What you (may have) missed on 3:AM this week:
Interviewed: Greory Frye talks to Richard Thomas
Reviewed: Max Dunbar on Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?; Joe Kennedy on Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times
Non-fiction: Stuck Inn XI, Charles Thomson on the art Damien Hirst stole
Fiction: ‘Remains’ by Michael Keenaghan
Poetry: ‘Five Poems’ by Steven Dube; ‘Ten Poems’ by Zvonko Karanović; In the 27th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Serbian poet Zvonko Karanović:
The Serbian literati disgraced themselves in the 90s. There were no real disidents, nor any kind of radical resistance to the dictatorship. The most ingratiating to the authorities were the nationalistic poets. They seriously took it as their task to establish the highest national goals. In the late 80s and early 90s the rivers of patriotic verse in an archaic/neo-nationalist language were flowing in books and literature magazines. The maintream of poetry had turned back to the 19th century from modernism and post modernism, towards the romantic zeal needed to establish a national identity. For their activities the nationalistic poets were awarded flats, membership in the Academy of Sciences, saw their poems published in anthologies, canonized by literary prizes. Unfortunately, after the collapse of the former regime the literature did not undergo any significant renaissance. In the small incestuous environment of the Serbian literary scene, there was no strength for subversion. The consequences of the moral black hole that swallowed the literary Serbia in the 90s are felt even today. It is hard to avoid its gravity field that lost its strength, but left chaos in the value system. Hanging on to the literary tradition, shut to the new methods of writing and performing poetry and ignoring the spirit of the times are still some of the largest obstacles that the new generation of poets has to cope with. The generation of the new literary critics, or those yet to be born, will have just one task: to consider the 90s in a serious critical manner, to systematize and revaluate artistic achievements, to unmask the new fake classics. The infestation of the cultural zeitgeist by political ideologies in the 90s created a great discontinuity in the development of Serbian poetry. This development must be jumpstarted, if for no other reason but to reinstante & continue the line of great and honorable predecessors.
