Distinguished guests,

dear colleagues,

lovers of literature and poetry,

Poems are born in solitude. You can travel long roads, experience much, love and leave many things behind – but before every poem you stand alone. Hilde Domin has described this: “All the birds are silent. / You hear only your own footstep / and the step the foot / has not yet taken but will.” Anyone who has tasted the loneliness of creativity knows how accurate these simple lines are. The blank page is a place of anxiety and expectation. The distances which open within you are greater than any you have ever crossed. Suddenly, it no longer matters who you are, but only what you can become. To find the answer you must step into the void.

“There are not, after all, so very many things that we must do entirely alone,” writes Kathleen Raine. “Birth, prayer, death; and creative art. Very few people like to be alone, and many cannot endure it. Poets must have a strong power of enduring active and arduous solitude. Solitude, even in the midst of the world.”

The impulse that drives a person into the solitude of the poem has been called many things over the course of history: madness; a mania for which poets must be banished from the ideal state; the feeling I must – ich muss – which wakens in the wee hours of the night and won’t let you sleep; the joy of the game, delight in the ludistic play of meanings; and even an alternative to suicide, which channels thoughts of destruction into the building of new worlds. Different literary-historical periods have come up with their own definitions of poetry-making. The house of poetry has been entered through the doors of literary theory, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, theology, ecology, and so on. Poets themselves have added their own contributions, describing what they do with the kind of passion we reserve for speaking of our deepest desire – a desire as old as humanity itself.

But with such attempts to define poetry, we find ourselves on slippery ground. When we take apart a music box to discover how it works, we are left holding only the pieces, sadly disjointed and useless.

Poetry happens somewhere else, always somewhere else. Octavio Paz, who believed that poetry was more than just the skill of putting words together, called it la otra voz – the other voice. “Its voice is other,” he wrote, “because it is the voice of the passions and of visions. It is otherworldly and this-worldly, of days long gone and of this very day, an antiquity without dates. Heretical and devout, innocent and perverted, limpid and murky, aerial and subterranean, of the hermitage and of the corner bar, within hand’s reach and always beyond.” Because it is something other, poetry unsettles us. It challenges our conceptions of time and space; it connects opposites; it loves paradox. Images from ordinary life become extraordinary; the living sit at the same table with the dead. There is no profession or education that might preordain a person to be a poet. There is only the other voice, which demands another language.

The other voice is the voice of making. It speaks of the interior life in a way that is both testimony and creation: it tells of what is and of all that could be. The Slovene poet Edvard Kocbek wrote: “I am never / what they think I am / and never / where eyes see me.” This never is where poetry enters with all its warmth and passion, with a language that is constantly widening its boundaries and, by doing so, widening also the boundaries of our world.

What we have admired in poetry for millennia is the human mind in all its ingenuity, all its inexhaustible abundance, all its complexity and beauty.

The times we live in, however, do not favour complexity and beauty. They are drawn to repetition, replication, uniformity, simplification. The question that hangs in the air after every celebration of the poetic art is always the same: Wozu Dichtung in dürftiger Zeit? What use is poetry in lean times?

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Once a poem has been written and published, it goes out into the world. It enters the so-called literary system, where it is one poem among many, subject to the laws of the market, the poetic canon, and that personal taste we so love to talk about. It may be lucky; it may even be lauded at the world’s largest book fair, where it crosses from language to language and culture to culture – something that is certainly extraordinary and unforgettable. Or it may not be so lucky and will have to survive in some other way. Whatever the circumstances of its existence in the literary system, the only thing truly necessary for its survival is that it find its reader. The numbers are not important here; what is important is that the poem be read from within the deepest solitude, the same solitude from which it grew.

Reading poetry presents an immense challenge for the current age, which is losing its balance between feeling and thinking, and which is made nervous by the unruliness of the interior life. If we as readers are to hear the other voice that flows through the poem like a subterranean stream, we need not only knowledge and understanding, but also another kind of seeing. A critic once wrote about one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films that the viewer must “watch it as one watches the stars, or the sea, as one admires a landscape. There is no mathematical logic here, for it cannot explain what man is or what is the meaning of his life.” The same is true of poetry. When we read a poem with our reason and our heart, knowledgeably, but also “as one watches the stars”, we will never come to the end of it. Because it arose out of need, from a noble mania, from the deepest solitude, it will never die. For what it has captured in language is infinitely greater than poetry itself.

So what, then, is the use of poetry in lean times? To build a community. Not some homogenous community of people with similar opinions and outlooks, but a subterranean, utterly diverse fellowship of readers, who find connection in the fact that they all listen to that other voice and bear the burden of their own solitude.

Where I come from, we enter into poetic creation respectfully, with the awareness that the meeting of language and poetic vision can conjure up something that is powerful and true. We know that there are times in a person’s life, and in the life of a nation, when poetry is the only possible answer. That this is no myth can be seen in the poems in the anthology Mein Nachbar auf der Wolke (My Neighbour on the Cloud), which was produced especially for Slovenia’s role as guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, as well as countless other poems, which I hope you will one day be able to read in translation. Perhaps this is why Slovenia has such a rich tradition of poetry, which is an essential part of our abundant literary life. Perhaps this is why the statue on the main square of our capital city is not that of a soldier or general, but of a poet, whose verses about the brotherhood of nations are sung by our world-famous athletes with no less emotion than by our political leaders. Perhaps that is why it was a poet we entrusted with the reading of the declaration in which we expressed our desire for independence.

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Poetry works in a way similar to hope. It is born from a surplus of meaning and energy so that it can challenge the status quo, can inspire and connect us, and can answer the most urgent of questions, the kind of questions each of us, in solitude, asks ourselves. What I wish for each of you is that, in the wealth of books offered by this extraordinary book event, you find just such a poem and carry it with you back to your home.

Thank you for your attention.

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Translated by Rawley Grau

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Octavio Paz: La otra voz, 1991, translated from Spanish by Helen Lane.

Friedrich Hölderlin. “Bread and Wine”, Poems and Fragments, 2004, translated by Michael Hamburger.

Andrey Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time, 1989, translated into English by Kitty Hunter-Blair.