I’ve been thinking about the poet’s relationship with truth, and how poets reveal their epistemic concerns in formal strategies, particularly in those which develop the “I” of the speaker. Thinking about Mahmoud Darwish’s “The faces of truth” describing truth as “what falls in drops from its shadow,” leaving us to read the shade of the poem’s visage.

If a shadow is a text, then truth is not singular. Truth is as elusive as the image or metaphor—and the poet’s relationship to this Imago dei is an attachment formed in particular attentiveness.

“Why does daylight fall on the knife?” Tomaž Šalamun asks in “Are Angels Green?”

What can we know about the unknowable? What are we asking when arguing about the colors of angels?

I’ve been thinking about how the Šalamunian approach to truth/verity may be a self-immolating proverb.

“Proverbs” consists of three numbered lines, each one offering a statement about the speaker named as Tomaž Šalamun, himself. Here, the proverbial form is rubbed and illuminated to reveal truths limited to statements about the speaker.

Like God, the speaker isn’t speaking of themselves so much as listing their legendary selves, expanding upon their personas in a way that raises questions about the form of the proverb. You will know me by my powers, etc.

This Šalamunian strategy invokes the grandiose “I” in order to make it absurd. He does this again and again at the level of the line, as in “Red Flowers”:

Now I know, sometimes I was a rooster, sometimes a roe.

One line with the leonine rhyme eating its own tail.

I’ve been thinking about how memory in Šalamun serves as both foil and fortress.

Man with the Golden Eye

I remember the nun who studied in the Jagiellonian
library in Krakow. I was sad. Outside there were
sled tracks in the snow. In my thoughts I was
somewhere far south. I ate peanuts out of their sheels.
Yesterday I saw the feathers of Montezuma
and how he longed for his ruin, for some foreign
god to drink up his soul. The Empire is eternal.
Eternal are the mirrors. The water evaporates,
only the gaze remains. Who hoards it?
A chariot with a golden shaft?
I’m not that yellow fruit.
I’m not that mob staggering from the Coronation.
I ate the ticket to the Anthropological Museum
while I spoke to a tourist,
while I kept looking at you.

The first three lines begin in the memory of a young student studying in Krakow, glimpsing the loneliness of the sanctified (the nun) while the speaker eats peanuts and imagines himself “somewhere far South.” Then the speaker ressurects Montezuma in his longing to be ruined, to be swallowed by “some foreign god.” It is this skipping-stone effect of slipping into different people and places that makes the next segment (“The Empire is eternal. / Eternal are the mirrors.”) so resonant. And then the speaker switches into question that focuses on the divine gaze itself: “Who hoards it?”

Now Salamun is ready to bring back the “I” in a denial: “I’m not that yellow fruit.” And then easily into the why, which is the ending. That final you in relation to the I—and the musum appears only at the end, as a sort of context in which to locate the intimate you.

Technically, Šalamun was Croatian, or born to Croatian parents on a territory known as Croatia. But his parents fled their homeland for Slovenia in the 1940’s, after learning that his left-sympathizing father was on a list of Ustache targets. So baby Šalamun wound up in a small Slovenian town, not far from Trieste, and he grew into one of Slovenia’s most famous poets.

But Šalamun is peak Balkan.

I mean eventually, every tribe demands that loyalty be proven by murder.

Every body in the Balkans knows this.

Charles Simic repeated this in what amounts to a brief lecture on refusenik poetics:

The lyric poet is almost by definition a traitor to his own people. He is the stranger who speaks the harsh truth that only individual lives are unique and therefore sacred. He may be loved by his people, but his example is also the one to be warned against. The tribe must pull together to face the invading enemy while the lyric poet sits talking to skulls in the graveyard.

Mass murder is the monumental achievement of the modern nation-state.

Our poet addresses this in a folk song, which is to say, the drumbeat of dolorous nostaglia, the uniform of folkisch. The nation relies on its court poets to enchant the masses with their own superiority. So what if the neighbors said you are thieves? It is We who are beautiful. It is Our Suffering that nurtures this storm of ecstasy in which killing the neighbor will be labeled moral.

Because nationalism leans into racial or ethnic superiority, it is a scarcity mindset. All nations are not equal. Power is the story of who is willing to do the worst things to climb on top of the corpses. The poets of power wear their laurels like humanitarian missions. Ask Sarajevo for details.

What I trust about Šalamun is the relentlessness with which he implicates nationalism. The difference between the court poet and the poet laureate is the throne or the constituency they serve. For poets, power is measured in podiums, in platforms, in contracts and pay raises, in prizes, in speaking fees and kickbacks from the fine arts presidium.

Salamun indicts himself often, and performatively—as one must when the officials and leaders cannot stoop to interrogate themselves. The poet models a sort of self-trial by imagined jury which is both literal (since Salamun was imprisoned for poetry) and gestural or figurative.

His absolute refusal of innocence speaks to a seam in contemporary Balkan poetics, or the poetics of the balkanized, the bombed bridge, the busted.

Not for Šalamun, the visionary poetics of political solutions. In an interview, he described poetry as “a parallel process to spiritual development. As in religion, you are trained not to be scared. As in the cabala or in dervish dances, you are trained to be with the world as long as you can endure it.”