Benediktas Januševičius – Maybe Everything Has Already Been Written

Benediktas Januševičius is a poet and translator, and a tireless chronicler, cameraman and photographer of Lithuanian literary life. He is one of the most curious language experimenters in Lithuania. He started with punk surrealist poems and created poem-objects and is now exploring the possibilities of language and sounds. His urban lexicon is embellished with jargon and “street” language. According to the counter-culture activist Darius Pocevičius, “Having consistently examined the oberiuts, the dadaists, the surrealists, the Vienna School, Fluxus, the minimalists, the conceptualists, and finally, the Lithuanian ‘Four Winds’ figures, and having let them filter through his archetypically Lithuanian peasant brain, Benukas [the diminutive form of Benediktas] has succeeded in fending off the school of rigid decadent Lithuanian poetry.”