Biography Essay

Recent treatments of Slovene literature generally recognize the year 1966 as a watershed. What came before is seen as flowing with all due dignity into literary history. What comes after, almost statutorily, qualifies as contemporary writing in the strictest sense. That this is so is largely to the credit of Tomaz Salamun, whose first book of poetry, Poker, still holds the honor of signaling that change of direction. Salamun's poetry, like its predecessors for nearly a hundred years, proceeds from the poetic "I" as its center of focus; but, unlike the meditative, mostly passive lyric subject well established in Slovenia until then, Salamun's is an assertive self that actively creates and molds its poetic environment with total disregard for convention, producing worlds that bear little resemblance to the one that traditional categories of thought—spatial, logical, and ethical—allow the greater part of humanity to...