2024-08-08 03:58:38
He recently completed an extraordinary American tour with his poetry, where the audience listened to his poems, even though they did not understand a single word. Some time ago he celebrated his 60th birthday and released the collection Missing it exactly. In an interview for Aktuálně.cz, Petr Hruška talks about the importance of mystery and banality for poetry and life. “At schools that teach us to understand the world, we should also learn not to understand the world,” he believes.
He did not publish his first collection of poems until he was thirty, but in retrospect he found his preoccupation with “everyday poetry” at an early age. “For unknown reasons, since childhood I have been especially attracted to things and events that at first glance are unimportant, pushed away, insignificant and worthless. How much time I spent in geography or physics classes thinking about the unattractive flower drying on the afternoon window in the mezzanine of the school corridor, while the teacher spread out at the blackboard during the explanation about the solar system. I felt that some obscure meanings were accumulating in that flower, with which it mysteriously participates in this tragicomic world,” recalls Petr Hruška.
Soon after he made his debut with the 1995 collection Obývací nepokoje, he became one of the strongest voices in Czech poetry and won the State Prize for Literature 11 years ago. So one could already talk about a poetic career. However, Hruška counters that the man of letters has no career. “The expression that the author desires is always in front of him, still just as looming and elusive. He can constantly tempt him, he can give up on it over time precisely because of its elusiveness, he can weaken or never even begin. But he cannot fulfill it,” he describes.
The inspiration for Petr Hruška can be, for example, a flower that suddenly becomes “significant”. | Photo: Jiří Zerzoň
Hruška has so far published ten collections, many of which have been translated. Readers in Polish, Hungarian or French can immerse themselves in his poetry. So far the latest is last year’s committee from the work, which was published in the UK under the name Everything Indicates. The title contains the poet’s view of life and poetry, although it was suggested by the translator.
Recently, the poet also completed an American tour with an almost musical name – Petr Hruška US Tour 2024. At the invitation of the Czech Literary Center, he traveled through ten cities from New York to California, mostly alongside leading American authors. He was pleasantly surprised that the audience there emphasized that his poetry should first be heard in the original language, although they do not understand it in the traditional sense of the word.
Feel the energy
According to Hruška, this is due, among other things, to the fact that the American listener does not have a convulsive need to “decipher” the text, she thinks. “They didn’t listen so much to the words, but rather to the speech – all that energy made up of sound and silence, sonority, pauses, diction, rhythm, intonation,” he enumerates. In contrast, in the Czech Republic and elsewhere in the world, we put a fierce emphasis on understanding specific words. “It is based on the mistaken assumption that there are some connoisseurs who understand poetry. The others are not among them, so they are not given to experience the poem. God knows where it comes from, perhaps the fact that the poem is made of words is to blame, and after all, we should all understand them.”
He contrasts this fact with music that many people allow themselves to experience without “understanding” it, says Hruška. “They are not afraid that they will have to know why they like it. That they will even have to defend it, explain it in front of others. Music can be talked about, but not necessarily – so why not go to a concert? No one will suspect us of inadequacy when they hear about it we will not say anything and we will simply take our experience with us. However, after listening to or reading the poem, we must take a stand, or we will be recognized as inferior, even in front of ourselves, rather than undergo such a horror miss the poem,” thinks the author.
He guesses that the way poetry is perceived by education is partly to blame. Paradoxically, he himself is a part of some high school literary canons. “We recently talked about this with my son from different generational perspectives and experiences, but we agreed that in all schools that do teach us to understand the world, a subject that would specifically teach how not to understand the world should be mandatory,” he says Pear.
According to him, it reflects the real state of affairs – that we will always primarily not understand the world. “And it’s about how, that’s what determines the nature of our lives and the nature of the epoch we live in. We can misunderstand the world in different ways: irritated, offended, defiant, conquering, timid, obedient and inquisitive, humble and humbled , resigned and balanced. Our incomprehension can crush us, provoke aggression,” he says.
According to him, dictators are an example of people who cannot cope with the mystery of the world. “They try to eliminate it by appropriating the world, determining its order and removing the mystery from it, or outright banning it. Religious fanatics dictate its secret form and rules for the same reasons. Grocers ridicule it, idiots have known it for a long time,” he says. .
According to him, good poetry, on the contrary, prevents secrets from looting and enslavement. “It reminds us that the unknown can be not only harrowing, but also exciting,” he adds.
Fundamental nonsense
Petr Hruška writes precisely in his last collection Minout, which was published this year by the publishing house Host: if poetry is to be worth something, it should always have the possibility of appearing to be worth nothing. “I am convinced that wonder and banality are deeply connected, one relies on the other and does not exist without it. The magic of poetry is that it allows the reader to always freely choose – is this nonsense or importance? Always again – what “What seemed trivial once may appear essential the next time. And sometimes even both at the same time,” he says.
Banality and miracle are deeply connected, Petr Hruška is convinced. | Photo: Jiří Zerzoň
Even the title of the collection Minout contains precisely the contradiction that Hruška perceives in poetry. According to him, it is not possible to capture a fleeting “not at all essential” moment exactly, but only “exactly in inaccuracy”, he believes. “The collection Minout se precisely has a deliberately messy rhythm. That is why there are so many texts of different forms – poems in verse, poems in prose, texts of the nature of an aphorism, a record of a dream, a quotation from another text, from an email, a diary entry, a poem alternates with a reflection on the writing of a poem, several lines appear on the pages at different distances from each other, so that they can be read as separate texts or as one interrupted whole. I did not want to create a collection of refined poems in a traditional form, which follow one another and do not allow the reader to breathe,” he describes.
His creative process is similarly “smelly”. Hruška cannot tell when the creation of a poem begins or when it ends. “I carry around various notebooks, receipts from pubs, I have a mess of various detailed files on my computer. I know very little about the creative process, probably only that it cannot be relied on. There are systematic authors, I am not one of them. The most common way, how not to write anything is a big preparation for me. In one of those notebooks I have a sentence: It’s too tidy for a poem,” he quotes.
Hruška was born and has lived in Ostrava all his life. “Probably the raw objectivity and harsh grotesqueness of the fate of the city in which I live my whole life, unless of course I’m on the road, which I’m on almost all the time, also plays a part in the form of my poetry,” he says. At the same time, he warns against overestimating his influence and distances himself from local patriotism. “It was always foreign to me, after all, just like any other. Patriots for Ostrava or Patriots for Europe – it’s scary,” he says, referring to the newly formed faction in the European Parliament, which was co-founded by Andrej Babiš from the ANO movement.
That is why Petr Hruška does not rely on the mythical Ostrava directness in his texts. He prefers to be inspired when the banal suddenly becomes significant, just as he did back in school. “I am fascinated by how a being, a thing or an event emerges from the apparent insignificance in which it might have rested a moment ago, and for a moment highlights itself with a kind of not quite decipherable strength. So that it can sink back into its previous invisibility. What is it for the events, for the constellations that suddenly give meaning to everything? Where do they come from, who determines them and according to what? I don’t even want to figure it out, I want to be able to get excited about it ” the poet wishes.
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