2009
Struga Poetry Evenings
Dear and Respected Friends,
I am deeply honoured and many things open before me after the news that by giving me your award you rank me among the pleiade of great living poets of the world. You the Macedonians, a people with the greatest ear for poetry in the entire world, with your generosity, have enabled me to create and survive as a poet ever since long ago. I have been your guest on many occasions, even as a very young man and to great many I seemed strange, incomprehensible and problematic, but you accepted me entirely, with all your bigheartedness, with legendary hospitality and openness.
As a history of art student, before I even thought of ever being befallen by poetry, during a field trip I admired your churches, monasteries, nature and people. The promenade. Those things which in a certain manner belonged to me being a Mediterranean, but have been taken away since they have died out in my country. “Longing for the South”. Here I experienced freedom and the overwhelming desire for mythical spaces.
I never forgot that in the middle of the 1970s, when in my Slovenia, thought only for a short period of time, I was under unbearable political pressure, you welcomed me as someone in whom – since he is a poet – you can put complete trust on all levels, you put a microphone in his hands and authorized him to do interviews for your television with the colleagues. Among us poets it is crystal clear that it is precisely Macedonia, it is precisely the Struga Poetry Evenings which have for almost fifty years been the centre, the living source and guardian of the dignity of our profession.
Of poetry I know nothing actually. I have read all books and forgot everything. From Derrida (I do not deny that his first texts have shocked me completely) I escaped to the United States where I used to meet young poets who when handshaking introduced themselves as “poets” as we in Europe say “carpenter” or “dentist”. It seemed endlessly fresh to me.
Words remind me, rush through me or eat me away and surprise me, I give into them. To sentences I recognize I leave all my freedom, even terror. And laziness. All things possible. All utter stupidities if they are in the mood for stupidities for all this occurs in a protected space of the unknown, the old and the new. It is a priori such if I recognize it as poetic, although I do not know whether this is a case of my imagination, a game or only joy. I am terribly irresponsible, but I have trust. There is a higher consciousness watching over me.
I am deeply honoured and many things open before me after the news that by giving me your award you rank me among the pleiade of great living poets of the world. You the Macedonians, a people with the greatest ear for poetry in the entire world, with your generosity, have enabled me to create and survive as a poet ever since long ago. I have been your guest on many occasions, even as a very young man and to great many I seemed strange, incomprehensible and problematic, but you accepted me entirely, with all your bigheartedness, with legendary hospitality and openness.
As a history of art student, before I even thought of ever being befallen by poetry, during a field trip I admired your churches, monasteries, nature and people. The promenade. Those things which in a certain manner belonged to me being a Mediterranean, but have been taken away since they have died out in my country. “Longing for the South”. Here I experienced freedom and the overwhelming desire for mythical spaces.
I never forgot that in the middle of the 1970s, when in my Slovenia, thought only for a short period of time, I was under unbearable political pressure, you welcomed me as someone in whom – since he is a poet – you can put complete trust on all levels, you put a microphone in his hands and authorized him to do interviews for your television with the colleagues. Among us poets it is crystal clear that it is precisely Macedonia, it is precisely the Struga Poetry Evenings which have for almost fifty years been the centre, the living source and guardian of the dignity of our profession.
Of poetry I know nothing actually. I have read all books and forgot everything. From Derrida (I do not deny that his first texts have shocked me completely) I escaped to the United States where I used to meet young poets who when handshaking introduced themselves as “poets” as we in Europe say “carpenter” or “dentist”. It seemed endlessly fresh to me.
Words remind me, rush through me or eat me away and surprise me, I give into them. To sentences I recognize I leave all my freedom, even terror. And laziness. All things possible. All utter stupidities if they are in the mood for stupidities for all this occurs in a protected space of the unknown, the old and the new. It is a priori such if I recognize it as poetic, although I do not know whether this is a case of my imagination, a game or only joy. I am terribly irresponsible, but I have trust. There is a higher consciousness watching over me.