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The legacy poetry of Ante Popovski is a “supreme meaning” between two silences that could happen to this country and this culture, for which he cared as his own daughter, taking care that nobody “dishonors” her, thinking of:
The honor that you tried to take from
Our fatherland… (153)
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Maybe it is time that I apologized for my emotions, maybe it is time that you forgave me that I dared at all to speak about His word, but maybe this poetry made me such. And it shall also shape and reshape you. As of today, I think, once this verses of Ante are heard for the first time, the poets shall become more poets, the doctors more doctors, the politicians more politicians, or in short – the people more people. For we were addressed by a more of a man, more than a human, more of a poet… May all those who were dedicated a poem in this book be proud, but let us the unnamed that are being addressed also be proud.
How can be not believe him, when he proposes, even if we lose everything in life, even if we can not have children, that paradoxically, the only “way out” is “birth” or “rebirth”. And what is the seed of the new fertility after some “death’? This is what Ante says:
There is nothing which is not word.
Not even the eternity, not even transience.
A living remnant of the creation times
the word continues to create living worlds
as opposed to the deserts in our souls. (143)
The “creator word”, the “mother word” of the future, which we are yet to fill with meaning, is the biggest cult “seed” of the new worlds. That is how Popovski’s poetry “gives birth”, that is how the syntagms are “fertilized” via: love, magnetism, “chemistry”, and even the “marriages” between words. The sentences also become “partners”. This is how the poems themselves “talk” to each other.
“Golden seed” are the poetic legacy, Две тишини, Коска паленица, Пророчки труби, Светата песна and you know what other collections I have in mind.
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For only Ante and nobody else asks us alone:
Whom shall I keep quiet
Who shall teach me
How to live without myself? (36)
When we have already “left ourselves” or when we have become aware that it happened long ago, silently, quietly, we have the right to ask: “How?” “How further?”
If we have forced ourselves and used to be without others, without those whom we love, “live” or only “finish living” the “rest of the life”, even by force, are we so cursed to force ourselves to “also live without ourselves”? There is no bigger loneliness. We are becoming “guests” of our own life. We see off ourselves, even before the others see us off. We see ourselves as we depart. Every day. Without anybody finding out. In secret.
And it all happens – in time. Now Ante will correct me and teach me with his verses: “[what] we the living comprehend as time”. The poem The Preacher reads this:
Never and nowhere He mentioned the thing
that we the living comprehend as time,
and here, we basically
differ from the Preacher
we never wanted we never could
understand that it was not the time
but life itself
that passed for us. (32)
And indeed, this is how we constantly regret the “time”. What “we have lost”, what “never happened”, or what “happened” in that time, or what we do not have and we shall not have ”the time” to “happen”. If I understood Ante well, it is “not the time that passed”, but the life. Because he says: “ we never wanted we never could understand”. Or he wants to tell us that we did not understand at all “what time was?” and “what life was?” These categories are not the same after these verses. The school book or the philosophy dictionary would not be same after this distinction. We too are not the same. What do we do? Do we fill in “the time”? Do we naively believe that we “fill it with meaning”? The illusion is even cute. When we are most convinced that time “passes”, that is “runs away”, the Preacher knows that our “life” passes. But the drama that we use to occasionally remind ourselves that life passes is pathetic or unnecessary. When we think that we were the most conscious that it happens, via drastic comparisons, via someone’s death, then or in those more dramatic situations, we usually think of ourselves only. It is then that we are trapped or in an illusion that “life passes by”. No, it also passes by in far more banal situations, in far more everyday episodes, … and maybe it does not pass only on one spot. Where?
In the poetry. If Ante understood and he claims that “fear is older than the poem”, can it outlive it, defeat it, win over it, outsmart it, as an old woman. Can it wind it – by life, and can it lose – by death? Like in any game, chess for example?
I think that it has already done it, it did it bravely, in the bravest and most cunning possible way. Ante’s poetry has cleared with “fear”, because it says:
“I stand before a noble challenge: to return the fear with a –poem! Fear is older than the poem, but that is the advantage of the life that I defend: I left everything that I had to it, I did everything that I could for it, and it is quite natural that it is I who defend it and not its shadow.” (30)
Is the victory over fear – maturity? Does it mean that the poetry is the place where this victory can be seen in a most crystal way? And be shared with another?
So. So, if we make an effort to seek for the most delicate, most essential questions in Popovski’s newest poetry our path to knowledge shall be shortened, we shall save years of unnecessary thoughts, maybe we shall finally find the strength with him and him only, as a “doctor of the soul via word”, as an invisible and unordained “preacher” to finally clear with our long term compromises, illusions, masks…