Authors

Kasal played the part of the angry young man of Czech poetry in the 1990s. His poems are a mirror, coarse-grained and somewhat distorting, of the lyrical ‘civilism’ of the 1960s, represented by poets such as Jiří Pištora, Emil Juliš and Petr Kabeš. The hidden basis of his verse, however, is its response to Decadent poetry, with the firebrand quality of Hlaváček and the art-for-art’s-sake of Karásek. Kasal’s poetry also constitutes an individual confrontation with František Halas and Vladimír Holan, though not with their angelic metaphysics but with their sophisticated Neo-Baroque spirituality of places and events, connected not with any existing temple but with lone boulders that lie scattered about the landscape, the remains of what was once a house of God. Kasal’s approach is highly concrete, direct, at times blatantly crude and banal, yet accompanied by an inventive morphology, full of neologisms, occasionally straying far from the bare facts even to the point of vulgarity. Kasal is a disciple of Mirek Kovářík and his ‘Zelené peří’ (Green Feathers) poetry readings. His first collection of verse, Dosudby (a neologism evoking the ideas of ‘so far’ and ‘one’s lot in life’), came out of a circle of poets similarly orientated to everyday life. His verse is characterized by a mature approach and openness when recounting the human relationships upon which the triviality of the outside world is so urgently impressed. The poet thus reveals that he is no stranger to a tone sweepingly critical of society (much like that of the writer J. S. Machar [1864–1942]), which employs the poem to show how a life that consists merely in buying and selling is a cul-de-sac. Kasal’s critical motivation becomes increasingly conspicuous in his next collection, Vezdejšina (Daily-breading), which alternates verse with prose fiction and has led the poet to resign himself, at least for the moment, to a life of activity. He brings forth one dismal image after another, placing no importance on the milieu or addressee of his message. The setting of his verse is a bare, nameless landscape ‘in between’, a world stuck between town and country, society and solitude, love and animal sexuality, a cinema on the outskirts of town and a latrine in an old block of flats in Žižkov (a working-class quarter in the centre of Prague). The present moment and daily bread are regarded here in their almost mythical dimension – they are a phantom, increasingly hovering over existence the deeper one succumbs to the illusion that one’s lot in life will unfold inside some sacred, metaphysically meaningful realm. ‘Daily-breading’ brings us back to earth, with our wings flapping lifelessly on our backs. Kasal’s metaphors in Vezdejšina and his ensuing collections are a disillusioning, instrumental device like a litany, almost pornographic and pornocratic in character, very much of the flesh and, ultimately, intentionally destructive and Dadaistically invective. Kasal is by nature a late Romanticist. His collection of songs Jám (Máj [May], the best-known work of the great nineteenth-century Czech poet Karel Hynek Mácha, spelled backwards) is a testimony to this retrospective Romanticism. The collection is a true paraphrase of Mácha’s poem of love, punishment and death, yet it seems as if the backdrop of rundown castles, dusk and a young lady’s never-kissed lips has now been permeated with an atmosphere that is Kafkaesque, adopted from Dostoyevsky’s novels, or is the precise diagnosis of a battered soul, such as those chronicled by Chekhov in his plays and short stories. The duality of ‘me’ and ‘you’, of the lyrical subject and the cold abstract character of the other, provide the central theme of this Mácha-like allegory in which all naturally elevated issues have been suppressed, and prominence has been given instead to the chaos and disharmony of the contemporary world. In comparison to Vezdejšina, the instruments of style and metaphor here are taken to another plane, becoming more spectacular and ornamental. As if the very fact of competing with Mácha were preventing the poet from tainting the distant echo of Romanticism with the filth of the streets and the shadows of cellars, which cease to be a prison or hiding-place and instead become something of a dwelling or center for man. In his collection Hladolet (Satura) the poet once again endeavours to revive the shadow of an ageless, personified, daemonic, mythological being. Nonetheless, he does so without the ‘pleasures of the flesh’, without the carnality of his former sojourn on the edge of chaos. What the poet evidently wishes to achieve is a metamorphosis, both personal and social, a thorny path back to spiritual principles, yet the path remains pervaded with the mud-spattered poetry of the dives and morally devastated bars, nightspots and ‘factories of the Absolute’ (a reference to a novel by Karel Čapek). The very title, Hladolet, suggests that in the collection the reader will have to fast, that the lyrical ego in it will go through baptism by asceticism, and it is unclear whether this asceticism will inspire a new beginning. The suggestion of an upward path does not, however, reassure the poet. A book of such disposition might even have slipped into cliché, losing all philosophical substance, if the mythologized ‘hungry one’, instead of a personification of the necessity of hunger and asceticism, had not ultimately been presented as the devourer of the putrefying excrement and impurity of the world, as an exterminator or apocryphal rat-catcher, whose efforts nonetheless ultimately come to naught. ‘Everything ends in decay’ is the final verse of Hladolet. In spite of this, Kasal sees a glimmer of hope in the purist Pascalian conception of the ‘heart’ that has not yet been swept away by the giant steps of the ‘hungry one’.

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