Two of the most important poetry books to appear in Lithuania in 2025 are Marialė (Cantus Mariales) by Giedrė Kazlauskaitė (b. 1980) and Seismografas (Seismograph) by Marius Burokas (b. 1977). Both writers belong to the middle generation of Lithuanian poets. For both, this is their fifth poetry book. Both are also active and well-known figures in the literary world and, among other pursuits, have spent considerable time working as editors of cultural publications (Giedrė at Šiaurės Atėnai and Marius at Vilnius Review). To mark the publication of their new books, the editorial team invited Marius and Giedrė to talk about poetry, life, their generation, Vilnius, the unsettling times we live in, and other questions that concern them. Here we present the results of their correspondence.
Giedrė. Hello, Marius. This year we both published poetry books. We write poems rather sparingly and we rarely publish our works. What meaning do poetry books have in today’s world?
Marius. The easiest way to answer your question is with a paradox – the meaning and necessity of poetry books lie in their meaninglessness and lack of necessity. But that’s the easy way out. The harder way is to justify it. It seems to me that both of us are poets with a sense of responsibility (only it manifests mostly through poetry), and that is why we wrote what we wrote – Marialė and Seismografas. I don’t know whether it’s a blessing or a curse to be a poet-chronicler of both my inner states and the states of the world. I wrote that sentence, and immediately a red light went on – you’re overestimating yourself, it’s not like that, who cares. On the other hand, before the war in Ukraine, I was more skeptical. Now I look at the Ukrainians (and at us) and I say that poetry helps to survive (psychologically and spiritually). At least for some of us.
What do you think? And one more thing: I keep thinking about our poems, about Gytis Norvilas, and about a few other poets. I know you don’t like it, and I don’t like it, those generational definitions, but lately I’ve become curious – what do we, this loosely defined “generation,” have in common?
G. You see, that adaptability function turns on and it helps us to survive. Henrikas Radauskas probably would not understand it, though an émigré’s fate was not the sweetest. Sometimes I ask myself why am I wasting paper if I’m helping only myself to survive, but I have no power for evil, bloodshed, or climate change. I avoid aestheticism; today it would be equivalent to cynicism. Currently I’m reading the works submitted to Vilnius University’s annual young creators’ competition “Philology Autumn.” The paradigm of poetry has changed – young people already write in a completely different way, not according to the rules we imagined. Some write without drama – for poetry, jokes are enough. Others write with excessive drama – they’re very sensitive to phenomena we wouldn’t even have noticed. There are people who write half in Lithuanian, half in English (within a single poem). That’s possible too, only I realize that I’m living in a changed world. Then even Gytis’s publicistic writing becomes pleasant for me, although I disagree with it more often than I agree.
What do you think of poetry written by the younger generation? I mean the very young – the kind you hear at the young poets’ readings at the Druskininkai Poetry Fall festival. Doesn’t it highlight that we are aging?
M. Somehow you avoided the question about generations – I understand that it may not seem particularly important, but just as you mentioned that feeling of a changed world, I too, when reading poets of my own age (or slightly older or a bit younger), feel an ever-stronger sense of kinship – while others grow more distant, especially the young ones.
And speaking of the young generation – I try to read all the new poetry releases (especially books, since I can no longer keep up with publications) and get a sense of who is doing what. Although the abundance of new names already forces even me to feel confused. While reading young poets’ work, I increasingly grumble about this or that, but at the same time, I understand that there’s a lot I no longer understand. With age, your understanding of poetry calcifies, just like one’s thinking :)
And what I hear at the young poets’ readings often doesn’t grab my attention – not because it’s unripe, clumsy, etc. – that I can understand and see. It’s the path all young poets go through. I also see the potential in some. I note those who may become good poets, I watch how they develop, how many of them later stop writing, go silent, and how many break through everything (it’s a minority, of course). I won’t list any names, but I see two extremes – either they write completely about themselves and drown in their personal experiences or only about social issues. There is also a third path of incoherent experiments that writers take. I don’t see a balance between these yet. Of course, they need to learn to distance themselves from their own self.
What do you think of them? Can we learn anything from them (apart from the courage to perform:) )? It seems to me that we still manage to keep up with the changed world – but is that necessary? Is it a conscious effort, or does it simply happen? And how much of that world should be let into poetry?
G. Yes, reducing everything to generational differences can be careless. When I read the poetry of the older generation (Ramutė Skučaitė, Aidas Marčėnas, Donaldas Kajokas, Antanas A. Jonynas, Tomas Venclova), I feel a mismatch. Some of them are wonderful experts and I don’t know if any of the younger ones would ever be capable of that. Probably none. But first of all, the worldview doesn’t match – we express even exhaustion differently. We treat language much more casually, we leave traces of roughness, of unpolished edges in a poem – deliberately. Donaldas Kajokas once wrote a poem about a rough-skinned, rough-hewn woman (we can assume it’s a metaphor for poetry) – and that image, strangely enough, has influenced my worldview much more than all of Kajokas’s crystalline poetry! Mykolas Sauka’s wooden sculptures also have that splinteriness, although his prose, it seems, does not – both the language and the composition are rather smooth and traditional.
I consider the rise of the internet and our settling into virtuality an epistemic break. Through that I can identify with the younger generation. I got used to living online (I write about this in my poem “Pirmutinė atostogų diena” (“The First Day of Vacation”). At first I even liked it, thinking I could manage it! Later it saddened and frightened me, and now, as new health challenges have emerged, it brings a feeling of helplessness. I miss the pre-internet times, when we weren’t in this network, and at the same time, I realize that’s impossible. I must stay there as long as I am more or less functional and doing some kind of work. It’s frightening to drift away from the present, from knowledge, from current events. It’s almost as terrifying as falling ill with some disease that cripples the nervous system. When I read the collection of Janina Degutytė’s letters compiled by Giedrė Šmitienė, I was enchanted by how many living contacts there were back then! Even if based on daily necessity, on poverty. I observe some older writers who refuse an excessive presence in virtuality. In their work, I see a good deal of spite, catastrophism, a mismatch with reality, and pointless resistance to change – and that is not appealing either. I observe the work of both younger and older writers – I find it interesting. From the younger ones, we could learn openness to what they read (I’m talking about myself, not you, of course). They do not shy away from pop culture and are able to analyze it. There are things I can no longer grasp – film, music, TV series. When we’re no longer able to keep up with the essential conflicts in politics, that’s when we can no longer keep up with the changed world (at least that’s how I check myself). Should that be let into poetry? For now, I let it in cautiously. Now, I couldn’t simply sit “under the branch of a white acacia.”1A quotation from the Lithuanian émigré poet Henrikas Radauskas’s classic poem “Dainos gimimas” (“Birth of a Song”). I think you can’t either.
M. For some reason I immediately latched onto that inability to grasp things. I realize with horror that I haven’t been to the theater for maybe ten years and am hopelessly behind, though I do watch series regularly (and I’d argue with anyone who tried to tell me that they (well, at least some of them) are worse than Lithuanian theater :D ). I try to more or less keep track of and view the more important art exhibitions, and that’s probably it. I don’t have much time for concerts either. Essentially, I’ve shrugged off FOMO, except that I sometimes gnaw at myself for not going to a literary event. Overall, I’ve become slow like a snail.
I also identify with the younger generation through my children – they keep showing me some unseen corner of the world, more often virtual than real, and I admit that sometimes I absolutely don’t understand. But anime, manga, horror films, music, comics, and certain jokes connect us :) From them I learn slang and even ways of speaking – a translator needs that. On the other hand, you yourself have children, and on top of that you teach – you can question them about the matters that concern you.
By the way, your openness to what you read is enviable. I read your short reviews in the Šiaurės Atenai journal, and I’m amazed at how much of such a variety someone can read. And how many of those things are absolutely uninteresting to me :D But I think a considerable part of the books I read would also be uninteresting to you. I admire your determination to read so many Lithuanian authors. I’m often gnawed by guilt that the percentage of Lithuanian authors in my reading (aside from poetry) is small – maybe a quarter, maybe even less. There are so many strange things in the world that I haven’t read, and time is scarce. That’s why I feel a bit detached from Lithuanian literature, even though it might seem that I’m everywhere, participate in everything, know everything, know everyone.
The names of the older poets you listed (well, perhaps except Skučaitė) are important to me too, but yes, there is a great deal of mismatch. Often, to be honest, I regret that I wasn’t given that mastery – I couldn’t write a rhymed poem (although who knows – I’ve never seriously tried, but I also have no desire at all).
You jump between forms more freely, you take risks (or do you?) and even rhyme. I think you are braver in poetry than I am. Some of the fences you’ve climbed over are ones I wouldn’t dare (at least not yet) to climb over myself.
In general, you’ve tried more genres. I’m itching to write prose. I even know what and how, but then I think about the time it would require, and I hesitate. Another reason: I wouldn’t be able to translate anything. Which of the two is more important to me?
G. I mention Skučaitė because there are almost no older women poets. Well, there are a few names, but they were never considered significant. Skučaitė and Palčinskaitė are perceived as children’s poets. That phenomenon does not escape my notice. Aldona Elena Puišytė deserves to be distinguished for her moral stance during the Soviet era and her resistance activity. But beyond that, there are almost none. Even during our studies, we were told that there are none – you need a lot of mental resources to manage to inhabit that role.
For me, unlike you, Lithuanian studies are becoming increasingly important in my reading, even all sorts of trash, hack writing. Julius Sasnauskas regularly sends me gifts – books published in the émigré community after the war – you can find anything there. I had never analyzed them before. I read the classics of exile mostly from contemporary anthologies. In the Šiaurės Atėnai journal, I have started a new column – “Nečiupinėtoji lituanistika” (“Untouched Lithuanian Studies”). I find it interesting that at that time, the book was understood as a medium for spreading and maintaining Lithuanian identity. It had all sorts of mythologies about how they had to leave El Dorado unwillingly. It’s incredibly interesting because these books were published by lawyers, public figures, and intellectuals. Even if the plot is delirious, it still communicates something (most often it postulates Lithuanian stereotypes as a value to be preserved), and studying that is fascinating.
Right now, I’m reading an interview in the journal Metai. We are mentioned there as well. They argue about you: Akvilina Cicėnaitė calls you socially minded, while Neringa Butnoriūtė calls you an engaged intellectual. Have you read it? What do you think about it yourself?
M. There are also very personal things within that idea – when you put it melodramatically, my everyday life is a struggle with an innate laziness, slacktivism, wasting time on nonsense, etc. (I realize I’m not the only one like that). That’s probably why I take on many things. Besides, it’s always better to know than not to know, and to do rather than not to do. On the other hand, something always stops me at a certain line. I couldn’t develop public activity and give so much of myself to others as, for example, the most visible members of the Cultural Assembly’s2The Cultural Assembly is a civic movement that formed in the autumn of 2025, after the Lithuanian Seimas brought the populist party Nemuno Aušra (Nemunas Dawn) into the ruling coalition and handed it the post of Minister of Culture. initiative group do. So Laima Kreivytė observed well there that “not the one who leads, but the one who is personally involved.”
I also try not to cross that boundary where a writer turns into an influencer, that is, where there is more influencer than writer left in them. It’s a complicated matter, how to balance it, how to resist the many requests to promote this or that (in literature there are no fewer of them than in business), to say a good word, to avoid emotional blackmail. That’s why I limit my presence to one or two social media networks. I try not to overdo it and not to pander. Those “tectonic shifts of personality,” as you call them, frighten me a lot.
Lately, keeping the cultural protest in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot about a writer’s activism – among us it is very small (if we compare it, for example, with the Sąjūdis period3Sąjūdis (also known as the Reform Movement of Lithuania) was an organization whose goal was to seek the return of independent status for Lithuania.). The most prolific activists among artists are those in interdisciplinary fields, dance, and theater, while writers remain in the shadows. I don’t know, maybe that’s how it should be – after all, someone still has to reflect on and (de)scribe everything that’s happening. Sooner or later all of this will become material for written works. One way or another. What do you think about that?
G. Oh, I understand those requests very well – I experienced that while working in an editorial office. It seems to me that among writers, there aren’t many who can speak freely from the soapbox. I don’t mean to diminish anyone – on the contrary, I admire Laima’s talent, I value her extroverted traits, I’ve even encouraged her to go into politics. Or even if there were more people for whom public speaking is a pleasure, very few would speak from the soapbox without spouting nonsense. This is a serious cultural problem. I looked over the proposed vice-ministers: it’s some kind of horror. They share shallow influencer posts and the dumbest memes on Facebook. Is this how politicians understand culture? Maybe it’s good that the most active protesters are people from dance and theater because they can present what we are striving for in a more attractive and clearer way to the public. I don’t expect that writers will write much about this. I suspect this topic remains for social media, or at best, for opinion pieces. Did they write about the pandemic? About wars? (Some things were written about, of course, but not in prose.) It’s a different mode of reflection, much more introverted. It seems to me that what you are doing for Ukraine with like-minded people is completely enough. Others will serve as the heralds because everyone has their own part. Writers are not a passive community, even if they don’t operate in the Seimas.
I want to get back to those genre experiments again. I take risks, and sometimes I even put things into verse. I know what exact rhymes are, but I don’t want them – they feel banal, embarrassing to repeat. Art school left its imprint on me – you try things, even if they don’t work out. I remember, when I was younger, the cultural periodicals talked a lot about a writer’s craft, about knowing metrics, and of course about how we, the youth, know nothing. At the time it seemed funny – life had changed, after all, and it was hard to imagine we’d ever need those isosyllabisms. Today I’d quite like to write a collection of fables – I’d moralize to my heart’s content. The only question is whether I’d still know how, because untrained skills atrophy. Besides, there aren’t enough animals in my line of sight. I’d need to return at least to fairy tales, folklore, to watch birds, to see a horse. You probably don’t fantasize about such nonsense, do you?
M. I still think that writers will eventually write about everything – they just need more time and distance to sort everything onto its shelves. And we probably won’t get any straightforward novels. But the fact that our writing is seeing more genre mixing, clumsy (though often not) attempts to adopt all sorts of Western experiences and styles – that, nevertheless, makes me happy. How they’ll take root, how they’ll transform in the Lithuanian climate – it’s probably too early to say. But we already have one distinctive phenomenon – a new wave of “magical folk realism” (though, honestly, it’s not entirely a Lithuanian invention – the Estonians (Andrus Kivirähk) are doing it no less successfully). And the “return” to the countryside reflects general social tendencies – escaping the city, no longer being ashamed of your roots and dialect, trying to reconcile the city and the village – that is, searching for synthesis rather than division. It seems that poetry and prose have currently taken slightly different paths – poetry has descended from the heights into social issues and inner traumas, while prose has gone into the forest and to the old brick oven. :D It also returned to the kiosks of the 2000s.
There are plenty of animals in my field of vision – especially in translations and the nonfiction I read. I’m actually planning to get Alexander von Humboldt’s biography – his life was better than any adventure novel :) He even has something in common with us. He visited the Curonian Spit and was the first to measure the speed of a current in the Klaipėda Strait. :) I’m very drawn to and astonished by such people – you single-handedly push several branches of science forward and lay the foundations for a few more. That’s probably no longer possible today. A bit enviable, really.
As for thinking about strange things – today I got irritated by Andrius Jakučiūnas’s comment replying to Dalia Staponkutė: “knowledge is no longer relevant. People travel for months, some permanently, having rented out their apartments, so they simply live away and feel at home everywhere. Well, what’s the point of exploring and getting to know your home? That’s the new reality.” I realized I don’t want to agree with that and that this nomadic rushing is really not for me. I’d like to travel in depth, not in distance. I remember Jurga’s parents, who every year get into the car and set off along the district’s little roads, wherever their eyes lead them – they know everything there, have seen everything, know who lived or lives where, and yet they still go. And that journey, for them, is a confirmation of the world, a rekindling of memory. Ultimately, it’s also a way of observing change and even discovering new roads.
G. New phenomena, such as the emergence of genre literature or graphic novels, make me happy too. This magical folk-realism is wonderful; our generation could never have created anything like that – partly because we weren’t as well-read. I’m genuinely glad to see the shrinking gap between city and countryside. I’m not a nomad. I couldn’t emigrate even when the time was favorable for it. Now it’s probably too late. I feel a sense of responsibility toward my aging relatives, even … toward the graves (I know, it sounds ridiculous). The geopolitical threat pushes me further into despair. After all, not everyone will be able to flee – the elderly, the sick, the disabled will remain. Jakučiūnas would say I’m indulging in unnecessary Weltschmerz. The thing that puts me off traveling is realizing the scale of consumption involved (which, for many people, may also sound ridiculous). In this sense, I’m close to Jurga and my parents, who lived as ecologically as possible. I’d be content traveling just between Vilnius and Kybartai, trying to look after things, preserve them. Is that a symptom of magical thinking? If I live frugally, will climate crisis, war, catastrophe not strike me? I’m also drawn to that “depth” people like to poke fun at. The autobiographical book by the literary scholar Viktorija Daujotytė is built entirely from memory – unbelievable, but for me it’s more interesting than, say, the novel by Parulskis, whose work I follow, though he’s a master of fiction.
Yesterday I watched Pijus Opera’s TV show Tekstų pokeris (Text Poker), where he talked about Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud. I found myself thinking that all of us (you, me, Norvilas, Šimkus, Jakučiūnas, Brundzaitė, and the older ones, too) were strongly shaped in our teens by the “genius-madman” myth. Of course, they might deny it, but it seems to me it was almost mandatory to acquire some borderline experiences, to check out hospitals and addiction centers. Though perhaps it’s unethical to raise this question?
M. Why unethical? It’s better to talk about it than pretend nothing ever happened. To be honest, I’m not sure if that myth was perceived directly, or if, let’s say, it influenced me directly. It was more like automatically adopting a model from older colleagues. You do the same things because you assume that’s how it’s supposed to be. During our adolescence and youth, that “genius-madman” figure looked very romantic, though as far as I know, no one in my circle was eager to test it on their own skin – for some it happened naturally, without them aiming for it; some died from it; others calmed down and now either live a “boring” ordinary writer’s/translator’s life or have settled into some office dealing with textual or creative work. That’s simply how the wheel of life turns.
I think we were the last generation that drank that much and lived even a somewhat bohemian life – I talked about this with Mantas Balakauskas. He said that his generation simply got tired of partying (and much earlier than we did), and the even younger people aren’t interested at all and never were (maybe in other forms, in different ways – ones we no longer know, don’t understand, or don’t recognize as bohemia). In both their writing and ours, that kind of life hardly appears. In our work, those things are perhaps already “shelved” and described. At least I’ve written almost everything out in my book Išmokau nebūti (I’ve Learned Not to Be) – a kind of poetic diary of confusion and personal rupture. In the end, I no longer know what is considered a bohemian life these days, or whether anyone among current writers cares about that “genius-madman” myth, or whether those former geniuses who burned through their lives are now seen simply as strange cautionary tales of how not to behave, live, or write. Maybe all the wildness has moved into virtual space? Which is entirely sad.
These days I often catch myself wondering – what would my life look like outside Vilnius? Could I do it? Would I start climbing the walls out of boredom, say, in Zarasai? (Considering that so many artists live in that region and town, you’d hardly lack people to talk to.) Do you ever have thoughts like that?
And another thing – you’re from the borderlands, just like me (even though I was born in Vilnius, I spent a good part of my childhood near the Belarusian border). Does that shape our thinking and writing in some way? Or am I imagining things?
G. Good observation about the borders – the feeling of the periphery, a peripheral identity, testing boundaries. When I was born, the border there didn’t exist yet, but the division was formed by a different language, soldiers (there were training grounds), different customs, even the brightly blue roofs and house colors. Later, a real state border appeared, though at first it was quite porous – smugglers wandered around, and on the main street of Kybartai, Romani women would offer cigarettes. And, of course, those long lines of so-called truckers. The cult of Antanas Smetona, when a plaque in his name was placed on the former boys’ gymnasium building, just because he stayed for a few hours4Antanas Smetona was an authoritarian head of Lithuania from 1926 until the Soviet occupation in 1940. He fled the country after the occupation and his choice is still criticized by some historians.. Another one, resembling a gravestone, hangs on the cemetery fence – marking the place where he supposedly waded across a stream. It attracts crowds of tourists! Though the town has more interesting things – the German cemetery and church ruins, a Holocaust site, former Jewish buildings, and interwar architecture.
The huge Veržbolovo railway station, which Marius Ivaškevičius described so vividly (his grandparents were from Kybartai). I often dream that I accidentally cross the border and appear in Russia and get killed there. In reality, you and I visited the Kaliningrad region before the war – it feels as if you’ve stepped into another time. The wonderful German and Prussian heritage breaks through even the Soviet- and Putin-era horrors.
Eglė Frank would disagree with you! Bohemia still exists. They gather at Spiritus bar, maybe somewhere else too. I’ve been there – it’s quite different from the drinking holes of our time (far more upscale), though the conversations are similar. Of course, in our youth we didn’t see Garšva5He is the protagonist in White Shroud, written by Antanas Škėma. Garšva is a Lithuanian poet and immigrant working in New York, and he feels profoundly displaced – both geographically and emotionally. as an ideal, but I think we carried him in our subconscious, if that term still means anything. I’m too tired to write about alcoholism too – it’s just so uninteresting. Synthetic drugs are even worse – I feel such pity for young people who get involved with them. Total self-destruction of the brain. And I pity their parents even more.
Small towns make me think of writing a detective novel. I’d love to! I’d snoop around the residents, their relationships, the church, the local characters, the cemetery, the railway, the schools. But only because of my mother and because my great-grandparents’ homestead is there. The ties to my childhood home, objects, garden, and landscape remain. The primordial memories are essential.
You write about Naujininkai, the “non-postcard” version of Vilnius, but you’ve been (and worked) in Old Town all this time. So I’d like to ask you the same question, maybe a silly one, but about space: could you endure not being able to set foot there? If the entire Old Town were suddenly occupied?
M. Well, the place where I grew up, at my grandparents’ near Adutiškis, is a total backwater – a forgotten land of clay fields, blackberry thickets, shrubs, ditches, and swamps. Belarus within arm’s reach (it used to be; now it’s no longer, as if it were another world). Stubborn people, who never saw the independence of the interwar years. If they were Lithuanian, they were the sort you couldn’t tear away, but many had identities as mixed as in the Vilnius region. All the clay and shrubs in my writing come from there. I still know and remember the dialect, but I hardly have anyone to speak it with anymore, it’s slipping away.
Naujininkai is another language, though essentially the same. My Vilnius isn’t the postcard version, as you say, but one of edges, outskirts, borderlands. I grew up in Žemieji Paneriai, went to school in Krasnucha, later lived in Pilaitė when it was still under construction, and now in Naujininkai. For me, the city center and Old Town were mythical spaces, places I rarely visited before university. My spaces were construction sites, industrial abandonment, a mix of apartment blocks and wooden houses, proletarian districts inhabited by Russians, Poles, and Lithuanians – though mostly Russians. At the same time – the old Vilnius route in Paneriai beginning almost behind the house where I lived, the Paneriai memorial (things were strictly left unmentioned when you grow up there), and in Naujininkai – steam engines and locomotives (which I adore), the sound of whistles, the echoes of announcers’ voices coming from loudspeakers, hills, cemeteries become a sort of local identity – you’re a Vilnius resident, but not quite. You’re on the other side of the iron river, on an island, separate, a bit looked down on and forgotten, maybe even dangerous :)
History sticks out shamelessly in those districts, despite gentrification, and that aforementioned neglect is stubborn too – persistent, indestructible, and above all, uncomfortable for everyone.
Old Town is my late love :D I don’t think I could live without it anymore – I don’t like cities without old towns. I have the privilege of entering the city through the Gate of Dawn, and although I’m not much of a Catholic, I always mutter a prayer and turn toward the image in the gate – a kind of ritual.
Besides, Old Town for me is the place of those bohemian years, wandering, drinking. Pilies Street and the surrounding streets and their bars were our second home in the university days :) In that sense, I’m probably no different from many Vilnius (and non-Vilnius) writer-bohemians. I used to hang out in those same cafés that were popular in Soviet times – Vaiva, Žibutė, Ledainė, and so on.
G. We’re both neo-žemininkai!6Žėmininkai – a group of Lithuanian émigré poets, formed mostly in the United States after World War II. The name is associated with the anthology Žemė (Earth). It only seems like we don’t need that grounding, but if someone took it away, we’d mourn like Bradūnas or Niliūnas. Inga Vidugirytė-Pakerienė studies space in literature – in some poets’ work are plenty of precise geographical references, in others are none at all. Gali rišti valtį prie paminklo kojos (You Can Tie Your Boat to the Foot of a Monument) is also about land (Grand Duke Gediminas?).
Right now I’m reading Kazys Bradūnas’s Vilniaus varpai (The Bells of Vilnius [1947 ])– published in Tübingen to mark the 400th anniversary of the first Lithuanian book. Sonnets were written for every little corner – Old Town, Antakalnis, Kalvarijos, Rasos – and there weren’t many other parts of the city back then. I wouldn’t dare write a sonnet after Jonynas, but maybe I should look at it as a kind of training? You walk somewhere and mentally exercise your stock of rhymes. Not necessarily to show anyone.
M. Neo-žemininkai! In part, that’s really accurate – although in literature (and in what I read) I’m an absolute cosmopolitan, in poetry, as I now see and understand, I really am, as you say, a “neo-žemininkas.” You can’t do anything without your roots. When you’re writing, you are anchored somewhere, and it’s obvious to readers where and how you’re anchored.
Of course, I find it more impressive when a poet can reconcile the city with the village/small town, like Jurga – for her these two worlds overlap, even merge, and her sense of history is very alive, not bookish, not kitschy or postcard-like. I, unfortunately, don’t have that.
Regarding geographical references – here, I think, we can agree. When you read each book, you can map out routes and sit with maps. :) I even put coordinates into Seismografas. But in this case, I think psychogeography is more relevant – the poetic walk, the rhythm of steps, of movement (by train, bus, car, etc.) is very important. So is the drift of space – not a kaleidoscope but continuity, the ability to sense and contemplate (and that means – to describe) changes, certain significant points in a place that become points of change in thought, personality, emotion. All of this coincides, perhaps reminds us of one or awakens the other. In your Marialė this is very clear to me. Am I mistaken?
About sonnets and training – back in those good old inter-workshop times we used to do jam sessions (you might have been at one or two?) – how else did “Kalėdinė giesmė” (“Christmas Carol”), the limericks (which, by the way, also require pretty solid rhyming skills), and all those other poetic/satirical rhymed texts come about? To this day I see and use rhyme mostly to achieve a comic effect :)
By the way, I’ve long wanted to ask – and apologies for the pomposity – do you consider yourself a Christian (Catholic?) poet? For someone reading your work, the question might seem self-evident or even redundant, because the motifs, the themes, the imagery, the whole dynamic of your relationship with the Church are all there in your texts. In my opinion, you’re probably the only poet of my generation, and even among the younger ones, who reflects faith in a living, genuine way – and its real, painful path.
I sometimes drift into that territory too, but I feel like a layman there, and so, perhaps needlessly, I’m overly cautious.
G. Many people ask me that – I never know how to answer. It’s complicated. If I do consider myself one (after all, I don’t intend to leave the Church), then why is there blasphemy in my poems? At a festival in Sweden (!) I had to read in a church – I was asked not to read certain texts so as not to offend the feelings of believers. I know the term “crypto-religiosity” – used for artists who sincerely raise questions of faith in their work but scandalize the faithful. Maybe it fits me partly. I’m genuinely angered by Christianity, and if I called myself a Christian poet, I’d be automatically identified with that. To be a religious poet (like, say, Brazdžionis) is fine if the author meets all the Catechism’s criteria – successfully married or chaste, has no doubts about contraception, abortion, or euthanasia, and in general has no doubts about the Church’s hierarchy, teaching, or order. Indrė Valantinaitė, Rimvydas Stankevičius, and Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė, I think, would fit those criteria. Even Gintaras Bleizgys, though not a Catholic, to some extent matches the definition of a religious poet. Also Antanas Šimkus, if we speak of our peer. Biographically he might not fit, but the poetry does. Ieva Rudžianskaitė certainly doesn’t write anything sacrilegious. Sigitas Parulskis no longer fits. Though faith is one of his most important themes, it only manifests blasphemously. So I’m probably somewhere nearby in classifications of crypto-religiosity. It’s complicated.
No, I haven’t been at the jam sessions, but we did write those comic pieces for some Druskininkai Poetry Fall functions – I don’t even remember which.
Psychogeography – the word is precise. As you say, that’s exactly how it is. My own map of places I lived in Vilnius looks something like this: Kosciuškos Street (school years), Saulėtekis, Karoliniškės, again Saulėtekis, Pranciškonų St., Žvėrynas, Žirmūnai, Naujoji Vilnia (with an extension into Senoji Naujoji Vilnia, my daughter’s kindergarten was there), Olandų St., Visoriai. It may look like I’m a wanderer, but I simply lived for a long time as a tenant. For me, that fact speaks more about the socio-economic status of two humanists (gender matters here).
But I didn’t necessarily write only about where I happened to live and its surroundings. I too used to cross myself at the Gate of Dawn every day because it was on the way to and from work. Routes, travel vouchers, architecture, galleries, and museums also slip into the poems almost on their own. I’m quite certain that if we were ever evacuated, we would constantly be lamenting our lost places in our poems, even though we are neither farmers nor small-bourgeois hegemons.
M. “Crypto-religiosity” really is a good term – it probably fits more than a few of us. Someone like Tomas Petrulis, who examines these questions seriously, fits it especially well.
Today I was talking with Laima Kreivytė, and our conversation drifted toward psychogeography. We imagined an app that would show artists’ habitual routes (like public-transport lines) – the map would be fascinating. :) If I ever had to leave Vilnius unexpectedly, against my will, I think I’d be crushed by nostalgia, maybe for the rest of my life. That kind of thing, of course, would help me write, but I don’t want that kind of “help.”
As we’re nearing the end, I wanted to ask you one more thing – what do you think about ekphrasis? It doesn’t seem very characteristic of you. I tend to draw inspiration directly from photographs and paintings, you perhaps less directly. But art, the space of museums, helps me focus and look from another angle – how is it for you?
G. Probably not because my poems themselves are like photographs (at least that’s what the composer Šarūnas Nakas once said). But I find it very interesting to watch you when we end up in a museum together. You’re often inspired by the Dutch genre painters or by details in paintings, for instance, animals. I’ve tried playing that game too, but without teleporting myself straight into a poem. I miss those times when you kept sharing artworks on Facebook (you seem to be trying to return to that now?). I do have one ekphrasis – Las Meninas. Though this wasn’t from a gallery but from the memory of a slide and an online comment. Old paintings, and sometimes architecture or heritage, inspire me, but contemporary art rarely does. Perhaps because the older work has withstood so many years, and that moves me. For instance, Kačina’s figures or Marian statues in cemeteries. I’ve been “spoiled” by art school, and now I observe the same process in my daughter’s work. They teach them realistic drawing, just as they taught us, and then suddenly say: this year we’ll paint abstractions. It’s very hard to move from one to the other, as if you knew nothing at all. I generally keep some distance from visual art, but it’s always a joy to go to galleries with you and see you sit down on a bench to jot down a text.
I have a question for you: how does your daughters’ music-making affect you? Of all art, I’m probably the most clueless about music, though in my childhood I used to play four-page pieces. At the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art, there was a music teacher, Bertlingas – he saw I was interested and would make me play with the first graders. Later, I broke a finger and it healed crookedly, and Bertlingas retired.
M. What inspires me most is what is not obvious or is unusual in a work – a minor third-line character or an interesting detail. I’m not “spoiled” by art; I’m a total self-taught art enthusiast :D I probably couldn’t live without painting, photography, graphics, etc. – it’s necessary for my aesthetic and mental well-being. That’s why I’m sharing art on FB again – when everything around is so heavy and anxiety-inducing, a few minutes of looking at and sharing art is essential. And honestly, you’re my favorite gallery companion – somehow we don’t disturb each other, and we often see things in a similar way.
My daughters’ music-making affects me as a father – in terms of how much joy and struggle it brings them, how much I can support and help (or at least not get in the way). I’m glad they do it, though at the same time they barely have time for anything else, even other arts. I don’t know how this will influence their future lives. The Čiurlionis school isn’t easy (nor is Kelpša’s, for that matter) – double workloads take their toll.
I myself am also quite inept at music. In school they once tried to force me to sing in the choir (apparently, they thought I had the talent), but I stubbornly refused – it was torture for me. They eventually threw me out, though oddly recorded a failing grade for discipline. That school choir, by the way, was quite famous and often won various “Dainų dainelė” awards. I listen to music every day, of all kinds, but I’ve never played or tried to.
Thank you for the conversation!
G. Thank you, Marius.
