Acceptance Speech for the Most Creative Book of the Year, 2025
given by the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore
First, I am grateful to the community of literary scholars and writers (who are so closely intertwined in our country that, I think, I will not be mistaken in addressing you in this way) for the honor of Seismografas (Seismograph) being selected as the most creative book of the year.
Second, writing and giving speeches is difficult – this is not like writing a poem! True, my colleague and friend Jūratė Čerškutė suggested that I write an occasional poem instead of a speech, but reading a hastily written occasional poem to you would be like playing the balalaika in the Philharmonic. I do not dare to do it.
I will start from a step away, and be, I hope, brief: a poet who has decided to become a poet and is writing his first poems has a lot of unmotivated courage – he often does not realize what awaits him or what will be required of him. He thinks he knows everything. He (at least this was the case in the past) is convinced that he carries sufficient cultural baggage and has the ability to say something new. And he is right – otherwise, he would not even be able to start. That courage is more than courage. It is a kind of audacity, a naivety, and a passion, along with the need to create. A motivated courage to write comes gradually, with experience and the acquisition of craft. Book after book. I have always avoided sacralizing or spiritualizing poetry and the process of writing. I thought and still think that craft (and when you are not rhyming, craft and skill are more difficult to see than when you are rhyming) is just as important as inspiration (which must be spoken about carefully and with a bit of common sense).
For a long time, writing poetry was easy for me. Now it’s becoming increasingly difficult. But this is also the normal developmental curve of a poet’s life and work. You write, and while writing, you gradually become calcified. A person, and a poet too, tends over time to look for what is simpler and more comfortable, unknowingly falling into the trap of ease and convenience (unless, of course, he is a genius – they avoid these traps).
Therefore, a poet, like a kettle, periodically needs to be decalcified. Critics often do this with their reviews and articles, and sometimes with demonstrative silence. But an author who has some self-awareness and can criticize himself can come to this realization on his own. As I wrote these thoughts, I began to suspect that I was actually bragging because, of course, I would be one of those self-critical authors. At least, I would like to think so. I would also like to think that by writing Seismograph, I decalcified myself – at least a little bit.
Seismograph is probably the first book that I wrote with a conscious plan, conceptually driven and not just guided by life and biography. When writing Seismograph, I wanted to unravel myself from my various conditions, from my ability not to be, and even from my clean being.1The author is alluding to the titles of his three previous poetry collections: Būsenos (Conditions), Išmokau nebūti (I Learned How Not to Be), Švaraus būvimo (Clean Being). Of course, you can’t escape yourself, so I didn’t take some radically different path – some of the motifs and themes have remained the same, and the prose poem has also traveled from one book to another, only here it has probably received its most extensive development. When leafing through the newly published book, I realized that I couldn’t continue on this path either, for it too leads to a dead end – either you change yourself at least a little, or you become a self-replicating poetic virus.
This week I finished reading Rolandas Rastauskas’s last book, Atminties stalčiai (Drawers of Memory). (It’s quite sad that when talking about books, the word “last” becomes a fact and not just an awkward usage of that word.) I will quote a couple of his sentences that I think would be suitable for Seismograph as well: “I have always believed that questions that do not have immediate and unambiguous answers briefly pause a person’s, a thing’s, even a geographical formation’s time of existence. While you are looking for an answer to a paradoxical question, you are alive, still in the game, not yet kicked out of the network of fruitful relationships and perspectives.” Here, what caught my eye most was the words “geographical formation” – all of Seismograph is a series of “geographical formations,” a kind of album of the relationships between the city and nature, between human beings and their territories. The human being in this book is both a detail of the landscape, its creator, and its observer. The human being here is also the one who has dug down long and patiently into the abyss and now walks on its edge. The human being here is also the one who remembers and bears witness.
And I simply hope that Seismograph asks more than it answers, warns more than it proposes, and testifies more than it accuses.
In conclusion, I will summarize this way: what I would like most to avoid seeing is for poetry to become a test of loyalty or an indicator of views, just as I would not like the saying “let’s not confuse art and politics” to become a rule that is followed once more by default.
Poetry always needs resistance, the resistance of the world. The world of poetry begins and ends with improvisation. Good poetry is not lukewarm. It must be a bone stuck in the throat, a freeze-frame of life, a moment in which all the living, even the dead, are present. It must be an equation, a question, a testimony, a never-ending game…
Perhaps I’ve said enough, because I feel that I am again drifting into rhetorical lyricism. So I thank you all again.
