Donatas Petrošius

Translated by Julija Gulbinovič

Foto © Aistė Jurė, 2014

“The most beautiful poem for a girl you like is likely to be not a poem at all”. You’ll find this verse in the 2010 collection of the poet Antanas Šimkus, Sezonas baigtas (The Season is Over). I remembered this poem because I wrote something very similar – maybe even copied it, changing the keywords – about the Druskininkai Poetic Fall: the most important thing at the best poetry festivals is not poems at all. But then what? Life itself, us, as we transform in it, appearing and disappearing again; our beginnings, endings, (over)continuation – and all that magic of rituals, of returns, of repetitions.

When writing about the Druskininkai Poetic Fall, one risks slipping into sentimentality, so I suggest we talk in numbers. When I was asked to write this speech, the new festival director, Greta Ambrazaitė, said that Druskininkai Poetic Fall has had 35 editions so far, so that calls for a celebratory text. After a while, she reminded me that she was expecting the text by the end of the month and added that, by another calculation, the festival is actually older. On the eighth day after the initially agreed deadline, Greta reminded me that my text was still outstanding, and that, by the latest calculations, the Fall is already 40, because the Yotvingian Prize was established in 1985. Greta is a poet, young and promising, but already good, so even though I am late, I am not afraid to write this: although I am no longer good, I am still someone who promises a lot.

But this is not about me. In the Druskininkai Poetic Fall, all the poets are very promising. It is just that women poets write more; in general, there are now more poets who are women. For comparison, if in the poet Nijolė Miliauskaitė’s time, it was hard to count more than two female poets, nowadays it is hard to count fewer than twenty. It is hard to tell whether Druskininkai Poetic Fall contributed to the fact that there are now more women poets than men poets in Lithuania. Perhaps not - depending on what side you count from. The great value of poetry is that as soon as you start counting something in it, you get a different answer every time. Unless, of course, you are a semiotician, or Kukulas.

For the generation Antanas and I share, as for all generations that got entangled in poetry later, the origins of the Druskininkai Poetic Fall lie in the mists of mythical times, around the time when Sigitas Geda hunted mammoths, Kornelijus Platelis was busy rehabilitating Yotvingians, Vytautas Bložė constructed emptiness, while Nijolė Miliauskaitė looked after them all so that they wouldn’t overdo it. We came to be from anonymous Druskininkai Poetic Fall’s competitions, from drunken buses, from oddly coincidental circumstances. When we couldn’t fit in the Širdelė cafe anymore, we moved to the little tower, to later occupy who knows whose rooms, beds, or the spaces between them. I remember Antanas in all his past lives – when he was persona non grata (the one to watch so he doesn’t kick out a window or something), and when he was the executive director of the festival. Sometimes I don’t know which is harder to believe – poems that appear from who knows where, or biographies that are, at the same time, who knows whose and, strangely, ours. Sometimes, I catch myself wanting to howl at the moon at night: Druskininkai Poetic Fall, what have you done to us?

Many a foreign guest has left the festival giddy with delighted horror, to spread the good news of the Druskininkai Poetic Fall around the world. Only the Latvian luminaries, Berzinis and Brūveris, restrainedly sipping vodka, looked indulgently at the frolicking Lithuanians, naive children of nature, as one of them called us.

I have all the Druskininkai Poetic Fall’s almanachs. But the one I like the most is the very first one, in which there are almost no poems. Because it contains large-format photos from the early editions of the festival. Anybody can write poems, especially of all kinds. But try to find one that would at least approximately recreate what was happening 30 years ago.

Particularly valuable are old, faded, autumnal photos of friends who have now left us for better worlds. With Martynas, my and Antanas’s course- and roommate. With the multi-instrumentalist, polyglot Remis, Tanaka – Remigijus Audiejaitis. And one of the few true Yotvingians by blood – Stasys Stacevičius, who was not awarded the Yotvingian Prize for his Stiklinė due to terribly unfortunate timing, since he froze to death ten months before that. The Yotvingian Prize Committee voted in favour; the Ministry of Culture did not accept it. Every time I run my eyes through the lists of Yotvingians, I mentally add Stasiukas to them.

I am addicted not so much to poetry as to the Druskininkai Poetic Fall – I haven’t missed a single festival edition since 2001. I have tried to quit writing poems. More than once. But something seems to be broken in my head: words and objects in my mind always seem to take on poetic forms – even when I’m trying to fall asleep, plastering walls, chopping branches or reading old newspapers. Druskininkai Poetic Fall is the only place where I can rest from poetry. There is so much of it that all the poetry gets crammed together like herring in barrels, unable to move its limbs. And what does not move does not exist. For example, pine trees sway not because of the wind blowing, but because they do not want to cease to exist. And Druskininkai itself moves, changes, trying to push us out of itself, but not all at once, rather little by little.

You can come to the Druskininkai Poetic Fall, attend all the readings, but not hear a single poem. The new verses by living poets are overshadowed by poeticising radiation – from the Širdelė cafe to the little tower; the walls of the festival’s entire space have become dangerous to the sound mind, poetically overloaded, which is why, a couple of years ago, these rational people put a spell on the area, forbade it and locked it up. Is the season over? No. I had foolishly believed, a couple of times, that the festival had come to an end, but fortunately, I was very wrong. Because every time autumn arrives, some force – or folly – brings us back to Druskininkai. Because we all need each other. 

Donatas Petrošius, 2004