Authors

Čerepková is a prime example of the nature and extent of the gradual impact of modern poetic approaches on traditional lyric verse in Czechoslovakia after 1960. After her first collection Ryba k rybě mluví (As One Fish to Another), critics wrote of the influence of North American beatnik poetry, and traced the sources of her inspiration to the works of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Diane di Prima. Like the slightly older poet Václav Hrabě, Čerepková is closely linked to the history of the Viola wine bar in Prague, where groundbreaking concerts of modern jazz alternated with evenings of modern poetry readings called ‘text-appeals’. Čerepková can also be justly considered a profoundly nonconformist author, rebelling quite strongly against the canon of classic verse, and pioneering, for example, the fresh form of poetic blues in contemporary poetry. What was even more impressive about her first collection was its absolutely natural and convincingly colloquial, confidential diction, reminiscent of the post-war ‘Civilism’ of Jiří Kolář. Emigration substantially helped to change her style. Her collections from the 1970s and 1980s, compiled in the volume Básně (Poems), mark her dramatic decline towards the melancholy strata of the self, where suddenly ‘the sky is a thing of past and God a long-time stranger’. The poetess’s original stylization and her essentially still traditional verse alternates here with phantasmagorical, apocalyptically agitated threads of stream of consciousness, where fragments of reality merge with dreams in a multitude of ways, and the former reality of Bohemia permeates the new reality of France. In the late 1980s she took a step away from her place in the ‘dusk’, and moved towards wisely sceptical, compact miniatures dominated by an awareness of the finality of being and a longing to ‘sleep forever’. As a counterpoint to this, stands her immense will to complete the poetic ‘image’, which can be ‘nothing less than absolute’. Compared to the poetry of her youth, whose axis was formed by subjectivity and the absolute authenticity of her sense of life, Čerepková’s mature work is clearly more inclined to a phenomenological view of the world observed in the infinite set of eternity and everyday realities. Her poetic self, initially saturated with emotion, expression, pain, and memories, appears to have gently yielded to a tendency to render her verse more like prose. More importantly, it has given way to a unique, agonizing, turbulent, sophisticated poetry. And although she once wrote, ‘I invent nothing / I merely record’, she now understands that ‘form feigns being the basis of creation’, and that one can write ‘free of vague paroxysms’, indeed must do so.

(vn, rk)

This author profile was last updated in 2005

Deutsch Vladimíra ČEREPKOVÁ, Deutsch.doc

En français Vladimíra ČEREPKOVÁ, En français.doc