Poetry as a medium and space of memory

The literary program of the 39th Theatre City Festival continued the day before yesterday at Poet's Square with a guest appearance Radomir D. Mitrić, who presented his poetry collection “Kino Mediteran” to the audience. The book addresses the subtlety of the fate of a poetic being, the power of lyrical expression and the possibilities of language in reaching the essence of the world and the truth about man. The moderator of the evening was Dr. Jana Aleksic, writer and senior research associate at the Institute of Literature and Arts in Belgrade.

In her opening remarks, Dr. Aleksić recalled the festival's decades-long tradition and the importance of presenting authors like Mitrić.

"Looking forward to a beautiful poetic occasion, and how else but at the Poetry Square, within the framework of the City of Theatre event, an event that has a very long, decades-long tradition, we can speak and present the figure and work of one of our more prominent, distinguished poets, now I would say of the middle generation, Radomir D. Mitrić. I would like to take this opportunity in this greeting to thank the organizers for the invitation and for this opportunity to explore a poetic space that abounds in various cultural, spiritual and civilizational references, and which certainly touches on this space in which we are currently located," she said.

Mitrić expressed his pleasure at participating in the festival, which he considers one of the largest events in the region.

"When the whole of Budva actually becomes an open theater and the identity of a place is built, not only through culture but also through tourism, but actually most importantly of all, the people are the most important thing in a city. I was in Budva in '96 and then, perhaps, I decided that I would become a poet. Budva has always been an important place for me to which I always returned. I didn't come for long, but of course I followed what was happening at the festival, I used to be in the audience. What is valuable about this festival is that it is multidisciplinary - it is not only theater, but it is also literature, it is also painting, it is exhibitions, it is concerts. The greatest wealth of this festival is in this multidisciplinary nature."

Speaking about his own Mediterranean identity, Mitrić emphasized:

"My ancestors are from Montenegro, from Piva, but I grew up in Bosnia, in Dalmatia, and occasionally I came to Boka and Budva, and not only to Budva but to many places. There is a lot of sea in me, in fact I was looking for the sea on land, where the Pannonian Sea used to be. I wrote a novel based on that. I consider myself a continental Mediterranean, how can you White Hamwash, one of my favorite thinkers, claims. I am actually a Mediterranean who lives on land and remembers the sea with longing and writes about it. Many arts influence what I do, what I write. I thought of, for example Ignatius Job, a great painter, or Brand Murata "who painted the sea while he lived in Serbia. I dedicated poems to them," he said.

Mitrić also explained the concept of "sprezzatura" Baldassare Castilian, who inspired him.

"It's about something that Baldassare Castiglione called the term "sprezzatura" in his book "Manual for the Courtier" from 1528. What does it mean? It means that you have to be nonchalant in everything, and when things are difficult for you, you actually have to find some unbearable lightness of existence. Many great painters, and this was not only a literary, but also a painting direction, were guided by this thought of his. And while I lived far from the sea, I tried to achieve that kind of lightness of life with which people on the coast and the Mediterranean belt lived and existed," says Mitrić.

Speaking further about the symbolism in his poetry, Mitrić said:

“The Island is the principle of separation from the technocratic world and the preservation of the self, the Tower is the principle of defense, with a beautiful word, a full language or a contemplative polyglossia, from a conquering reality, while the Lighthouse symbolizes the possibility of poetry to send a message of meaning to someone. Borges is perhaps constantly present at the table where I write. He has a poem “Hymn”, which is very close to Sumatraism Crnjanski. I wanted to write a paper on Borges as a Sumatran. He is a magician, the first writer to understand the importance of the text and the library's understanding of literature. The book will always survive, even if it comes in the form of holograms and QR codes. Borges "He must be on a literary pedestal because he is a complete writer, just like Crnjanski. They wrote equally well in all genres," Mitrić pointed out, explaining the choice of the collection's title and the concept of cinema as a symbol in his poetry.

"I actually took the phenomenon of cinema in the sense that it is a screen that is a living image. That is always an advantage over other arts because it is actually an art that summarizes everything. I wanted to make a video for every song in this book that I wrote for seven years where the audience would come and they wouldn't have to listen to me but would simply watch the songs"...

Speaking about myth as one of the key motifs, Mitrić said that there is no indigenous text...

“Since only God creates ex nihilo, i.e. from nothing... He does not need to wait for anything to hatch from an egg or from some other form. Myth is very significant because it is something that is a kind of image that comes to life, as for example Joyce "I took Ulysses, but certainly Joyce's Ulysses would not have existed without Homer. So great literature is a great synthesis, but always or in most cases it is some kind of mythopoeia, some mythological image," he points out.

Mitrić particularly emphasized the importance of the feminine principle in his poetics.

“The feminine principle is important to me because the entire world's lyricism came out of that anime, from what is actually eternal femininity. And in fact, the entire world is a struggle of that feminine principle. And the world only exists because women are behind the whole story. All the great empires up to the present day have been so powerful because behind all those rulers, for example, stood some powerful women that we are not even aware of.”

Finally, Mitrić spoke about poetry as a spiritual medium and his personal need for writing and reading.

"A poet is a kind of medium, where certain messages are manifested. It's up to you how much you allow something to settle in you, and it's always a state of coming out of yourself. When you write a poem, you always write it for someone else out of some kind of otherness, out of the need to talk, out of the need to tell stories. I've always preferred reading to writing. When I started writing, I wanted to write sententious poems in every verse, but I also learned to expand that verse, to make it baroque," concluded Mitrić.

Supporting young poets and enjoying reading

He spoke of his blog "Hyperboreja" as a platform for supporting young poets.

"I see myself more as a reader, I'm that Borgesian. He always claimed that a writer must be a reader first and foremost. I will always be more happy with someone else's text than with my own. Nowadays, I read mostly poetry, but I read a lot of young poets. Many published their poems on my blog for the first time. That may not mean much, but it meant a lot to them at that moment. I was in that situation too. I tried to have more younger poets, and what I posted from eminent names was what I was reading at that moment. I posted pictures of my favorite painters, music, I haven't changed the concept since 2006. When I was going to stop, people kept showing up and sending me their texts and I didn't want to turn them down, so I found a way to revive it. There are the fewest of my texts, they remain as documents, and today everything that's worth reading is on the internet. You're not really present if you're not there," he said.