Authors

From its beginnings the poetry of Jiří Dynka has straddled the line between strict respect for tradition and, on the other hand, futuristic visions: with high formal demands, inspired by Mallarméan efforts ‘to touch the Absolute’, the poet blends Postmodern remixes of various contemporary symbols: ‘My writing is a process entirely subordinated to the order of poetry,’ Dynka admits. ‘I am always open to new inspiration, and I continuously rework, reformulate, cross out and add to the vast amount of notes I gain in this way, till I reach the clarified stage I consider poetry. I long for the perfect proportions of poetry; I want to express myself in a perfect composition of words.’ In his belated debut, Minimální okolí mrazicího boxu (In the Closest Proximity to the Freezer), the author presents a book version of lyrically coloured visual constellations, which he devoted himself to in the 1980s and which attack the reader not only with their sensual playfulness covered in verbal cries, but also with the conception of the poem as an individual artefact. By contrast, the collections wrong! and líviový lenkový (Livia-like, Lenka-like) are carefully constructed poetic compositions, which talk to the reader in a stuttering cybernetic neo-language comprising clusters of adjectives. Dynka’s dynamic verbal cascades in these works take the form of an intertextual collage, which in many ways quotes from and paraphrases literary and meta-literary texts of various periods and cultures: ‘The information that make me flutter with poetry and with the pressure to write it may be in advertisements for paper tissues, a Latin-Czech dictionary, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or an anthology of essays on liberal economics, as well as in Walt Disney, quantum physics, Rilke or Antoon Coolen.’ At the same time, the poet’s central theme – the search for emotion, tenderness, love – comes to the fore in these works, as does immense desire in which Eros consorts with Thanatos: the desire ‘to be killed / By a peony bud’, as Dynka writes in one of the poems. In the collection Sussex Superstar he reaches a turning-point: he has abandoned the semantic experiment and turned fully towards eager yet sensitive, exquisite, animal melancholy imbued with amatory lyric verse, which is related to, among other things, the fragile eroticism of the poet Jiří Veselský and the post-Surrealist verse of Vítězslav Nezval.

(rk)

The profile was updated in 2006

Deutsch Jiří DYNKA, Deutsch.doc

En français Jiří DYNKA, En français.doc