I wonder what's the current state of #
Struga, the town of #
poetry from #
NorthMacedonia (FYRO formerly), a place that had some visibility in the World Republic of Letters a few decades ago. Nichita Stănescu, the late darling of Romanian neo-modernist poetry in the '60s-70s, won an award there. For a while, quite a few Romanian poets were making pilgrimage towards there, but the poets closer to my generation? Not so much, I guess. Probably some key organizer died or at least lost their edge, which often happens with this kind of small institution.
I have only ever been to one "town of poetry", Bistrița. It was a one-time experience... And now if you don't mind the oversharing:
The late T.S. Khasis and his girlfriend at the time accepted me to share the ride with them from Bucharest all the way to Bistrița. On the way there, we were binging Radiohead while savoring the landscapes of Transylvania... But we arrived very late in town. I was uninvited and on a tight budget, so I had to spend the night (the only night of the poetry festival that Mircea Cărtărescu attended; in a parallel universe, I could've met Cărtărescu - which I used to idolize back in my high school years -, but that might have changed my trajectory into that of a starry-eyed liberal...) at a motel on the outskirts... The next morning, no one came to pick me up... So I took all my luggage onto the road, no sidewalk for a few Kms, just a side channel that was fairly deep, fallen apples were filling it with juice...
Eventually, I arrive at the venue of the first event of the second day of the festival - an open mic debate about the poetry book market across European contributions. No one was expecting my arrival, but the organizers knew me and let me politely grab the mic to say something about recent poetry from Portugal (don't remember much but I'm almost certain I've mentioned how Golgona Anghel, a female poet of Romanian origin, got published by a prestigious publishing house in Lisbon). Thankfully, the organizers let me stay at the hotel with the other poets from the festival - after all, I did contribute something even if I wasn't on the invite list. I had a great time with most everyone and Simona Popescu generously funded my night train ticket to get back to Bucharest and thus be able to spend a bit more money on poetry books!
Some weeks afterwards, one of the organizers quietly blocked me on Facebook for no reason I could fathom (we literally had no fight). I was not invited to read poetry at Bistrița in any of the years since. Funnily, another somewhat related organizer kept endorsing me to a little degree for a few more years, until 2019, when I was initially proposed to possibly read at another poetry festival - in Bucharest, where I had just moved -, yet they vetoed my inclusion (which I found out much later). Around the same time, being also a publishing house editor, they had given me a review copy... I was no longer a tourist, I was working in Bucharest a full-time job, struggling with money and time and mental health. So I didn't manage to write about that book by the time of the next book fair, point at which my failure becomes the pretext of a whole feud (its conclusion was that, from a "promising poet", I had suddenly become to them a nobody who somehow was never "talented"; the irony is that, just a few years prior, they were subject to the same treatment by a senior literary critic who had supported their debut; in other words, they were the victim of the most abusive gatekeeping from the traditional literary world they conflicted with, only to end up perpetrating the same abuse).
While I was already aware they possess a flawed personality, I respected them as one of the few who read at least as much poetry as I did and seemed to care about the craft and about the local scene and not only - and I was foolish to believe the respect was mutual (certainly fooled me when they credited me for throwing the spotlight on a forgotten poet that they went on to republish), despite the fact that I had a lot less support from them than people in Bucharest who clearly hanged all the time around him and shared his tastes... (By the end of the 2010's, it turned out that although having connected for years everyone in recent poetry that could matter, at the end of the day they only really liked poetry that is... "on the knife's edge". They wanted confessional, expressionist, authenticist poetry, while I was advocating for conceptualism, posthumanism, ecopoetry - notice the contrast?)
Sorry for digressing, but I stayed for many years in Constanța, I was privileged to rent-free with my parents (not in great conditions, but I had no worries), so I afforded to not work a 9-5 and actually read, write, daydream... But I was far away for most of the year from what was going on in Bucharest, I could often only interact with the literary world through Facebook - and while irl I could be a mild presence, even if not a charismatic presence, online I appeared to most people in my awkward autistic glory - opinionated, pretentious, with tastes that are too niche... (Not indulging in alcohol, smoking or intimate relationships with literary gatekeepers and peers didn't "help" either.)
In Romania there's not really such a thing as an academic literary field, the field here comes with (pseudo-)countercultural habits, which I am fundamentally incompatible with... In a nutshell, my autistic ass took itself too seriously, misread the rules of the game, got discounted, but due to lack of resources, I just couldn't get around organizing my own infrastructure. I would've needed more charisma anyway, and not just financial incentives though it would've helped, to persuade people, especially more like-minded people, on the autistic spectrum, just tell them:
go read this and that, blow your brains out, get creative, do wild stuff, you'll get rewarded and there's going to be an entire ecosystem around it! Like really... fuck the normies who just want to fanfic on and on about Bukowski and that fascistic Houellebecq prick! But also fuck those reactionary boomers who still hate the historical avant-garde (which is "woke" too to their standards!) and hate on us if we dare keep its spirit alive as a tradition!!...
Of course, none of this seems to matter anymore. My country is heading towards a full-blown fascistic state, but then so is the EU threatening to become a comfier dystopia of sorts, which might force even me - and unlike many Romanians I was nearly euro-federalist, especially in the months after Trump's reelection, I was really into #
BuyFromEU ... - to consider moving outside it. I survived years of living in Bucharest on a shoestring budget, moving across many rents, dealing with many fraudulous landlords - how much worse can it be?
Bucharest has become so expensive. If I were actually able to secure a remote job for good (which might force me eventually to become a small entrepreneur, even if that doesn't attract me - I'd prefer a solarpunk future where my lazy ass can focus on only working out my desirable arts and not have to pay insanely high rents), I could even spend less money living in, say, Struga.
It would be funny if the base for me and the #
PrincepsPoesis project would thus become Struga or other very similar place around the Balkans, even if the only surviving writers there would probably still treat me as an outsider - after all, I don't have the backing of any tastemaker, translator or big festival organizer, virtually no one in European poetry knows me - and would fail to see how #
PrincepsPoesis would be of any interest. But then again, in the future we're heading towards, I might have to move even #
PrincepsPoesis to the dark web, if I even get to stay alive long enough...
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