The poet and prose writer Milan Kozelka was born in 1948 in Kyselka u Karlových Varů: he studied at the university of life, after which he applied himself to the arts (performance, action, land-art, happening, minimalism, etc) and in the 1990s to managerial and editorial work.
He is the author of three large anthologies which map the contemporary literary and art scenes in the regions of Ostrava (V srdci černého pavouka, 2000), Northern Bohemia (Od břehů k horám, 2000) and Olomouc (Vertikální nostalgie, 2002). He currently lives in Prague, where he runs his own publishing firm, Gulu-gulu, and concentrates mainly on literature.
Milan Kozelka’s literary debut came very late: the poetry collection Koně se zapřahají do hracích automatů was published in 1999 when he was 51 and already had behind him a host of artistic achievements, happenings and performances, working with the possibilities of space and with the random viewer, but also five years in a Communist prison, which equipped him with a sceptical outlook on the world. His debut contains constrained verse, which is paradoxically augmented by associatively driven nonsensical and absurd images; the order, that is the rhyme and the regular rhythm, stands against absolute intellectual and rational freedom, dissoluteness and the de-tabooing and demystification of everything – from eroticism and death to the mannerisms of power of the political elites. We can hear echoes of the pataphysical-surrealistic poetry of Pavel Řezníček in Kozelka’s poetry, as well as the neo-decadent style of Jiří H. Krchovský, or at a more general level we can recognise its affinity to the rebellious poetry of the Czech underground of the 1970s and ’80s, following the inspiration of the Beatniks who arrived on the Czech scene in the 1960s. Identical motifs and artistic approaches were used by the author in his second book of poetry, entitled Gumové projektily (2000), though perhaps he displayed an even greater sarcasm and anger towards past and present social conditions in the post-revolution Czech Republic and towards the former totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia. In 2001 Kozelka published his first prose work, a mixture of Hrabalesque stories, tragi-grotesque narratives, usually with an explosion of the absurd, which take place from the 1970s to the present day in the legendary Olomouc pub Ponorka [The Submarine], which gave the book its name. Two years after his debut, and harmonizing with his poetic short-story collection Konec světa Emila Hakla and with the novel Technologie dubnového večera Václava Kahudy, the author’s four-hundred-page opus was published, again set in Olomouc which is now the imaginary centre of the world, where all possible time lines intersect and where intellectual, or more usually, pseudointellectual, comical conversations are heard between people from various periods and corners of the world, including Czech culture and art. Although Kozelka’s postmodern iconoclasm mercilessly pillories practically everyone, in the end his gesture is purifying: just as the dadaists and futurists wanted to burn libraries and throw everything from the past to the wind, Milan Kozelka is now angry that the words which form the world have run alarmingly wild, their meanings have been lost under a barrage of cliches and phrases – life has left them.
(rk)
This author profile was last updated in 2008.
