Like the Thinking of Trees

Absurdist

The poet Tomaž Šalamun did not like to speak about his five days in a Yugoslav prison.

When he was 23, Šalamun wrote a poem calling his countrymen “ideologues with whorish ideologies,” “trained intellectuals with sweaty hands,” and “rectors with muzzles.” None of that got him in trouble.

What got him in trouble was the dead cat mentioned in the middle of the poem. The Interior Minister, whose last name literally meant cat, took it personally. “He felt that he was attacked—and he put me in prison,” Šalamun later said, recalling the international uproar. Once free, Šalamun did the unexpected, refusing to reprint the poem in any of his books. When asked why, he said, “Others suffered much more than I did.”

But this tale doesn’t end there.

After being released from prison, Šalamun was barred from holding any government job (and in Yugoslavia, most jobs were government jobs). So, he walked door-to-door, selling black market encyclopedias. Once, he knocked on a woman’s door. She said she only read Proust, Kafka, and Šalamun.

“I am Šalamun,” he said.

And critics call his life’s work absurdist.

A “Difficult” Poet

What is the context for all this? When Šalamun was born in 1941, his native Yugoslavia was invaded by the Nazi-led Axis powers. His family, as the poet made a point to repeat in interviews, were persecuted by fascists and “suffered through two wars, fascism, communism—the center of Europe was really crushed. ” During the poet’s lifetime, Yugoslavia underwent a series of terrifying political crises: the decades-long presidency-for-life of the dictator Tito, the 1980s economic downturns, and ethnic conflicts of enormous scale, culminating in the Balkan Wars and the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Imagine a world in which pronouncing the word bread in the wrong accent could get you killed. Imagine watching the very name of your birthplace, the Balkan region, become a term for political explosion. From 1993 on, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia tried political and military leaders from the region for war crimes and genocide: these trials continued through Šalamun’s life and for years after his death.

Critics label Šalamun a “difficult poet,” a “fragmented poet,” an absurdist, a surrealist—but this “difficulty” of style happened during a moment of extreme historical, social, and political “difficulty.” It is not a stretch to imagine that the fragmentation of his poetry reflects the fragmentation of his homeland, perhaps even the fragmentation of the identity of everyone within that country. The point here is not to say that every absurdist must be standing in front of a burning building. The point is to say: we must open our eyes to see if there is in fact a building on fire behind the absurdist reading his verses. If so, might there be a whole other level of meaning we are missing?

“My chaotic background,” Šalamun said, “shows in my language.”

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Let's consider Šalamun’s language: open Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems 1964–2014 (Milkweed Editions, 2024) to any page and see tonal vitality, as if a child were playing with nouns instead of found objects. The pages are so filled with exclamations and fresh turns of phrase that one senses a kind of alluring arbitrariness, as if one were tapping into an energy source that no one knew existed, driven by vocabulary instead of combustion. That energy doesn’t only fly off the page, it produces pages. I have heard different numbers cited as to how many books Šalamun has published. Some say 48, others 49. Brian Henry, the poet’s longtime translator, says Šalamun published 52 individual collections—but what’s a book or two or three between friends?

The author and the text still need a reader, and Šalamun was rarely shy about addressing his own readers, whether on the subject of how he should be read, or indeed how he felt about readers in general:

Whoever reads me
As ironic
Will be guilty
 
Before God
I don’t care about
Your decadent
 
Defense systems,
All this embossed
Criminal shit
 
You proclaim
To be humor and
The cornerstone
 
Of your
Historical
Experience

About the reader, he says:

Like a loyal devoted
Dog, I lick your
Golden head,
Reader.

How’s that for poetic difficulty?

His Dualities

About Tomaž Šalamun, Šalamun says:

Tomaž Šalamun is a monster.
Tomaž Šalamun is a sphere rushing in the air.
No one knows his orbit.
He lies down in twilight, he floats in twilight.
The people and I look at him, astonished.

It might be useful to dwell for a moment on the idea of monstrosity here.

One aspect of this work that might be especially useful for American readers in the second decade of the 21st century is this poet’s perspective on how a protest poem might function, or, rather, on what indeed a protest poem or literary subversion is:

When I came out of jail, people from the Secret Service—the UDBA—said, “Oh, you lost your steam, you don’t write any protest poems anymore.” My second book, still published by myself, was about butterflies, about nothing. It was more subversive than if I had written protest poems, since the government needed to show its pluralism and democracy. One has to be very precise not to be corrupt or used. I was fighting to be free within my writing. And just this was subversive, and therefore political.

In our time, when lack of nuance is apparent and a slogan of “who isn’t with us is against us” appears on all sides of the political divide, Šalamun’s experience seems, to me, priceless.

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What I love about Brian Henry’s monumental work of lucidly translating and selecting the poems for Kiss the Eyes of Peace is the marvelous variation between the direct voice of poems such as those above, some more rhapsodic poems, and other more dreamlike narratives about his family and friends. I am also quite moved by the eerie feeling of premonition which appears in later, previously untranslated, work. “Clarity is our deepest mystery,” Mahmoud Darwish is reported to have said. This comes across very strongly in Šalamun’s late poetry whose images are as strange as they are perfectly, strangely clear:

My small bones love
your small bones.
 
A tremendous feeling.
Flowers grow above us.
 
People stomp.
Some have wet shoes.
 
They light candles and smack their lips.
They’re attractive. Our
 
small bones—entire little owls.
If you dig them out of
 
the ground, they frighten
no one They’re sacred
 
bones. Ossa sacra,
mamma mia.

The poet in these lines speaks as if from the underworld, as if he already knows his funeral will happen on a sunny day in Ljubljana, and there will be 300 poets in attendance—and he is speaking directly to them. Yet his voice doesn’t cease the strange, sometimes vivid, at other times comedic wonderment. Despite—or because of—all the comedy, surrealism, and absurdity, his main project is the ongoingness of awe. This curious duality is at the core of the poet’s work. There is a surrealist, absurdist, ecstatic outburst, yes, but there are also moments of prolonged quiet that attain a magnetic quality. Reading these late poems, I can’t seem to forget Šalamun’s long silence during the Balkan Wars, and how there was something both political and spiritual about it. Yes, in retrospect, this duality feels very magnetic:

During the Balkan Wars, when Brodsky and Miłosz were able to write something, I was completely silent. I didn’t write a line of anything from 1989 to 1994. I just stopped writing. I think if you did intend to show that anger or depression, you wouldn’t be able to write good poetry. But just being what you are, to be free within your writing, this is also the center of the real responsibility of the world. Therefore, your freedom is a political act.

His Influences

Šalamun’s influences are well buried. The poets he always praises are not necessarily the poets he borrows from. Here is one of his most famous lyrics:

This is Tomaž Šalamun, he went to the store
With his wife Maruska to buy milk
So that he’d have milk to drink.
And this is history.

 

One might hear here the echo of Šalamun’s beloved Khlebnikov: “I need but little! A cup of milk, / a crust of bread. The sky. / And, overhead, these clouds!” But I am more inclined to hear the direct link with Amichai: “A man all alone in a room / practices on a drum, that too is history.”

Or, take this lyric, which Šalamun once told me was influenced by Ashbery:

History
Of heaven’s growth
Is the movement
 
Of every eyelash
On every
Born and unborn
 
Human face.
. . . every pain
Of every trembling
Of the earth is
 
Every cry
Of all the children set down
At birth

Yes, one might compare the above to Ashbery of Three Poems (1972), which Šalamun often mentioned to his friends, but I sense a direct link to Blake:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
 
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

Having said that, I sense that the best commenter on Šalamun’s process is Šalamun himself: “All my / thinking / is // technical. / Like the thinking / o trees.”

Many Šalamuns

Šalamun’s is a kind of writing that “makes many strange and inscrutable observations,” as Irishman Colm Tóibín suggested in The Guardian, a kind of writing that “makes you sit up and not think, which is perhaps the real point of poetry.”

Perhaps. The most convincing criticism of this work seems to come from Slovenian literary critic Miklavž Komelj, who, while praising Šalamun’s inventiveness in the literary journal Transom, hastens to note that

in this dynamism there is also a monotone quality, which the poet makes no attempt to hide. It’s as if this ecstasy resulted from spinning endlessly in a circle, like the whirling dervishes—a religious order, incidentally, that was founded by the mystic Rumi, one of Šalamun’s favorite poets. It seems that the intensity of Šalamun’s language lies precisely in the endless insistence of its pulsation.

Perhaps. To my mind, it would be imprudent to make broad critical gestures in relation to the body of work that has enormous tonal range and spans thousands of pages.

There are, to put it simply, many Šalamuns. Sometimes, reading his poems, I get a sense Šalamun is like a spiritual seeker walking through the rubble of disbelief, searching with his flashlight for a fellow human being, and unable to find one.

Finally, he begins to sing to himself while looking, and he is looking so much, and can’t find anyone, but he never stops looking.

And then he finds one! And then he is screaming again from ecstasy because he’s found a dozen! But they are all Šalamun.

My Šalamun is a poet of light touch, as spiritual as he is playful, a poet whose sense of humor is combined with surrealism in a way not unlike (to my own surprise) these lines from Stevens:

Remus, blow your horn!
I’m ploughing on Sunday,
Ploughing North America.
Blow your horn!

I can’t recall if it was 2005 or 2006 when I visited Šalamun in Pittsburgh, but I know it was the end of semester, and, as always, Šalamun was surrounded by a small crowd of adoring young poets. Most of them were extremely comfortable with him—he was a master of finding the correct tone with many very different people.

As the poet was talking about packing his things to go back to Slovenia, one adoring student made an offhand compliment that after Šalamun left, the university should put a plaque on the door saying "a great poet lived here."

“When I leave they will indeed put a sign,” Šalamun said thoughtfully. Then he smiled. “It will say that the room is available for rent.”

After Šalamun died, many essays remembering him were published, one after another, all of them focusing on the over-the-top tonalities of his work. Let’s try and not confuse the man with the speaker of his poems. The speaker in his lyrics enjoys extremities of tone, yes. But the man I remember was once asked at a party what was the most important thing human beings tend to ignore.

There was a brief pause in the conversation. Then Šalamun chuckled.

“Modesty,” he said.

Echo

On some days I wonder if Šalamun’s absurdism is in fact a rather realistic portrayal of a postmodern, hyper-mediated world where we witness and are often terrified of our species’ power. In this society in which a modern person is shocked into realizing that, intellectually, one has very little room to dream anymore, a response such as Šalamun’s is actually quite logical—maybe even the only sane response. He is reaching for the extremes because in this dry period, a human being (as human beings always do) is longing for the ecstatic moment.

Šalamun is a postmodern poet, yes, but there is also an echo of something shamanistic, ancient, and raw in his writings.

Human beings have lived on the land now known as Slovenia for more than 250,000 years. A pierced cave bear bone flute, dating from approximately 43100 BP, was found there in 1995. It’s quite possibly the oldest musical instrument discovered in the world.

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Centuries and inventions later, we still long for music.