Radičević: More attention is paid to poetry than ever

Montenegrin poets Jana Radičević and Marija Dragnić presented themselves at the international poetry festival that the Cultural Center of Belgrade has traditionally organized since 2001 on the occasion of World Poetry Day.

World Poetry Day, March 21, was established by UNESCO in 1999, and the Belgrade Cultural Center two years later, in cooperation with the poet Dubravka Đurić, relying on its own and overall tradition of organizing poetry programs in Belgrade.

This year, like every previous one, the event has a new thematic sign that, together with the concept, is designed by another poet.

The editor of this year's program is the poet and playwright Maša Seničić, and the program was presented on the online profiles of the Cultural Center from March 21 to 23.

Radičević reports impressions and details related to this year's event for "Vijesti".

"The whole project was really thought out in detail, starting with the title 'Paper rock scissors', distorted from the game of our childhood, through the number of participants that is equal to the number of combinations of that game, up to the selection of songs and scenes in the videos that have a stone as a leitmotif. Everything is in perfect agreement with each other - the editor, young poet and screenwriter Maša Seničić did a great job," says Radičević.

We were expected to create a selection of songs that dealt with issues of the essential, home, family, intimacy and similar themes. For that occasion, I chose the song 'the witch eats me and my brother', which evokes a fairy tale, but also talks about intimate relationships. But that was not the only prerequisite... For each of the three poems that will be published in the planned e-publication, a non-poetic text had to be found that would form a diptych with them. That, it seems to me, was the most challenging part, because the texts had to communicate with each other. For those who are curious, the videos are available on the platforms of the Cultural Center of Belgrade", continues Radičević.

The task of choosing poetry for the poetry festival in Belgrade that deals with issues of the essential, home, family, closeness and similar topics, was not difficult for her, because in that she herself finds the initial motives for her creativity.

"Lately, I've been working on themes from the cycle of poems with which I finished the first collection, the cycle that I like to call 'family'. Now I'm doing it in a slightly different way, because it's a long poem about water, which will soon be published in Austria. It is part of the project within my residency in Graz, which will also include a visual, i.e. multimedia part, that is, a performative performance," says Radičević.

She says that she would not call poetic inspiration inspiration and is still trying to find a word that would adequately describe the creative need...

"I wouldn't say it's inspiration, in fact it seems to me that there is no right word that describes that moment that happens after a long time of thinking and working out the topic 'within myself', but I need to read a lot in order to be able to write , and the structure, motifs, and even the style impose themselves on me, they are dictated by the theme," she points out.

Radičević points out that this year's World Poetry Day reminds us "of contemporary poets that we should not turn to until they are gone."

"I truly believe that no literature can be as interesting as that written by our contemporaries, nor can we understand any other as well as the one whose timeline we share. Readers often complain that there are no editions in bookstores and that they have to order or buy them when they cross the border. I don't need to explain the law of supply and demand - Everyone to the bookstores!", says the poet on that occasion.

When asked what is the position of poetry in Montenegrin society today, Radičević points out that she is satisfied with the current situation and adds that the "young literary scene" is evidently the most active.

"I would say that more attention is paid to poetry than ever. During this year's World Poetry Day, I had the opportunity to participate in another festival - POESIA 21, which is organized in Moscow, and which gathered many poets from all over the world, as many as 350, and took place online. And that is again only part of the contemporary poetry that is being created today... The literary scene in Montenegro is also active, especially the young literary scene, and especially the poets, and I would say that the works are reaching their readers", she says with pleasure and adds that the freedom that poetry gives her branches into many different paths - "how many right ones can be drawn from one point - infinitely many".

Since the Belgrade festival moved to the digital space, instead of discussions and panels, a dialogic e-publication was designed, and along with the editor of the program, the co-authors of that and video material are cameraman and director of photography Marko Milovanović and illustrator and graphic designer Srđa Dragović.

This year, the event relies on the children's game "Paper rock scissors" which is "based on a non-hierarchical cyclical system, with nine possible combinations of moves". Just as many young authors, who create in the same language, will present themselves through their verses this year, and they are, in addition to Montenegrin representatives: Đorđe Ivković from Serbia, Marija Dejanović from Croatia, Tomislav Augustinčić from Croatia, Radmila Petrović from Serbia, Alen Brlek from Croatia, Vladana Perlić and Anita Pajević from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

"The videos that make up this online event are intended as an intervention, not as an illustration. Since we are not able to invite the authors to guest performances, individual recordings were made for one work of each of them, and these audio-visual materials are part of the program as responses to the songs, instead of being just their presentation/reflection. Bearing in mind that the picture is taken separately, and that the poets will be present with their voice and text (not with their head/body), the World Poetry Day(s) in a well-known way deal directly with movement and distance: the spatialization of poetry and its associative materialization". it says in the explanation of the organizers.

With the concept of this year's program, we move the contextual limit of reading poems by regional authors, perceiving their works as a whole consistent in the intention of asking questions, although not necessarily in terms of style or motive. Each video also has subtitles in the original language, to make it easier to follow the text," say the organizers.

The Italian Institute of Culture in Belgrade provided additional support for this year's event, so three young Italian poets, Giulia Martini, Alma Spina and Beatrice Kristali, will be presented, whose poetry will be translated into Serbian for the first time, "especially for this occasion", they add. organizers.

Authors will send recordings of their readings and presentations, which will also be available to viewers with subtitles.

The entire program/content of the event will be available on the YouTube channel of the Cultural Center of Belgrade and on their Facebook page.

Poetry is an endless field

Jana Radičević was born in 1997 in Podgorica. She completed her studies in German studies at the Faculty of Philology in Nikšić, and as a student she was on exchange at the universities of Marburg and Graz.

Her first collection of poetry "if I say it can become true" was published in 2019 in Partizanska knjiga.

"That's right, the collection was published in 2019, and today the publishing house informed me that the edition was sold out, which made me very happy. I have always looked at poetry and its trends with an open mind. It's an endless field, so I 'frantically' explore it, and she shows me again and again 'how it can be done,'" says Radičević to "Vijesta".

She is also the youngest winner of the annual literary scholarship "Writer of the City of Graz" for 2020/21. which is awarded every year by the city of Graz.

She is a member of the literary group Forum of Young Writers, which gathers in the Cultural and Information Center "Budo Tomović" in Podgorica since 2015.

For her cycle of poems "Megalodon Lantimos" she won the second prize at the "Ulaznica" competition in 2017, and was a finalist in several literary competitions.

It was included in the selection for translation into German in the competition Time (without) Utopia. The Network of Young Writers, a project supported by the DAAD, has also announced translations into English, French, Slovenian and Greek.