It is completely normal to get lost both in the text and in life / Article / LSM.lv

This year at the Poetry Days Award two authors have been healthy: Raimonds Ķirķis for his debut collection of poems “Kartes” and Jānis Hvoinskis for the book “Muse from the City N.”. Both books were published last year by Neputns. “The book is an invitation to my colleagues – young poets – to dare and publish books,” Raimonds Ķirķis emphasizes in the “Book Stories” program of “Latvijas Radio 3” Klasika. –

Liega Piešiņa: It is written in your book that it is poetrys book. Do you think so yourself? Because there’s a lot of prose …

Raimonds Ķirķis: In principle, it is a book of poetry, and although there is one poem that is in the verlibris, it is also a slightly fake verlibris. Poetry is, however, because the traditions of poetry are strong both in the world and in Latvia, and I do not know whether poetry should be singled out as a special phenomenon.

How is poetry closer to you and more acceptable in poetry than traditional poetry?

With the fact that it is easier to operate without climbing on old mines. There will always be opportunities to say something important and significant in a way that no one has said so far, if we think about tradition.

Are you aware ka Latvian poetry offersat different poetics than before? You are not talking about love – you have other things that are more important.

But there is also a lot of love there – it is only said by other means, and that is what was important to me – to talk about very human, self-evident and all-available things in a way that would be most suitable for me individually.

I do not want to say that there are no qualities that can be found in traditional poetry – they are only expressed in a different form.

Do you like to be ironic not only about others but also about yourself?

Irony as such is not widely used in literature, and if there is irony, then it is mostly self-ironic, but it also becomes slippery – it is not blatant postmodern irony, it is different.

Did the fact that your book came under the wing of “Neputna” allow you to create such an interesting visual design? Looking at the cover of the book, we can clearly see everything that will be inside, because the content is already on the cover.

I am very, very happy about this idea of ​​Armands Zelčs – to put the content on the cover. This seems to me to be an absolutely brilliant solution – this little nuance makes the book extremely compact and seamless, rounding out what is all the length of the book from the beginning. I am happy about “Neputnu”, which was ready for more unconventional poetry.

How did you get to the point where this collection of poems should come out just at this time?

The manuscript was ready in July or August last year, a year I had purposefully put it together, and then at one point the critical mass was reached, which I realized – the collection is ready. After that, everything depended on the publishing house and other circumstances. But the inner conviction was that at the same time I wanted to publish poems that might seem outdated to me later, and the second thing – I wanted the youngest generation of Latvian poets to start to resonate somehow: the book is an invitation to my colleagues – young poets – to dare and publish books.

What you have written is not simple. It cannot be read while passing.

You can’t, but at the same time the book is extremely thin – if I’m not mistaken, there are only 33 poems. Only if the reader is not completely ill will he be able to pierce through.

What do you think are “cards” in this case?

Maps seemed to be a very successful metaphor for both the way I write and the emotional state that has been described, and it is also a tool to use to find something, but at the same time it is not really clear what it is, what needs to be found, where to get there and why you need to get there at all. With these cards, it was successful to show that it is completely normal to get lost both in the text and in life, and the way to get out of it depends on the reader and everyone.

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