Rimas Uzgiris

Photo © Aistė Jurė, 2014

Times have changed. So they told me. My first time there, in the fall of 2012, as a guest from the United States. (I never left.) Yes they told me. The wild days are no more. Poets are more sober now, more serious. Guests get more attention. Nobody digs a hole and then stands in it. Nobody falls out of a window of the Little Heart Cafe tower. (Nobody was hurt.) Nobody rows out drunk into the middle of the lake and recites poems to the fishes. Nobody takes a dump on the hotel room floor. Well and good, I suppose. Though nobody sits at the Little Heart Cafe. Now it’s closed. Nobody shouts out, “What is this shit?!” during a poetry reading in the wood-paneled Bubilas Hall. Now that’s closed too. Things change. Now, there’s a midnight reading by a bonfire. Now, there’s a reading at the Jonynas gallery where poets read one of their poems and a poem by someone else. Now, there’s a raucous auction to support Ukraine. Now, there are Ukrainian poets every year. Now, there is a war. There is also a disco, every year. Now, there are Versopolis readings every year. The grand evening readings are still happening. The afternoon readings of Lithuanian poets are still happening. The anonymous contests are still extremely popular, though the judges seem tired. (Seriously, they declined to give a first place award last year because they thought everything kind of sucked.) The young poets reading still attracts a lot of, well, young poets. And there is no lack of those who want to read on the open mic at midnight. (Though listening is optional.) The guest poets are still coming. The guest poets seem better than ever. We’ve had a National Book Award winner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a T.S. Eliot prize winner (or two or three), since my first visit in 2012. And that’s only considering English. The English has improved, generally, of the Lithuanian poets. Once upon a time, they did their own thing, and the guests did theirs. Lithuanians can be shy. Now they speak their minds and mix and mash. The festival feels European where once it was the Lithuanian counter-festival to the Soviet authorities’ beloved Poetry Spring. Yes, a handful of anti-Soviet poets started this thing. A place where Lithuanian poets could get together for a few days of intense poetry and the feeling of being free. (You know, creating a Garden in The Waste Land of late Soviet life.) Now, everyone feels free, though most of those poets are gone. They are missed. (Those Yotvingians of old!) People say they had strong opinions. They liked to argue. Now the conferences are boring. (They say.) Everyone is so well behaved. (They say.) Maybe there won’t be any conferences anymore. Maybe we’ll dig another hole and stand in it. Maybe we’ll declaim poems from a sinking boat on a lake that’s been so renovated by the city that it could use some drunken poets in a drunken boat. Yes, it was a drunken boat of a festival. It still is, metaphorically speaking. It continues to sail through the high seas of international poetry. Sometimes, the waters are turbulent. Sometimes, they’re calm. And the wonders this festival has seen! The wonders yet to be seen… The closing of halls and cafes be damned. We float in the waters of poetry, and we, the poets, steer (more or less) and bail out the water and darn the sails when needed. And the ship sails on. OK, there can be times, like two in the morning during the Saturday disco, when it can look like The Raft of the Medusa, but relief is always on the horizon, just as in the painting. And I mean this literally. The sun comes up, and we drag ourselves to the Dainava Center, as always, and eat our eggs and sausages and buckwheat and tomatoes, drinking our coffee, looking haggard, looking happy, or at least vaguely satisfied, with a bus ride back full of bad breath and camaraderie to look forward to before the real world swallows us up. Then, of course, we start planning for next year. (For there’s always a next year.) And next year there will be something new, and something old, and a drunken boat that just won’t let us go, however sober we may be. 

Rimas Uzgiris is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in Barrow Street, Hudson Review, Paris Review, Poetry Review and other journals. He is author of North of Paradise (Kelsay Books, 2019). Uzgiris holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark. Recipient of a Fulbright Grant, a NEA Translation Fellowship, he teaches at Vilnius University.