Authors

The poet Jiří Staněk has eight collections of poetry to his name, with a great deal more of his texts still remaining in handwritten form, as though the author wants to prove that “he isn’t an artist, but rather a fruit machine, mechanically converting what the world places into it”, as he likes to say of himself. In Staněk’s latest collection are concentrated all his main poetic motifs and so we will therefore turn to it first. The somewhat odd title of this collection of poetry - Shakespeare na piercingu – does not only take advantage of a provocative onomatopoeia, but opens up a whole range of associations. If we look at the initial inspiration (that is, a historical portrait of the famous playwright with an earring in his ear), he endows this detail with greater symbolic significance. Shakespeare with a piercing – it is a bridge between the past and the present, the foolishness of an old man who looks back on the liberty of youth, the fashion of piercing as imitating something basic, relating to the body, pain, to authentic experiences – and not least, this motif obviously refers to Shakespeare’s theatre of the world. Thus in a number of texts the poet stylizes himself as a viewer, an observer of the stage, and even a snooper and voyeur, whose “Sade opera glasses” pass over the adolescent actors who haven’t yet managed to surround themselves with the armour of habit and hypocrisy. “You are shamans of love, I am only an observer,” he says in a typically masochistic fashion. Another of the author’s obsessive motifs is nostalgia for his lost youth, with the carefree era approaching maturity being particularly myth-laden for Staněk, a time when one could behave with the prerogatives of both youth and adulthood, without having their obligations and responsibilities. If we were to say that Jiří Staňek’s latest collection is one of erotic poetry we would only be half right. Passion, sex and physical love undoubtedly play an important role here, while the theme of carnality is always bound up with a complicated network of meanings and interpretations and almost always problematized. We don’t expect pure hedonism from Staněk. Perhaps the contents of the collection could be expressed by two lines from the poem of Shakespeare variations: “Futile returns in futile temptations / The bier of Hamlet’s lances picked naked”, or lines from another of the author’s books, Na hrobech samojedů: “the beauty of the breasts and the hairiness of the outisde / the confusion within?!” or made even clearer by the title of the author’s debut work Co jsem četl v sobě samém [What I read in myself]. It is not surprising for readers who are familiar with his previous works that for Jiří Staňek sex has a self-destructive element, the excesses accentuating the solitude and emptiness of life; to light a fire on a deserted snow-covered plain signifies a lost natural state and perhaps – paradoxically – also innocence. We often come across the motif of fire in several variations: from the evocation of a blaze which became the fate of Mácha, through the burning of medieval towns and the burnt bodies in concentration camps to the poem Hořící keř těla, where he writes: : “…there can be no faith without the body / And the body is a burning bush from which speaks God / and no-one knows what about”. In another place this ontological pessimist describes the human body as “the lure of death.” Jiří Staněk is basically a romantic who confesses his life’s disillusionment through poetry. Even though the poet’s inner mood does not fundamentally alter, he does experiment a great deal with form – and he is maturing. His free verse and richly rhyming sentence structure sometimes lets itself get carried away by the river of speech, sometimes the language becomes too deformed and sometimes he overworks grammatical metaphors such as “samet oblosti”, “veš mše”, “kost poézie”. Nevertheless, each of Staněk’s poems creates its own microcosm, the interpretation of which becomes a small adventure – and that is why the author holds a permanent dialogue in his poems, not only with himself, but also with history and the great figures of the past. As the discoverer and interpreter of Staněk, Miroslav Kovářík, says: “Jiří Staněk is both a Christian and pagan, and the oscillation between these positions searching for God is already attributed to him somewhere at the source of words. When measuring the polarity of aesthetic consciousness then Staněk has his twins in the entire gallery of poets, painters, scholars and outstanding figures whose names swarm in his verses. Seen allegorically, it is wandering along a bridge full of statues which Staněk is able to bring to life through the language of his poems, carrying out contemplative conversations with them.”