Thisessay discusses our Feature on Lithuanianpoetry, including eleven well-known poets in Lithuania.

Also see the Commentary upon Lithuanianpoetry by the poets themselves.

For J.C.’s other columns on Lithuania:

Lilacs and a Resinous Will: Poetry Spring inLithuania

International Poetry Festival

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For an essay A Nation Sings Out

To visit the Anelauskas websitewith important essays on Lithuanian poetry, including:

About ModernLithuanian Poetry

Maironis

Experience of Exile inLithuanian Poetry

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For J.C.’s Spring 2001riverviews

For J.C.’s translations from the Spanish of IvónGordon Vailakis

For another review by J.C. Todd

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J.C. Todd’s work can be found online at:

www.frigate.com

www.cortlandreview.com<br>
www.grdodge.org<br>
www.artistsandcommunities.org

“Why I Teach Poetry,” an on-linesupplement to the PBS special Fooling with Words with BillMoyers, Fall, 1999 is located atwww.pwnet.org<br>
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J.C. Todd is a Contributing Editor of The Drunken Boat

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Email[email protected]

riverviews At water’s edge is how I locate mylife: Great South Bay marshes and beaches of Long Island; peninsula ofPittsburgh narrowed by the Monongahela and the Allegheny rivers; bank ofthe Susquehanna in Harrisburg; and now the Delaware’s levee inPhiladelphia, the Schuylkill at my back. As a poet, too, I’ve stood tothe side of the mainstream, in the marshy detritus of language fromwhich new language emerges, myself a river and reiver, splitting andsplicing, plundering and rescuing, making a language of my mothertongue, being made by it. So, a reiver’s view of riverviews,this column of musings on language and poetry.



“moremodestly I look on lithuanian poetry:”
Reflections on the Poetry ofContemporary Lithuania

By J.C.Todd

*****Before traveling to Lithuania last Spring, I imagined the Lithuanianpoet as a priest or seer, a shaman who spoke or sang the word that wouldbring into existence what had been named. Not just any word, but theword whose tonal configuration created by vibrating with the universe,my archaic and Romanticized version of an ancient Sanskrit principlethat vibrations of vowel tones could cause changes in the physicalworld. Magical thinking? yet there is a linguistic and historical basisfor this image. The Lithuanian language is one of the last two extantlanguages of the Indo-European branch most closely related to Sanskrit. Pre-medieval pagan traditions have been carried into the present indainos (folk songs), folk art and in the appropriation of paganvisual imagery by the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches. Themost compelling image of the poet as priest came from the resistance toSoviet rule; in 1987-90, the Lithuanian people overturned almost fiftyyears of oppressive occupations (German, then Soviet) with the “SingingRevolution,” whose anthem, a traditional folk song that begins “Upon ahill, the highest hill,” prophesied the rise of Vilnius, then all ofLithuania against the Soviet occupation. At the time it was rumoredthat the KGB was frustrated with imprisoning revolutionaries becausethey could not arrest an entire nation. Laima Sruoginis, an Americandaughter of Lithuanian emigres, then a student at Vilnius University,gives this eye witness account in her essay, “A Nation Sings Out:Poetry, Politics, and Folk Song in Contemporary Lithuania.”

***** It was impossible toestimate how many people had gathered for the candlelight vigil,organized to mark the first conference of the Lithuanian grassrootsreform movement, Sajudis. The Cathedral Square at that moment onOctober 23, 1988 held more people than it ever had in its fivehundred-year history. Hundreds more packed themselves into the windingmedieval streets that opened into the square—symbolically and actuallythe heart of the city of Vilnius. . . .The crowd listened as poets,philosophers, professors, and scientists. . . who made up the reformmovement, formerly known as ‘The Philosophers’ Club,’ demanded. . ..social reforms. A lean, middle aged man, his tousled gray hairinterfering with his thick glasses, is pulled up onto the stage. . ..Then the crowd sees him. . . (and) a chant loosens into the crisp air:LIE-TU-VA, LIE-TU-VA (Lithuania, Lithuania). . . . Until now Lithuanianshad led a double life–in their hearts they were Lithuanians but onpaper they were Soviets. Their official language was a foreign one,linguistically different from their own. The poet shyly waves his handand the crowd stills. . . , he speaks into the microphone:

Spring
And for you, spring–isn’t it spring?
And for you, spring, isn’t it beautiful?
When it’s beautiful
When it’s spring.

How beautiful! How beautiful it is
When it’s beautiful.
Even for the not-beautiful
It is beautiful
When it’s spring
When the sun thaws
In windowpanes.

How beautiful it is to be grass
Or smoke
Over one’s homeland.
Even for the dead
It’s beautiful on earth.

How beautiful it is for you, spring,
When it’s spring
When it’s beautiful
When all of Lithuania returns
After a long winter’s exile
To the fields
With plows and hoes.

The poet is Marcelijus Martinaitis.. . . The crowd recognizes the persona of the poem. . .Kukutis: a Stalinera farmer who is a pagan, a fool, a hopeless romantic. Kukutis cannever learn to live by the New World Order. The crowd is Kukutis. . . ;they have lived to see the spring Martinaitis was hoping for when hewrote the poem just a few years earlier. This poem had led the peopleto the Cathedral Square that day.

***** Kukutis is not anideology, not an anthem, not a social justice organizer or a performeror personality. He is not a dead hero but a foolish human figure,spoken into existence by a poet, perhaps derived from figures indainos, but a contemporary creation, nonetheless, who gives voicein the mother tongue to a people’s desire to reclaim their language andnationhood. Since the late nineteenth century, Lithuania has had atradition of poets who acted as populist leaders and whose poems helpedto redefine the sense of nationhood. In his essay “About ModernLithuanian Poetry,” the contemporary poet Kornelijus Platelis identifiesthe poet/priest Maironis as the founder of this tradition because he “.. .organically fused the Lithuanian folk song tradition with Europeansyllabotonic poetic forms, and for many people Maironis became thegeneral symbol of what it was to be a Lithuanian poet.”

 *****This was the image I had, animage I soon discovered was too narrow to hold the dazzling rangeevident in the poems in this feature on contemporary Lithuanian poetryin translation. Although many poets of the Lithuanian diaspora continueto write in Lithuanian, only those living in that country are publishedhere. All the translators are poets as well, a mix of well-known,bilingual translators from the Lithuanian-American community and newer,non-Lithuanian-speaking poets from the U. S. who have participated inPoetry Spring, the Lithuanian Writers’ Union’s international poetryfestival. Of these, Kerry Shawn Keys is the only one who lives inVilnius and has dual U. S.-Lithuanian citizenship. Represented here area eleven of the many fine poets writing in Lithuania today, when thenumber of readers and the public stature of poets has declined since theheady time of the “Singing Revolution” and the early years ofIndependence. No longer central to their society’s moral and spirituallife nor driven by revolutionary fervor, as they enter the twenty-firstcentury, Lithuanian poets are engaged in the difficult and necessarywork of forging a poetics and making poems for a nation focused onmaterial pursuits and developing a globally viable economy. Lithuanianpoetry seems to be retracting into the place poetry holds in the Westernworld, a diminishing of the power of poetry to move the people.

 ***** Selections of poets and poemsspan the periods of the occupations through the Singing Revolution andIndependence up to the present. The two senior poets, Vytautas Blozeand Sigitas Geda, began to publish in the 1960’s. Bloze, a master offree verse, refused to conform to the “. . .complicated system ofcoercion and privilege (that) forced and enticed artists to serve Sovietideology.” (Platelis) Begun just prior to his forced hospitalizationand completed more than ten years after, when the ban on his work waslifted, “Musa Domestica” suggests that the strength of tradition encodedin the dainos is a source of personal and national identity,while “The Three Wrights” is his reworking of a folk tale. Geda is apantheistic poet whom Platelis describes as “singing in the junction ofnature and culture.” Readers interested in Lithuanian poetry during theoccupations can read Platelis’ essay and the chapters by VytautasKubilius in Lithuanian Literature (Vilnius: VAGA 1997). In the1970’s, Antanas A. Jonynas and Kornelijus Platelis debuted, part of ageneration which, influenced by the ruins of Prague Spring, did nottreat Soviet ideology as its own. Jonynas’s “The Destruction of theSawmill,” first published in 1981, appraises the decline of the Sovietstate. In contrast, the poems by Platelis are recent, their referencesextending far beyond Lithuania. “Aegean Wine” draws on his interest inthe classical world; it uses Theseus’ return as a foil to contrast theperiod of revolution and Independence with the “sober everyday routine”of post-Independence. “St. Elizabeth’s Hospital” includes lines from apoetry fusion made by U. S. poet Craig Czury from the writing ofhospital patients. Of the same spiritual generation are those whofirst published in the 1980’s including Bloze’s wife, NijoleMiliauskaite, whose intimate, unfettered style is similar to that ofpoets debuting now, and Eugenijus Alisanka, whose recent fragmentedlyrics are published here. Platelis observes that the 1970’s and 80’sare the renaissance of Lithuanian poetry. Others included in thefeature debuted in the 1990’s, after the burst of renewal; their workoften combines narrative (especially filmic), and lyric strategies inlinguistically playful poems, some of which are notable for rapid tonaland associatives shifts. These younger poets are Laurynas Katkus,Marius Burokas, Neringa Abrutyte, Arturas Valiones and GiedreKazlauskaite, whose “Antipoet” both interrogates and claims as lineagetwo Lithuanian poets born in the early twentieth century.

*****In his poem “essay onlithuanian literature,” Alisanka responds to the diminution of both therole of the poet and poetry itself: “more modestly I think aboutlithuanian poetry.” Curious, I asked four Lithuanian poets, SigitasGeda, Kornelijus Platelis, Laurynas Katkus and Giedre Kazlauskaite, andtranslator Laima Sruoginis for brief comments on directions or changesin Lithuanian poetry since Independence. In their insightful andsurprizing responses and in the diversity and complexity of contemporarypoetry, there is linguistic vigor and enlivening experimentation that Isuspect will sustain the poets through the current period of settlingin. As Osip Mandelstam wrote in exile, “The people need poetry thatwill be their own secret/ to keep them awake forever.”