Maintenant #33: Eugenijus Ališanka
My creative points of departure were not history, not politics, not nation, but internal spiritual conversions and feelings… I took part in the constitutive SÄ…jÅ«dis meeting, I stood in the Baltic Way… I was standing hand-in-hand with my brother and hundreds of other people at the TV tower enclosed by tanks, Soviet solders broke the chain just a few meters from us and I kept a vigil all night at the Parliament, I built barricades. That life sucked me up more than writing, it seems even I had lost the distance with what was happening around… One good friend of mine during those days of the Independence movement shut away and nearly never left home while he was writing a book about the adventures of spirit; in his words, “those cannonades just want to distract me from my work“. I was living in a different way, but my poetry was maybe more shut away from life than my fellow. Maybe not from life: it simply lived another life…
In the 33rd of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Lithuanian poet Eugenijus Ališanka.
Five Poems
wearing army boots you clumped through the vineyards of god
somewhere on the adriatic in medana or priština maybe piran
since school days geography has been your blind spot
your worn overcoat faded by weather shows its original color
where your insignias were roman fatigue
or just the tedium at the fringes of the empire
patches stained with dirt and blood in the nights there was time enough
to think about possibilities of life about other lives here
about a woman about many women
imprisoned in attics of your dreams while the south wind
every morning blows in wreckage of jason’s ships…
By Eugenijus Ališanka.