Publikacija SEP 2011 - Vilenica

Present-day Value of Poetry Reading
Ljiljana Jokić Kaspar
DON’T BE EVIL FRIEND, LEARN TO LOV
Before you exp,
before you drop dea,
legs outstret
and be an examp –
learn to lov –
TO LOV IS TO LOS!
Hand kis, all that hands hol,
Wmn old and gent ol,
Giant new, and new fash –
A chance never los
To lov!
I can best illustrate the topic of my essay by opening the text with
the verse of a great Yugoslav avant-garde poet from the 1970’s, Vujica
Rešin Tucić, who was well-known for public readings of his poetry. As
one of the greatest and best poet-performers he extended the boundaries
of reading, and sometimes even of physical interpretation of poetry,
and yet he curtailed nothing of what he had transformed into words
and written down. Thanks to modern technology this unusual poem remained
recorded even after the poet’s death, and if we want, we can hear
it in his interpretation. But let me go back to the topic at hand and the
question of what the public reading of poetry means today. I can answer
it straight away: It means the same as in the past, only much more!
Aristotle’s Poetics has remained a working tool in all periods of artistic
poetry writing. The essence of his poetics is still imitation with the help
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