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| Translated by Agnieška Leščinska | |
Tomas Petrulis, Daikto kūnas (The Body of a Thing). Vilnius: Baziliskas, 2024.
Tomas Petrulis stands out among Lithuanian poets. He’s a kind of rebel and provocateur. He published his first book, where he combined religious imagery with pornography (only one page separated a cock from a cross), on the Naujas vardas (New Name) free e-book platform in 2017. His work is shocking but playful, even clever. He has sometimes deliberately used simple rhymes, and I suspect he enjoyed doing so. Daikto kūnas (“The Body of a Thing”) is his third book, and you can recognize Petrulis’s style in it. However, in both form and content, he’s in motion – forward or maybe backward. What is certain is that he’s moving because, in the book, he says that movement is neither good nor bad (p. 16).
In The Body of a Thing he abandons the usual division of poems into lines, turning the book into a collection of poetic prose. Although visually, the texts look identical, their stylistic features differ, and the emphasis in defining his poetic prose can be placed on both of those words – “poetic” and “prose.” When I read some of his poems, I’m influenced by the rhythm, so I pause and break the lines accordingly. These poems remind me of Petrulis’s earlier work, with rhythm formed by excessive epithets, repetition, unusual word order, or simple tautology, for example: “To pretend you don’t know, not knowing that you don’t know” (p. 9). This shows the fragile boundaries of poetry as a genre. It raises the question: as poetry is becoming more diverse, is graphic layout the only criterion that remains? However, the book also contains texts that resist any attempt to return to their traditional poetic form. They resemble prose, and we read them like philosophical treatises, for example, the poem “Iš judėjimo užrašų apie judėjimą” (“From Movement Notes on Movement”). In this review I’ll refer to all his prose in this book as poems because Petrulis always refers to his narrator as the lyrical subject.
Another distinctive feature of this book is the narrator’s speech. It’s not blunt, but he’s pretending to speak bluntly. For example, in the poem “Sintaksė” (“Syntax”), Petrulis describes sitting in front of a wall and staring at it. However, the flickering of the world in the wall suggest that it represents a social media feed (referred to as a “wall” in Lithuanian). Today, writing about social media has become something of a cliché, so this ambiguous approach to the subject feels justified. He uses a similar technique when addressing the pandemic: the miniature end of the world slips into a man’s nostril and a woman’s ear, though the focus lingers more on the woman’s ear (p. 23).
The passages in The Body of a Thing are so densely packed that it can be difficult to focus on their content or even begin interpreting them. We must reread it – otherwise, the poems may appear as a self-indulgent play on language or pretentious displays of poetics. Their deeper and more unusual meaning emerges only after we unpack the significance of objects and understand their connections. A recurring theme is the observer’s perspective and a lack of evaluation. For example, in the poem “?”, the electric train says: “I don’t want to prove anything to you, and I don’t want to teach you anything” (p. 34). A similar aspect appears in “Gelsvi šviesuliai” (“Yellow Lights”) (p. 41-43). Finally, in “Lietuvos herbas” (“The Coat of Arms of Lithuania”), Petrulis writes that the author has nothing to offer (p. 70). On the one hand, we could read this line as irony, as if the author is evading responsibility for his words and shields himself from possible public reaction. At best, it’s a form of ivory tower discourse, which slightly contradicts the spirit of provocation. On the other hand, deconstruction isn’t about swapping things around and overturning the hierarchy, but to illustrate their similarities. In short, the excessive insistence on unpretentiousness becomes, paradoxically, a pretension to unpretentiousness.
In this book, Petrulis doesn’t blend religion and pornography as much as before. The field of themes expands to specific objects and phenomena. It appears he is attempting to establish connections that aren’t immediately apparent in everyday life. For example, he links rain and alcohol, suggesting that they are responsible for many encounters (the poem “Debesis” [“The Cloud”]), or he draws parallels between customers and shop assistants, whose conversations consist of rehearsed, automatic phrases (the poem “Pramoga” [“Amusement”]). He has a tendency to expose value relativism, which brings me back to the same issue of speaking from the point of view of a privileged observer. Such narration allows Petrulis to lump together ecology, communism, feminism, nationalism, fascism, and other left and right movements (p. 69).
The book’s opening passage (found on the cover) serves as an accompanying text from the lyrical subject. However, it doesn’t really accompany the poems but rather acts as their equal, which is rare. According to the lyrical subject, Petrulis portrays people as things and things as people. For example, he addresses a floor lamp, writes from the perspective of a lollipop that sees its identity as important, and gives a voice to a flower being watered. Such poems seem to be based off dreams, reminiscent of Hans Carl Artmann’s poetic prose in Grünverschlossene Botschaft. 90 Träume (Green-Sealed Message: 90 Dreams), which was also published by the Lithuanian publishing house Baziliskas. Meanwhile, people in the book (more human bodies than people) exist as statistical units without unique identities. Death is depicted physiologically, like the hobby of collecting flies (p. 33). Society is anonymous, living in apartment blocks, closely connected to the internet. It’s simultaneously repelled by and drawn to the margins, it ferociously circles the wastrel (p. 37), it hates sluts but wants to join them (p. 64). Their society is based on laws and institutions but is hindered by misplaced and protruding intestines (p. 18). Specific characters are constructed from stereotypes, their roles are recognizable, such as Mrs. Danutė or Ilona from Vievis. All these people are seemingly screwed into life and forced to move inertly.
In an interview with Andrius Jakučiūnas,[1] Petrulis mentioned that the theme of compulsion plays a significant role in this book. He explores this idea through objects in everyday life. For example, a cup and a plate are forced into a relationship simply by being used. In an especially Petrulis-esque poem “Saulutė” (“The Sun”), the computer “mutilates” an image of a child. Clicking on a link reveals what one bird is doing to another, dragging the reader down the rabbit hole of compulsion and mutilation, as can happen on the internet. Even coincidence, according to the lyrical subject, is a form of compulsion (p. 41) because it leads to one situation or another. The poem “P(l)andemija” (“The P(l)andemic”) also touches on this theme, but I have a different and serious observation, which is particularly relevant to our society and our geopolitical situation – the soil for propaganda and conspiracy theories is sown in advance. The tendency to believe in disinformation is shaped by a person’s environment, education, and social class, well before they even encounter it: “The day he’s trained was yesterday” (p. 44). All it takes is the right time and circumstances, such as a pandemic or war, for it to manifest itself.
The aspect of movement, which links all three chapters, recurs throughout the book. It’s inevitable – necessary but unconscious. It’s predetermined, has no goal, no direction, and no intention, because it’s all an illusion and deception. They’re moving because not moving is impossible (p. 65). In fact, movement is an end in itself and the only form of existence (p. 66). But movement is of space itself, not of bodies. Even speech and poems also fall into the category of movement, as their inertia only reinforces this idea. In the poem “?”, the electric train orders its riders to “keep on speaking – pronouncing words, chanting, reciting, syllabifying. Let your words bounce off me. (…) And when your voices fall silent, all of your differences will vanish – and you shall be dead” (p. 34). Speech, then, is also a form of existence. The reader gets the impression that through relativism and self-directed movement, human affairs on Earth are bleak. Therefore, through its assumed neutrality, the book offers no hope.
Thus, in Petrulis’s latest book, he explores the interconnections between people, things, and the mechanisms of compulsion. From the perspective of an observer, he tries to deconstruct attitudes and show the relativism inherent in society and does this through poetic prose and intricate, dense language. This combination of form and content makes it easy to dismiss the book, and the reader might give in to the provocation and become angry. However, this won’t happen if the reader is willing to dig deeper. I have a feeling that it would be useful to look into the writings of Michel Foucault when analyzing this book.
1. Tomas Petrulis: „Kai ką, galimas daiktas, ir užpisa, kai skaito“, Literatūra ir menas, 18, 2025. Accessed on the web: https://literaturairmenas.lt/literatura/tomas-petrulis-ikai-ka-galimas-daiktas-ir-uzpisa-kai-skaitoi
