A View Through a Closed Window: The Phenomenological Hiatus of Vojislav Karanović’s Poetry

Abstract

The paper aims to show the genesis of this particular poetic expression, which developed over a wide span of four decades, by highlighting the basic poetic postulates on which Vojislav Karanović's poetry was formed, through the analysis of individual poetry collections. Highlighting as the basic characteristic of the author's poems their autopoietic and metapoietic nature, the position of the poem which, no matter what it talks about, actually talks about poetry and the poetic act, the paper also traces the development of individual poetic attitudes through nine poetry collections. The beginning of the author's poetics in the key of neo-avant-garde experiment is considered both in terms of the traces that he will manifest in subsequent collections, and in terms of the undoubted creative transformation in the direction of transsymbolist ideas. Built in the space of instability of the world, subject, language, in the ontology of the poem in which signs slide, slip away, move away, and the poem always remains somewhere behind, the poetry of Vojislav Karanović creates a special position of poetry that searches for the sign, language, the being of things, poetry and, ultimately, the lyrical subject itself. Building, on the other hand, a poetic manner in which the final identification of the sign never comes, where semantics, once hinted at, already annihilates itself in the next poem / next verse, the poet has built an opus in which interpretation always moves on the edge of a multitude of possibilities, which is why the work views Karanović's work from the position of a special poetic game that never ends. Defining the poetry of Vojislav Karanović as “the great poetry in an unkind time“, the paper in its conclusion points to the importance of the author's poetry, both from the perspective of the poetic revolution that the poet made in his transsymbolist beginnings, and in terms of the influence that this opus has had on generations of contemporary poets.