Auto-referentiality also dominates in the chapters The Mirror Is Above My Knees and Up to My Kneed in Ink. Taking over the risk to be boring, banal and to end within well-known clichés, Jovica here still, metapoetically, takes upon himself to write poetry on poetry and writing. When referring to the image of bulging water (up to one’s knees, above one’s knees) in the tide (or flood) he places the metaphor of writing, or more specifically, the permanent, unstoppable outpour of verses. Writing for him is something completely different than Seamus Heaney’s “digging”,5F it is not labour, no effort, nor his poetic interpretation or continuation of some “male” tradition. For him, writing is a necessity, a need, a salvation from pointlessness: “Writing saved you from certain death. / And you have realized long ago that in in this restless / poetry sea that flows over from alcohol, / tobacco, women, unhealthy life, / but also from justice and honesty, / the bad swimmers, / almost never drown, / but only the best” (Ibid, 60). And boredom, banality and clichés are not avoided only with the freshness of the metaphor of the ink which comes like unstoppable water, but also with the ironic questioning of poetry as turned towards the outside, as a message to the reader. In such a way he speaks about public poetry readings: “Poetry reading! / It is smarter that / you stay home / and write a poem / that you will read / to your beloved” (Ibidem), or seemingly equally ironically, but actually quite realistically, he summarises his own (and everybody’s) poetry work, which is only limited to “maybe several poems / (at the real time, on the real spot)” (Ibid, 70).
The chapter The Sea Is Up to My Knees, which is also the title of the complete collection, separates the poetry of this book from most of Jovica’s work. The urban atmosphere here is replaced by the seaside one, the everyday life with a summer holiday, the greyness with blueness, as if the poet himself needed a break, distancing from his usual poetics. Separated from his recognisable inspiration (or from the jouissance which directly comes from the (r)urban banality and ugliness of Skopje)6F, in the sea up to his knees, in the shallowness of the summer that slows down and salts life, Jovica creates his new metaphors: “the sea is up to my knees / with my arms raised I replace / the lightbulb of Earth’s satellite / and when the water is cold, / and I think if I should get in” (Ibid, 36). In this way, what Bogomil Gjuzel calls “an authentic urban sensibility which pushes among us loud and pouring as the noise of youthful voices on the street” (Ѓузел 1995), calms down, settles at the coast of poet’s midlife, as the day calms down when it comes closer to the night: “the sun (up to its neck in the sea) / tried with its last ray / to get hold of a fishing boat. / On the quay, a feather fell from a linen tree, / heavier than the air itself” (Ивановски 2016, 39). In this calm, he can again deal with his favourite motif, himself, but in a different, deeper way, and without all petty, but tiresome sekojdnevnosti which drain his poetry, he has the time to even rediscover old live within himself: “now, from here, / I hug you as never. / I love you the way you are, / and your shortcomings are my privilege” (Ibid, 94).
Lyricism that is hinted in the “seaside” poems of this collections comes to the surface and dominates in the chapter The Earth Is Up to Your Knees, in the poems that are maybe the most emotional outburst in general in Jovica’s poetry. The only heading in this collection which is dialogically directed to another (poet’s mother) instead of towards oneself additionally ocuduva the game with measures by introducing earth instead of water. Earth is our image about the finality of life, it is the cruel truth, the definite end that ruthlessly comes: “your cube of life has almost melted. / Earth reaches its hand as something / that you mustn’t refuse” (Ibid, 51). Testifying the inevitability of his mother’s near end, despite his well-known cynicism (“we tell her that she is / in a private hospital, / but she knows well where she is. / Exactly where she belongs – / a cynic would add”), maybe via the most impressive verses in this collection (“in the snubbers of / death old age grows” or “time is a paid assassin”), in a philosophical-lyrical way, the poet expands his thoughts from his personal story to some essential, universal issues related to human living and existence: “on the other side of life, / is there endlessness? / Some other space body / from which another space body is seen. / Something endless, such as / at the beginning of love” (Ibid, 53).
In this collection, in the middle of his fifties, in his life and poetic maturity, on one hand Jovica (for the reader who has read him before), lives his poetry in a recognizable manner, or, as Šeleva would say, “politically non-bribable wisdoms and ontological curses from it, as the only outcome from the otherwise bitter transitional everyday” (Шелева 2005, 52). However, on the other side, here he does this somehow deeper, up to his knees, up to his neck, sunk in the flood of life, buried in the earth of his unescapable and closer end, buried in his ink. Meaning gushes from the margins of these verses, in a Derridean way, the essence is outside what is served in front of us, somewhere behind the doors of the poetic kitchen. As the Russian poet Sergey Yesenin, his “peer” of almost a century ago write in his poem “The Confession of the Hooligan” (Исповедь хулигана, 1920)7F Jovica here also goes about unkempt on purpose, to shine out the autumn’s baring on our souls.
Bibliography
Галевски, Влатко. 2016. „За книгата ‘Градот што веќе не е мој’ на Јовица Ивановски“. Окно. (http://okno.mk/node/58771) Пристапено на 17.11.2016.
Ѓузел, Богимил. 1997. „Поезија полна свежина и ведрина“ (текст прочитан на промоцијата на збирката Градот е полн со тебе)
Ѓузел, Богомил. 1995. „Една нова урбана поезија“ (текст прочитан на промоцијата на збирката Зошто мене ваков џигер)
Ѓузел, Богомил. 2005. „Јовица Ивановски – ’Три напред три назад’“. Време, 14.1.2005.
Ивановски, Јовица. 2016. Морето ми е до колена. Скопје: Табернакул.
Јанковски, Владимир. 2005. „Слатко-горчливиот талог на стварноста“. Дневник, 14.3.2005.
„Јовица Ивановски: Сè почесто се соочувам со сурова темнина – меѓу луѓето, на улиците, во градов, во државава“. mkd.mk, 29.4.2015. (http://www.mkd.mk/kultura/knizhevnost/jovica-ivanovski-se-pochesto-se-soochuvam-so-surova-temnina-megju-lugjeto-na) Пристапено на 17.11.2016.
Јолевски, Љупчо. 2016. „’Шарените’ песни на Јовица Ивановски“. Радио Слободна Европа. (http://www.slobodnaevropa.mk/a/27701860.html) Пристапено на 17.11.2016.
Крстевски, Душко. 2012. „Диоптрија на урбаното“. Репер, 15. (http://www.reper.net.mk/star.reper.net.mk/statija.php?ID=28) Пристапено на 17.11.2016.
Крстевски, Душко. 2016. „’На колена пред песната’ – кон поетската збирка Морето ми е до колена на Јовица Ивановски“. Во: Ивановски, Јовица. Морето ми е до колена, 5-10. Скопје: Табернакул.
Мартиноска, Ана. 2011. „’Scorpius balcanicus’, или како да се чита македонската поезија: Предговор кон ‘Шест македонски поети’, Arc Publications, Велика Британија, 2011“. Блесок бр. 80-81 (септември-декември 2011). (http://www.blesok.mk/main.asp?lang=mac&izdanie=80-81#.WJIoexoo-M-). Пристапено на 1.2.2017.
Ќорвезироска, Оливера. 2015. „Поетот на градот / градот на поетот“. Слободен печат, 16 мај 2015.
Шелева, Елизабета. 2009. „Кога домот го домиш, а државата ја држиш…“ Наше писмо, 67: 66-67.
Шелева, Елизабета. 2005. „Кога песната ‘доаѓа ненадејно како смртта’“. Наше писмо, 56: 51-52.
#b
5. “The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head. / But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”
6. Or, as Vladimir Jankovski says, poetry that “ravenously feeds on potrosni materials of the common day” (Јанковски 2005).
7. “I on purpose unkempt go about, / Head like an oil lamp on shoulders waring, / And I like through the gloom to shine out, / On your souls that autumn’s baring.”