The theme of this year’s symposium of Struga poetry evenings is more than present and prevalent today. We believe that it will enable different approaches towards the relation poetry – mass media. Indisputably, number of questions can be opened in the context of this issue. We can impose some of them: is the poetry lost in the waves of the popularity initiated and injected by (and in) the mass –media? Are the great communicational opportunities offered and enabled by the media unconquered field for poetry? Did the industry for fun (cultural industry – Frankfurt school) expel the poetry out of the mass media? Is the emancipating potential (Valter Benjamin) of the mass media not fully utilized towards the opportunity of the poetry to achieve its desired smooth communication with the readers. Or simply put: poetry and its authors and interpreters have a particularly ambivalent relationship with mass media. On one side, they want the poetry to maintain its glory and inimitability (located in the past and partly invoked by the presence), but on the other hand they want a broad communication and popularity (necessarily provoked by the presence, reality and by the “ecstasy of communication”). The crucifixion of poetry is a challenge for us again to consider questions related to binary oppositions: grace and popularity, authenticity and simulation, transience and eternity, etc.., or to get out of their frames and try to build an inclusive relation dichotomy between them.

Of course, this are just short features and considerations of the possible sub –topics which can be included within our symposium in Struga in the context on the main theme : “Poetry and the mass media”.

We believe that this topic is sufficiently broad to cover various approaches, and that your participation will contribute towards successful interpretation and evaluation of issues related to the relation "poetry-mass media”.

Yours sincerely

Prof. D-r Ivan Deparoski, moderator of the symposium of the Struga poetry evening’s festival