Tomaž

The great Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun (1941–2014) cultivated an imagination freed from forces that suppress “this incredible truth / the truth how we live,” amassing a vast oeuvre dedicated to playfully serious inquiries into the nature of reality and consciousness. In Tomaž, translator Joshua Beckman draws on extensive interviews conducted near the end of the poet’s life to offer a first-person account of Šalamun’s “life, his work, and his muses” during the cultural ferment of the 1960s and ’70s. Broken into centered lines interspersed with poems and photographs, the highly readable Tomaž straddles oral memoir, Bildungsroman, and garrulous slide show.

Šalamun recalls a happy, well-educated family in a Slovenian backwater (“such a hole”) and his first attempts at poetry:

[…] maybe
this was some kind of
mental disorder

but I also felt that
this is something important

A thin-skinned official jailed him briefly for an early, absurdist poem, making Šalamun famous and reinforcing that he “must really be a poet.” Restless in Tito-era Yugoslavia, he wandered the artistic enclaves of western Europe and Mexico (“as a poet I want to be really free”), before finding a place to support his work: “My destiny is America.”

Tomaž illuminates the deep gregariousness of Šalamun’s poetry: the choice of art form came, in part, from the proximity of a charismatic, visiting poet, Dane Zajc; his influences—John Ashbery, Bob Perelman—were often poets he knew; and loved ones, like artist Metka Krašovec, could inspire entire books. While his transitory adorations—“he appeared to me a / Christ”—were undoubtedly detrimental to his marriages and the men he discarded out of “guilt” about his sexuality, they were of a piece with the ardent multifariousness of his work. Tomaž offers an inspiring model for becoming a poet, with an insouciance that makes congenial a serious dedication to poetry and with the grace to thrive in a now-lost world of avant-garde bohemias.