ROLLER-SKATING notes: Interview with Nina Živanćević
Nina Živanćević’s new book of poems published with Coolgrove Books can be found here: https://coolgrove.com/books/nina-zivancevic/
The following interview should be considered a poetic-landscape or dual portrait of Nina Živanćević in conversation with Malik Crumpler about her inspiring new book of poems, ROLLER-SKATING notes. Nina Živanćević will be the featured poet, reader at Paris Lit Up this Thursday 14, October 2021 and will be reading from her new book as well as others.
Malik Crumpler (M.C.): There’s a multitude of literary and musical forms interacting in each poem in ROLLER-SKATING notes. Do you have a favorite/ most reliable poetic form or any forms you prefer not to speak through? Oh and also, how important is it to you to invent your own forms?
Nina Živanćević (N.Z.): Oh, I don’t think I’m inventing my poetic forms, they are already given to us by our predecessors, genius poets and composers. In all modesty, I don’t think that I am either John Donne or Stockhausen. Sometimes I believe there are more old forms than contemporary poets and performers - Alice Notley had a poetry workshop once where we were exploring all these ancient forms not only the form of Persian Ghazal or of the Elizabethan sonnet, but many more, endless endless...
M.C.: In your poem “HANNAH ARENDT” p49 you honor, investigate and illuminate the legislative wisdom of Arendt by quoting her when she addressed the essence of human’s ability to inflict or compose horror on one another by their individual “refusal to imagine the life of others…” Do you consider your poems as a means to direct your readers' attention to the importance of empathy for our fellow human being's situation and condition (from the migrant, refugee to the surgeon) that suffer because of another's refusal to acknowledge their humanity?
N.Z.: I do, absolutely. You see I believe in humanism. I write social engaged poetry, otherwise why write? (Yes, of course there is self-therapy, or all intimate romantic roaming of my soul, but the term of humanity is SO underrated these days, a human life costs a vaccine etc. etc.)
M.C.: There’re so many multi-dimensional dense truths operating in all of your poems. Do you consider truth-telling/confessionals/dialogues about historical horrors and their effect on migratory realities as a necessity of your poems? To be clear, as you wrote on p92 “And the spirit of our / Daily resistance”. Do you feel like it’s your responsibility in your poems to maintain the daily resistance against historical and contemporary crimes against humanity?
N.Z.: Well, you see, for years people considered me as “Allen Ginsberg’s former assistant and secretary”, I didn’t even write like him, but finally something of his work has rubbed off, haha!
M.C.: Not just in “IF I WERE TO PAINT” p52 do we gain clarity on your position as poet-painter, but in all of your poems you allow us to see, taste and feel colours, textures, juxtaposition, uncomfortable imagery, unpredictable light, and even more so in “PRAGUE 89 ...BUDAPEST BUKAREST WARSOVIE BELGRADE (17 November in Prague)” p. 91 you let us (the readers) in on the cultivation of your attentive painter's eye, when conjuring your father (artist, painter and director of the national museum in Belgrade). Do you ever consider some of your books as museums and your poems as framed visual pieces hanging on the pages (walls), installations, sculptures or interactive vicarious time machines, or is that just me?
N.Z.: Yes Malik, I really think that you are on the right track- I was meant to be a visual artist and I attended art classes for a couple of years. However, as that visual poem “Prague 89..” suggests - my parents were really discouraged by the political regime in former Yugoslavia so they did their best to discourage me to become a starving artist. However, I became a poet, a creature poor with a position even more difficult to pin down than a painter. I do drawings on my own when I get time to breathe but I don’t show them around.
M.C.: In “ACTIVE ACTIVIST PERFORMING ACTION” p21, all the lines following your Vermeerian highlighted refrains, “And to some of them…” are tungsten sharp lines filled with absolutely explosive multi-languages, perspectives, lenses, images, places, angels and so many enormous moments & ideas. Could you please share one or three jewels about your alchemical process of revision and refining or transmuting so many unpredictable expressions into a succinctly woven one and a half pages of distilled honesty, framed by paper?
N.Z.: This is an interesting issue - how do we write poems and other stories. You see, some of them appear naturally to me, like a one breath poem filled with many one-liners and some of them have to be revised; some revisions are long and tedious as they last for years, but some are quick, you change perhaps a comma or just one word and that’s it. The poem you liked I never changed, never worked on, however, the poem “Paris is Burning” took me 10 years to write as the subject seemed difficult to me, painful, so I was fishing for the right word(s) for years to fit in.
M.C.: There are several specifically erotic, sensual love poems in this book where within each, the political, mystical and spiritual realms mélange quietly within luscious moments of erotic clarity. Do you consider all your poems to be love poems of a certain kind of shade or colour or aromas of encountering the being that is love or that state of being where love abounds? Or like your “good friend [tells you]” p 85 -86 in POEM FOR EM, “once you start/ with heavy erotica you can never stop…” Is there a difference for you, between the tone, pace, and language of cultivating heavy erotica as opposed to conjuring traditional love poems?
N.Z.: Well, I was warned from my early age to avoid writing traditional “love-dove” poems, even as a po-mo pastiche which I normally love to write; however, my erotic or sensual poetry is in fact love poetry, although it may seem different from other poems in this genre. It’s like asking the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima if he made In the Realm of Senses as a love film or an erotic porn fantasy. The creation changes the boundaries of love - if you see it as a porn it will be porn for you, and if you see something as a tender love affair it will remain with you as such. In my view Rodin was a very tender sculptor, however, as I saw some of his rare bronze in the collection Morozov last week, I was truly puzzled that his approach to lovers could be different. Obviously, he had to respond to the taste of the buyers, brothers Morozov who commissioned the art work that they wanted to see in their collection.
M.C.: Do you ever consider the poems in ROLLER-SKATING notes directed towards specific people to be either transmissions from or simply in correspondence with (as you so superbly and sublimely put it at the end of a POEM FOR EM) people, places, sensations and presences from or “On the other side/ Of heaven”? And if not HEAVEN exactly, from the just the other side of awareness, or better yet beyond the mundane awareness of daily routines?
N.Z.: I learnt a lot about writing personal poems from that lovely American poet, Frank O’Hara whose work and times I studied extensively during my post-doc studies in Washington D.C during the 1980s. Most of his poems are superb because not only they are intimate, private and peripherally directed to some real people but they are also universal. His statements in there are always multilayered and triple metaphors, of course for those readers who can figure them out.
M.C.: There’s so much humour in a lot of your poems, HOW DO YOU GET ALL THAT HUMOUR IN THERE? Is it a matter of writing the devastating beauty of the paradoxes of being alive, first or is it something about articulating something about being beyond alive? Or does it start from a humorous ironic view on a subject?
N.Z.: I would say that humor is very important element like in life like in poetry, I am almost tempted to say that its traces are to be found in an Oriental wisdom that my mother was endowed with (she was born and raised in Bosnia where the people’s mentality is very Eastern, “oriental” - mind you, the only author who got the Nobel prize for writing coming from my region was Ivo Andric, also Bosnian. And sure, as you said “it is a matter of writing the devastating beauty of the paradoxes of being alive”! Thanks for your extremely sensitive reading of my verse.
M.C.: Several poems in ROLLER-SKATING notes are directly written “for” a specific person, or about and for your family, friends and people who are still living, and beyond ascendant. Do you consider the form or vehicle of letter writing one of your favorite ways to activate your poetic voice/imagination?
N.Z.: Wait, this is a complex question or rather a few of them. When I address some people through dedication or a dialogue in my poems – it is mostly to address some crucial issue like the state of art nowadays, the state of humanity, human beings in all that - my verse may be continuing some invisible conversation or the real one that I started with these specific people, or the poem attests to the lack of a conversation or communication with them - BUT THE POEM is always addressed to all people. For instance, my ELYSIAN FIELDS OF POWER is a real discussion with theatre people: about theatre, the division of power (the theatre or even cinema directors often do not get it). The poem is dedicated to two friends of mine, but the fact that I dedicate one poem to several people means that the poem is not a personal letter, but rather trying to get under the surface of a problem. I wrote just a couple of very personal poems in my life and these people to whom I dedicated them were telling everyone “don’t make Nina angry - she’s going to put you in her poem”.
M.C.: For me, you’re one of the supreme word-alchemists who captures and unleashes performances of the mind, behaviours/attitudes of the soul, lifestyles of thinking and the emotional/sensual language of living resistance culture on and beyond the page or stage on any topic. I think you’re able to do this because your ink is fearless in your prose and essays as well, you fearlessly navigate any topic you choose. Are there any topics you refuse to cast your luminiferous lens upon, if so why?
N.Z.: Thank you for your kind words, true I am not afraid to discuss any topic and my eloquence has alienated a bunch of diplomatic people in this world. Of course, there are many topics I know nothing about thus I cannot write about them but whenever I feel that there is some problem or social injustice going on - I have to kinda comment on them. We live in an era where so called witch-hunt becomes staple food for the media so people are discovering all sorts of anomalous or deprived behavior, ha, perhaps I don’t have to write this social critique any longer. But if a poet sees all social insufficiencies and problems but fails to write it down - that’s a serious problem for me.
M.C.: Having read, followed and been inspired by your work for more than twenty years, I just have to ask this: do you consider “ROLLER-SKATING notes” to be the culmination of all your ideas, like a retrospective of NEW WORKS, or is it more of an exhibition of your newest experiences in thinking and word-meditations?
N.Z.: Well, true, the Skates is some sort of compilation of my previous work but I would not consider the book “to be the culmination of all my ideas”, I hope to be writing some more.
M.C.: What’s next, Nina? How’s it going with touring “ROLLER-SKATING notes” around Europe via in-person and online readings, workshops, panels etc. Do you have any new works on the way after your tour?
N.Z.: Malik, you are asking a very difficult question, it’s difficult and sad because NONE of us can make any plans about anything due to the Covid epoch which has been going on and on. Several festivals that invited me prior to this crisis are closed in Europe and the U.S. where my editor, the Coolgrove Press is located, see, my heart goes to friends such as Alice Notley who was not able to travel for 2 years, not able to see her children and grandchildren in the U.S., and stuff like that. Yes, there are Zoom conferences and readings, but like with theater or any other outing - it is not the same event when you host people virtually and you see the real faces in the audience. Someone is already writing a doctoral thesis on the importance of the ritual of seeing a real creation and the work of art directly and in person. I will travel rather bravely to Belgrade and Budapest in the beginning of November where a public event becomes an outlandish thing so I am not sure if the scheduled readings will take place, but we have to try hard. And to try buying books online - independent publishers such as Coolgrove have to get encouraged to continue their work.
M.C. : What’s the title, ROLLER-SKATING notes mean for you? For me, it has to do with the difficulty of learning to roller-skate in general as a means of navigation, fun, and eventually dance (by the way, I still can’t roller skate). For me, as a reader, the poems in here do all that, they navigate the existential and metaphysical and REAL with a hidden road map or invisible instructions for how to dig into your environment internally or externally, while moving forward or abruptly time traveling backward into that inner-void of timelessness, like those moonwalking roller skaters used to do in Central Park, roller skating backwards while not moving at all, something about stillness there, right?
N.Z.: Oh! I hope you enjoyed the book - as Bowie said “if you’re happy I’m happy too”, and true - you did give answers in all your questions related to the book. I was one of those skaters in Central Park in NYC and that was my way to move around the city while making all the notes, observations in my head. I would get home and write them down. Until one day when I had a heavy fall down the slope in Central Park. From that day on I was always forced to take subways which I really hate - that’s why this book is not called Subway Notes or Boat Lessons but hey! I may even write such books if the global lockdown keeps us grounded here - my soul has yearned to travel a bit, haven’t we all?
For more information, visit Nina Živanćević’s website: https://ninazivancevic.wordpress.com/about/
I write social engaged poetry, otherwise why write?