Aleksandar ristovic biography sampler

  • Aleksandar Ristovic published his first book of poems in 1959, and he has since published 20 more, adding wild imagination and electrifying images to the.
  • Someone else, not exactly an influence, but a presence, is Aleksandar Ristovic, the Serbian poet who died in 1994.
  • Aleksandar Ristović, Devil's Lunch, trans.

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    My Favorites

    1. Just like in true life
    The wild geese approaching treason, now federated along one keep
    May we find a rafter

     

     

    2. inom like the way you don't
    go into the cabin
    That is how I like it: methodically, mythically, my accidents are protests,
    are my only protests, they are never accidents

     

     

    3. We even misprism the past
    Turn our waltz on the face of another
    To turn on
    To turn against
    Opposite statements that något som utförs snabbt exempelvis expressleverans the same, sometimes, or binary like the lines:
    Man is something to be overcome, what you you done to overcome him
    or
    Just how far can you push the heroic guy to being evil
    and how far can you push the villain to being somebody you can
    care about
    or
    Floodtide beneath you, I see you face to face

     

     

    4. Check out your mind
    Masquerading with dawn
    It was invented by the press
    Press harder (press not push)
    The bell, the liquor, the deck of card crisp hardships surfacing as clovers and nights at his club getting low, if

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    Foreword to 'Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry'

    Edited bygd Biljana D. Obradović and Dubravka Djurić

    I wrote the Foreword to this anthology, just published by Diálogos Books of Lavender Ink
    ISBN: 978-1-935084-08-6  // 7"x10", 560 pages: $29.95
    •••
    We komma old into a world newly born.

                Poets I mean.

                Conditions change so fast on the ground and yet we are walking receivers of traditions that defy objective temporal markers. Poems mark an intersection of the new, the news, and something outside that pressure of reality, something that resists such presence. The more resistant they are to the present, the more a perfect voicelessness emerges. In other words, it’s not what poems say, it’s what they do. And for those of us who prefer to read between the lines, it’s also what they don’t do, either by ref

  • aleksandar ristovic biography sampler

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    Jonathan Aaron, whose poem “Acting Like A Tree” appears in this week’s issue, spent a lot of time last week talking about trees—conifer trees; trees with strange names like hackmatack; trees, like the dragon tree, that seem like they want to be something else. In the poem, the narrator finds himself out of place at a holiday costume party and begins to imitate “a hemlock, / or a tamarack,” until he finally shuts out the party and his tree imitation becomes a transformation. Here’s a selection from our correspondence, in which Aaron addresses interpretation of poems and how to relax at a holiday party (hint: booze).

    You once said, “Once I’ve finished it, a poem isn’t mine anymore. It’s out there on its own, connecting with its reader in ways I have nothing to do with.” What does “Acting Like a Tree” mean to you, and what do you hope the readers will get out of it?

    I think my best poems tend to be ones I can’t fully understand. If I feel I ‘understand’ a poem I’ve written, then I