Maybe He Is a Comet

In “My First Time in New York City,” a poem that memorializes his maiden journey to the United States, the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun recalls his arrival in the capital of the world:

My first time in New York City
I gave out all my cigarettes within half an hour.
And I finally
managed to sniff out
where the poetry store was.
And I went into the poetry store and
as casually
as I could, I said
Hi!
and two bizarre little men
stared out at me
from where they stood, surrounded by dusty books
and they asked me if I was scared shitless.
No, I said
and I was scared shitless
and I showed them a long letter from Ferlinghetti
and I asked
if they knew anyone
who could translate me into English from Slovene.
And I was scared shitless
and they said wait
and they asked me how to say butterfly
in Slovene
and I told them the Slovene
for elk,
because I knew
that half an hour from now they might meet
some Yugoslav
diplomat on the street
and tell him
that they know
the Slovene word for
butterfly
and I would be burned then at the stake back home as a witch.

Šalamun had come to New York as an artist rather than as a poet. He had been invited as a member of the OHO Group, a collective whose work was included in the 1970 MoMA show Information, a landmark exhibition in the history of conceptual art. But by 1976, when this poem was published, Šalamun was well on the way to defining his poetic identity: chaotic but innocent, perhaps a holy fool in love with the world’s beauty but not so foolish as to be unaware of the dangers of writing within the orbit of Eastern Bloc authoritarianism. The poem also alludes to what would be Šalamun’s ongoing struggle to bring his work to “the poetry store”: that is, to find good translators and audiences receptive to his gifts.

That wish was largely fulfilled. Šalamun has exercised an outsize influence for a poet who wrote in a language with only 2.5 million speakers—considerably fewer people than the population of New York City. He published more than 40 books before his death in 2014 and was championed by luminaries such as Jorie Graham and Robert Hass. His dynamic and eccentric verse also influenced a generation of younger American poets, including Matthew Zapruder and Brandon Shimoda. Yet his legacy still raises important questions about the meanings of major and minor as well as the ability of poets from smaller literary cultures to challenge the hierarchies of a market dominated by work either published in English or translated into it.

A reader who opens a volume of Šalamun to any page is likely to find a startling line: “Bees rustle like a fifth column”; “I am a volcano that needs no sandals.” His images cascade in bewildering but thrilling torrents: “Wreaths shut in butter, shut in a glassy / casket in the hydra’s snout under the tree-tooth, / left shadow, microbes, blown up by / Job, flushed tender shivering gelatinous / Law morphing into socage.” Tonally, he can shift abruptly from the silly (“the soul of earth jacks off the skeleton key”) to the breathtaking (“My heart / beats like the heart of a hare who will die of fear”). He is a poet of wild and strange delights; to love Šalamun, readers must want to be invited into uncharted territory.

Rather than refer to him as a “poet’s poet,” that rickety epithet, better to think of him as dashingly “peripheral”: an artist on an arrow-flight toward the world’s bullseye, a pilgrim on a mission to transform speech, regardless of birth tongue. Šalamun’s journey to the United States changed his writing, a shift that accelerated after he enrolled at the University of Iowa International Writing Program in 1970, a year after his New York visit. There he befriended the poet and translator Anselm Hollo, who became a close friend and collaborator, as well as the young poets Bob Perelman and Barrett Watten, later associated with Language poetry. Reading widely in the English-language avant-garde, Šalamun absorbed the lessons of New York School poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. Although O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” credo was an inspiration, more of Šalamun’s work is indebted to Ashbery’s magpie eye and collagist sensibility.

But perhaps that distinction breaks down upon inspection; it’s an outsider’s prerogative to see that disparate styles can combine to surprising effect. Part of Šalamun’s brilliance is that even when he’s at his most baffling, an inviting undertone surfaces. “History,” arguably Šalamun’s most famous poem, displays this fusion of epic oddity and the personal touch:

Tomaž Šalamun is a monster.
Tomaž Šalamun is a sphere rushing through the air.
He lies down in twilight, he swims in twilight.
People and I, we both look at him amazed,
we wish him well, maybe he is a comet.
Maybe he is punishment from the gods,
the boundary stone of the world.
Maybe he is such a speck in the universe
that he will give energy to the planet
when oil, steel, and food run short.

The poem, flitting through these lofty-but-cheeky abstractions, returns to the everyday as it descends toward landing:

But in Ljubljana people say: look!
This is Tomaž Šalamun, he went to the store
with his wife Maruška to buy some milk.
He will drink it and this is history.

In her influential book The World Republic of Letters (1999; English translation 2004), the scholar Pascale Casanova points out the complex relationship between “capitals” of literature—Paris in the 19th century, New York in the 20th, where money and prestige accumulate—and the so-called “provinces.” Šalamun, perhaps more than any other poet of the late 20th century, attacks this divide: “Slovenia is so / tiny you can easily / miss it!” he writes in one poem, but he was simultaneously determined to be a poet beyond his locality—both the ordinary poet who goes out to buy milk and the monster that might provide energy to the planet. Without denying his origins, Šalamun sought to reroute the peculiarities of his provincial experience to the purported center, implicitly issuing a challenge for those wealthier in literary inheritance to think themselves strange again.

***

Two new books serve as reminders of Šalamun as a thousand-faced hero. Tomaž (Wave Books, 2021), by the poet and publisher Joshua Beckman, is an homage in the form of a documentary poem, composed from interviews Beckman conducted over his years-long relationship with Šalamun. The two met in New York in the late 1990s, when Beckman was a young writer “variously employed” and Šalamun was “the new cultural attaché for the Sloveneian state (the most notable part of which was the free use of a photocopier).” The poets forged a close collaboration, during which Šalamun occasionally lived with Beckman as they translated hundreds of Šalamun’s poems into English. Beckman uses his archival material in Tomaž to construct the closest thing to a biography—or an unintentional autobiography—that Šalamun may have for some time.

Meanwhile, Opera Buffa (Black Ocean, 2022), translated by Matthew Moore, is the fourth and latest installment in Black Ocean’s ongoing Šalamun series. These late poems are some of Šalamun’s most cryptic and spare, as his language travels into arguably even more uncompromising regions. The collection underscores just how idiosyncratic, even inexplicable, his poetry is.

Born in 1941, Šalamun was the son of a doctor father and an art historian mother—leftists but not orthodox Marxists. He had a cultured, bourgeois upbringing and was thought to be a prodigy from a young age. His family had roots near Trieste, a city at the crossing between Slovenia, Italy, and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Tomaž, Šalamun remarks on this multifaceted background: “I feel Mediterranean / which means in a way almost more Italian / than the rural Slovenians / who wouldn’t understand the sea.” His early life reflected a similar European cosmopolitanism: sailing on the Adriatic, an exchange family in Brussels, a love affair in Paris. Poetry burst from him as a teenager—its sudden emergence seems to have surprised him as much as anyone. He muses, “maybe / this was some kind of / mental disorder // but also I felt that / this is something important.” His work gained immediate acceptance with Slovenia’s leading literary journal, Perspektive. However, this precocity was stymied when a provocative poem "enraged some government official.” A reference to a dead cat was interpreted as a swipe against Ivan Maček, a prominent politician (maček is Slovenian for “cat”) and landed Šalamun in jail for five days.

The incident made Šalamun famous in Slovenia—an inadvertent culture hero. Perhaps there is something inherently anti-authoritarian in work that is hard to parse: what can’t be neatly categorized, whether “difficult” or simply bizarre, also can’t be easily controlled. Such work is ripe for misunderstanding and supposed hidden messages. However, some of Šalamun’s early poetry flirts with explicit politics. Consider, for instance, the short “Proverbs,” another early poem, which blends provocation with something more mystic:

1. Tomaz Šalamun made the Party blink, tamed it, dismantled it, and reconstituted it.
2. Tomaz Šalamun said, Russians Get Out! and they did.
3. Tomaz Šalamun sleeps in the forest.

Although some of Šalamun’s poems allow glimpses into his personal life, Tomaž provides a more complete sense of the making of a poet as well as a window into how his work was written. Readers learn, for instance, that his collage poetics predate his life in the United States, which he attributes to a moment of rural serendipity:

               so I’m in this wooden toilet
                           this outhouse
                           and looking at
               a little cut up piece of newspaper
 
                     and I read it and
 
                     awwwwwwwww
 
                     this is poetry
 
                     so I copied it
 
                     […]
 
                      I started
in the outhouse and then went looking
for some other pieces that attacked me

Beyond the prophetic voice of the poems, Šalamun’s disappointments and struggles are also disclosed in Tomaž. These range from the small (feeling “devastated” when Ashbery couldn’t remember their having previously met) to the highly significant, including his painful separation from his first wife, Maruša, in 1975 and his lingering uncertainty about his fluid sexuality. It’s too simple to say that the biography “informs” the poetry; part of Šalamun’s appeal is the boldness of linguistic freedom, running beyond the boundaries of his ordinary experience or any dictum to “write what you know.” But, regardless, it arouses sympathy for the circumstances of a long journey into language.

Stippled with translations that periodically remind one of Šalamun’s vividness, along with pictures of Šalamun and his family, Tomaž is a kind of parallel or ghost text, a book that can’t survive on its own without the work of its subject but which doesn’t try to do otherwise. In a closing note, Beckman, writes that the project is “a kind of getting closer and the sharing of it now feels something like introducing a friend to another.” In the spirit of informality, Beckman center justifies the lines, lending them a casual buoyancy that he argues “felt less forceful … than any other way to have his words on the page.” The result is a lineation that resembles both poetry and scriptwriting, a limbo in which moments of transparent delight such as “Bob was the best dancer / he was nineteen years old” or “a huge office // white silk // enormous dog” flicker across the page.

If Tomaž sets readers at ease with its geniality, Opera Buffa asserts Šalamun’s enigmatic side. Although tracking his full bibliography is difficult, the book is advertised as Šalamun’s “last testament.” The poems are largely written in couplets, the lines studded with rapid-fire non-sequiturs. His earlier work more frequently (though never regularly) embraces narrative, even autobiography, as in his recollection of New York. In Opera Buffa, the personal at first seems out of the question, as if language’s instability is accelerating. As soon as one inscrutable image is introduced, another is already barging into view. Moments of political suggestiveness manifest (“Beria, so it seems, strangled him,” reads one line, a reference to the notoriously brutal Soviet bureaucrat) and dissipate on arrival, both sinister and kitschy, without context. Other lines, such as “I licked a clone / to death,” radiate the joy of pure bafflement.

The concision of the form highlights Šalamun’s gift for parataxis, the adding together seemingly unconnected phrases. “Snow,” the book’s first poem, bursts in with declarations:

Rouge. It’s not a rose, it’s rouge.
It’s a smile. It’s a seal.
 
They are eyes. It’s the forehead.
It’s the kouros. Naxos.
 
They are hair. It is a gas village.
It’s winter. It’s spring.
 
It’s an arm broken off.
It’s vomiting.

The couplets invite readers to exercise their powers of comparison—x is to y, or is it rather apples to oranges?—and at first Šalamun seems willing to oblige and clarify distinctions—“It’s not a rose, it’s rouge.” Quickly, though, one questions whether adding a sentence to another enhances understanding or undermines it: are the eyes and the forehead part of the kouros, an ancient Greek sculpture of a naked young man? Or, like statues falling into ruins (“an arm broken off”), do readers lose their comprehension even as they try their hardest to see? And if they are lost, do they like it?

Elsewhere, Šalamun seems to delight in disorientation, nearly taunting readers by taking confusion as his subject, as in the poem “Ives, I Did Not Look at the Finish Line”:

You change horizons, too, when
you swallow saliva, dear
 
reader. We play with image like
the indigenous, Italicized.
 
I take whatever I’m prescribed,
low behavior’s
 
low behaviors. I did enjoy the
ortolans (I don’t
 
eat them, like Italians, no, no,
I enjoyed them
 
as they sang). I pushed the ship
away. I just asked for a little bit.
 
Hi, c’mon, hi, clutching something
makes it more expensive.

The horizon of the poem—what readers can reasonably expect to be its frame or boundary—is reflected back to the readers, asking them to reconsider who is responsible for such perceived limitations. Meanwhile, a hint of something subversive lurks in the act of poetic creation, as the poet “take[s] whatever I’m prescribed,” a lack of discrimination that might flirt with any bad behavior, even (although it’s denied) the consumption of ortolan, a gruesome culinary practice banned in France (although Šalamun intentionally conflates it with Italy) that epitomizes decadent depravity. Images of luxury are thrust into the poem, distorted and, in the end, dispensed with, becoming a loose parallel for how this terse form can seem simultaneously rich and spare.

References to Italy are another curious theme throughout the book, perhaps weighing, retrospectively, Šalamun’s affiliations of heritage and memory—the clever pun of Italicized invokes the regional power imbalance. These references are accompanied by a litany of unexplained Slavic names and place names. Jeffrey Young, who co-translated Andes (2016), another late Šalamun work, writes in that book’s preface, “[Šalamun’s] native readership will find these to be … as incomprehensible to them as to people in the United States or elsewhere.” The poems achieve a curious hyper-specificity, referring to people and places that only Šalamun can know. Through all the unusual imagery, the experience of the local returns to overwhelm the poem and claim the strangest vantage point of all.

***

Šalamun did not set out to be a political poet. For a writer who grew up at the edge of the Iron Curtain in the mid-20th century, freedom might have seemed like the luxury of freedom from politics. But he was occasionally drawn back to political language, even as it became part of a more eclectic vocabulary. Perhaps this signals a promiscuous imagination, one attracted to language that holds a charge—the liberty of being able to say anything in a poem runs counter to self-censoring impulses. However, when Šalamun returned to Slovenia from Iowa in 1973, as he recounts in Tomaž, harsh realities were unignorable: he was poor, and there was no work for rebellious poets. After a period of struggle, he eventually found work as an encyclopedia salesman:

            and no one would let me in
                    except in one house
            there were two young people
 
            I showed them the encyclopedias
            and they said we don’t buy this drek
 
we want Kafka Proust Dane Zajc and Šalamun
 
                              and I
                    couldn’t talk
 
                    it was so absurd

“Absurd,” of course, is an epithet many commentators, from Robert Hass to Colm Tóibín, have bestowed on Šalamun. But what does it mean? Šalamun’s writing does not avow life’s meaninglessness, as one conventional definition of the term might venture; his poems have an almost religious love of life and language. Absurdism often has a political valence in its associations with other Eastern European writers—Milan Kundera or Václav Havel, for instance—whose work is a commentary on oppressive governments that actively deny individual expression. For Šalamun, however, the “direct” comment of a poem like “Proverbs” is the exception: nonsense is deployed pointedly.

Similarly, Šalamun is a surrealist (“no purer contemporary surrealist,” according to Matthew Zapruder). The two terms are by no means mutually exclusive. These categories are helpful, if heuristic. They offer a convenient framework when meaning in a conventional sense is not immediately forthcoming. How are readers to parse a line such as “A whoosh of owls, a rainbow made of wolves / inspires Magna Carta”? What do readers “get” from the poems in Opera Buffa as they fly by, each line more mysterious than the last? Lacking a deep understanding of the work—which can evade even close readings—classifications keep boundaries clear but can also conceal the difficulties of accepting when something is truly mysterious.

It is already a cliché that categories such as “surreal” and “absurd” feel feeble in a world that routinely surprises with its strangeness. Like any avant-garde movement, the methods were absorbed, neutralized, and rendered into ready-made stylistics. Surrealism can be found in any anodyne work in 2022 that does not attempt strict “realism,” and every Twilight Zone receives its Black Mirror, a derivative that merely attempts to “make you think,” to use another anemic phrase. The specter of a surrealism that could still surprise readers, and what it would look like if it could, haunts the artistic imagination. Perhaps Šalamun, in his uncompromisingness, could be a model for an ethic of astonishment, if he could be released from his enclosure—no “mere” surrealist but a writer constantly seeking new rules for his language game.

Surrealism was originally a political project, an attempted revolution from the vantage of culture, in which the psychic life, once unfettered, would destroy an instrumental rationality. Certainly, Šalamun’s work resonates with André Breton’s remark in the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) that “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable.” This project failed—life went on—but is there not still a need of an antidote for the dulling? As Šalamun says in an interview with Charles Simic in BOMB, “My instinct is to only be dependent upon my internal weather. I don’t notice what is outside. When language wakes up, it just has its own weather.” To follow the weather, and not try to engineer it, is an ability much desired but rarely achieved.