Aleš Debeljak, Alojz Ihan, Brane Mozetič, Boris A. Novak, Jure Potokar, Tomaž Šalamun, Uroš Zupan

The edition La poésie slovène contemporaine encompasses several key names of contemporary Slovene poetry, which either rose to prominence or continued to develop the foundations of contemporary Slovene poetical language in the eighties and early nineties of the past century.

In Slovene poetry, a radical fissure between the traditional and the modern was carved in the sixties by Tomaž Šalamun’s collection Poker (1966), which introduced an uninhibited playfulness of language into the Slovene verse-crafting arts and triggered a veritable linguistic explosion. “After Šalamun, Slovene poetry was never the same.” (Novak). The neo-avantgardist revolution left in its wake an empty canvas, a formless void which the younger generation of poets filled with their postmodernist tendencies. Šalamun was followed by a generation of authors born around 1950, whose tones brought freshness and wit to the Slovene poetical language, a balance between the traditional and the contemporary, between sublime and everyday word. Boris A. Novak’s poetry shares in these traits, too, instilling modern sensibility into classical poetic forms.

In the final decades of the 20th century, predominant currents were no longer a deciding trait of the Slovene poetic milieu: domestic poetry becomes increasingly polyphonous, with the emergence of numerous ‘auto-poetics’. Employing postmodernist techniques, artists such as Aleš Debeljak, Alojz Ihan, Brane Mozetič, Jure Potokar and Uroš Zupan developed idiosyncratic poetical universes: uncovering space with intimate voices, entering dialogues with poetry all over the world, attesting to the verdant state of the Slovene lyrical grove.

Abridged from Boris A. Novak’s afterword