Indeks 21 Publishing Promotion / Promotions of Literature Editions
‘Indeks 21’ Publishing Promotion will take place on 27 November at the Rebel Relic Cafe, as part of the Other? Europe programme arch.
‘Indeks 21’ comprises 47 authors born in the period from the end of the 70s to the end of the 90s of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 2000s of the 21st century. That is why the Collection of New Poetry of Novi Sad from 2008, ‘Nešto je u igri’ (Eng. Something Is at Play), can represent a watershed in differentiating the first and second generation of Novi Sad poets since some names from the first generation are also included in this selection.
In addition to meeting the age limit requirements, the criteria or framework for compiling ‘Indeks 21’ was to include poets who were not only born, and who live and create in the territory of Novi Sad, but also the authors who spent a certain period of their life in Novi Sad, and who came to live or temporarily stay in Novi Sad by changing their place of residence, that is, authors who lived and continued to live in other cities, and whose period of activity in the field of poetry did not go unnoticed on the poetic map of Novi Sad.
The overview strives to show that the poetic positions and methods of the poets’ writing style are changing, that new voices are emerging, and new readers are being established. What characterises the listed poets and their poetry is the deflection from harmony and the confrontation with the pressure of the socio-political reality that contributed to the formation of their poetic voice. It will help them find a personal tone, form and rhetoric that will irreconcilably respond to the volatile, controversial and dramatic reality and the reality of their inner poetic voice. In a poetic sense, the works of the included authors are different, but at the same time, correspond, are connected to or intertwine with certain poetic lines of previous generations. Of course, they are not necessarily the bearers of new practices, but, since one part of them appears in the context of postmodernism and shows an ambivalent or antagonistic attitude towards it, certain actions can be recognised as an inclination of certain paradigms in continuity with the dominant poetic heritage of this area from the 70s and the 1980s, primarily in attempts to appropriate the (neo)avant-garde, with variations of discursive and narrative poetry, while among the poets of the generation born in the 1990s and the second half of the 1990s of the 20th century, confessional poetry takes over dominance. The poetic strategies in question are not distinguished by radicality or unexpected novelty on the formal level, but to travesty or create a superstructure of gestures of earlier poetic directions. That testifies to the simultaneous presence of different principles within the new poetic generation in Novi Sad, best illustrated by the corpus of poems included in the chronology of the represented poets, which offers insight into current poetic tendencies and thematic-motive flows.
Photo: Jelena Blanuša