 in the university journal Tribuna, and were
based on the avantgarde constructivist tradition (the konses of Srečko
Kosovel). Soon afterwards, the poetic, artistic and performing group
OHO was founded (Franci Zagoričnik, Iztok Geister Plamen, Marko
Pogačnik, Matjaž Hanžek, Milenko Matanović and Vojin Kovač-Chub-
by) and turned out to be a source of inspiration also for Croatian and Ser-
bian authors and artists (in Vojvodinian context: the groups KÔD, E),
Januar, Februar, Bosch+Bosch and others were inspired by the Sloveni-
an initiative).3 According to Croatian literary historian Branimir Bošn-
jak, radical experiments with language and visual imagery were realized
in their most consequent form in the Slovenian scene (n.d., 160). Slove-
nian theoretician Taras Kemauner called these experiments reisms (6–
7). Dubravka Đurić coined the term ‘cosmopolitan reservation’ for the
neo-avantgarde Yugoslav artistic phenomena:
3 About the ludism of the Slovenian group OHO, see Igor Zabel’s essay Uloga igre u
delu OHO (1996, 355—362).
