TOWARD THE POETICS OF VOJISLAV KARANOVIĆ

Abstract

Vojislav Karanović usually invokes the subtle phenomena that the sensual, spiritual, as well as the virtual of the language are able to detect or produce, thus bringing about “the poetry in the process of its creation”. His poems are sometimes the in-depth momentary images, short scenes presented aslant, like meditative lyric etudes. Oftentimes, Karanović’s poems present themselves in the form of pseudo-essays where the most common characteristics are the twists and turns, as well as the betrayal of readers’ expectations. After the author’s initial poetic endeavours in the form of poetic radicalism in his book Tastatura (1986), in each of the subsequent book of poems the energy of denial and excess loses its momentum. The inquisitive energy is, in fact, removed from the surface to take its place within the depths, from the plane of the external effect and out loud provocation, and shifted to a subversive strategy of remodeling the order of things and their interrelation. The poet’s emphasis is gradually transferred from the sphere of mythopoetic and casual explorations in the book Unutrašnji čovek (2011) to the domain of a more profound experience of existential issues and more acute clash of oppositions, on all of the semantic planes of a lyric text. The lyric procedures in Karanović’s poems may be described as an attempt to reach out for the analogies between the remote or quite distinct points, as well as an attempt to approximate the incongruent and remote phenomena, thus attaining the bizarre congruence among them. Karanović’s poems are quite often characterized by the rudimental lyric standpoint, whether there prevails the intermediated image of the sensual or the infantile one, with pacific self-reflection and wonder. While struggling with the dark existential issues, the instance of facing the outside world gains on a peculiar spiritual perspective, all the while introducing the lost and desired invisible world into the poems, the presence of which compensates its absence on the visible side.