… No one could accurately date a tyrant's ball; since no one knows when it started and no one knows when it will end.
And behind the ball masks are the faces of particular persons - named directly in the poems or presented only with a fragment of their biographies - public figures from the past and from the present - a list of names of people - locked in the ballroom, in the labyrinth of everyday life, placed in situations in which transgressions and travesties of the spirit crystallize. But recognizing specificity, artistically adapted, is the first step of the mad dance, without beginning and without end, the first level of reading, the first line of the invitation to the ball - an invitation to reflect on the ethical positions of a person, an invitation to look at social roles, in the role characteristics of the modern man, in the speculative visions of the city.
"Meet ..." with the unrecognized children of the city - with families, with secrets and with overt agents, with ministers, with shopkeepers, with translators, with those sent to the periphery, with relatives, with poets and poets - who lurk with subordinates pencils or sold to later edit their own warped memoirs. Meet the drunken woman, the cops, not so much the prototypes as the universal types, the criminals and their victims who seem to change places imperceptibly when the music, tone prompts or causes a change when the hierarchical structures of the political and social have come incredibly close to their complete disintegration, when the exits of the maze turned out to be walls, high stone walls, as opposed to bets on exits, and gambling - tax-exempt. Throughout the rest of the value-free system, the individual seems relieved of responsibility, of memory, and of the idea of memory in general, when a spiritual collapse occurs, and the worship is performed not before icons, not saints, but before the crowned immorality, stepped on a vicious pedestal, when the tyrannical natures, which are over and over again, are brought to the fore again and again.
The lyrical speaker takes different positions with regard to the tyrants, to their balloon city, to the community, to the obscure streets of society, in which few would approach in a moderate stride, in measure, in order, in the conditionality of order, in the internal dimensions of man.
The book lacks ubiquitous moralizing impulse, lacks a reprimanding pathos, lacks a stage tribute to which the magistrate is proclaimed omniscient and righteous, because through the lyrical speaker and through the distance he occupies over events and their interpretation, through irony, landmark scenes from our time, but also from archives, from outdated memory folders, are metaphorized and poetized.
The lyric speaker is gradually transformed through verses, through dance into a lyric self. It enters both under the thick skin of the abuser and in the consciousness of the abused, engages in the act of violation of freedom; sometimes representing two interlocutors who met at a ball at the same time, conveying their thoughts rooted in social disenfranchisement. And in the last poems in the book, the manifested social commitment is increasingly giving way to the projections of the personal-intimate.
The book can also be read from the sketches of nature through the portraits of one name to the etudes by memory, but also in the opposite direction - from the etudes of the self to the strokes for those who stood on the front line, the announced guests of the ball who received their first invitations. The three parts of the book bring us back to the first poem, to the general conceptual framework, to the Ball of the Tyrants (2016, Nesart - Milen Milanov, Queen Mab Publishing House).
The book begins with:
"From below - death, from above - dream, in the middle
a confused body - freedom ... "
and ends with:
"Immortality walks between us,
but it always goes away. "
In the axis between immortality and death, freedom is laid, transgressed, expected, unelected, and the boundaries of power are laid - not only political, social, social, but above all power over the other.
The last poem in the book is followed by "Fragments to a New Political Poetry" ... The tendency has become to search for and produce manifest texts, to turn to exhibitions that postulate to one degree or another new aesthetic principles, new poetics, etc. We can easily also identify the fragments of the Ball of Tyrants as a manifestation of new political poetry if we decide to record any trend phenomenon if we want to use genre markers, categories and paradigms. In and beyond questions about trends and manifestos, we must first and foremost consider the text itself and place it as the afterword in the book. And the text reads: "New political poetry has no specific language, no poetry or style."
The new political poetry wants to live with the illusion that it "can only be used" for "more freedom" because it remembers the old political poetry, its ideologically biased stepmother, the plaintive vocal verses for mass consumption. Remember poets. Remember also citizens, politicians, politicians and policy languages. The new political poetry does not remain indifferent to the repetitive models that function in the free field of the public. The new political poetry remembers, knows, speaks "many Bulgarian languages", knows how to speak them, how to cite them, how to mask and unmask them, how to speak and recreate them as a common but individualized language.
For example, the language of journalism is present in the book, in new political verses. The names of the works included in the Ball of Tyrants are initially puzzling, as they seem at first glance to be headlines for newspaper articles, usually positioned in the criminal record or in the yellow pages. But the "journalistic" contours of reception are lost in the gloomy background of the paintings, in the colors of irony. The irony of losing the thread that a citizen could find himself in his daily wanderings, if he had not been bombarded with forged information, with invalid stories, with artificially modeled, showcase sensations, with tabloids and tabloid worlds, in a maze of hazy outbursts . The "Tyrant Ball" with reverberation and noisy noise poses the problem of the discrepancy between the official version and the hidden "corridor", between spoken and silent facts, between fornication with words and the life word.
The languages of the witness, the narrator and the narrator are also reformatted in the book. For example, in poems such as "Superintendent Rajegeva recounts memories of a concentration camp near Lovech", the guard's attitude over the prisoners is filtered out and secondarily ironic. But the witness is a fiction (insofar as the ball is a metaphor by which "reality" is corresponded), and in the language of the narrated, in fact, the lyric speaker, who transformed himself into a stenographer, conveys what the supervisor said. In poems in which a foreign narrative is present, with all the conditionality of the narrative regarding its pseudocytosis, the connection between reality and fiction at the same time seems blurred, vague, whimsical, but at the same time it is never lost. The Poems of the Ball of Tyrants retain their attitude to the fact, to what is or has happened, to the places where
"The truth is dying and dying,
where between a lie
and another
is slipping
the venomous snake of beauty. "
New political poems remember both the "April lyrics" and the earlier ones - September ones, and the extension from Bot's social outlook through the Geo-Milevo to the present. They remember the contexts of Bulgarian (and not only Bulgarian) literary life. Some of the quotations lead to a change in poetics, a change in expressiveness. In other poems of the paratext, the reference to a Bulgarian or foreign author and / or to a story related to it becomes a plot-generating mechanism, a plan for the unfolding of the poetic - e.g. in Stoicho Mamin: One Name.
The authors, the author's type of behavior and the philosophy of writing, in the language, are ironic, and the author himself - his name and his place in the Bulgarian literature - and the writing in general are ironic. For example, "The invitation from the president arrives at the right person" - in the poem after "Shopi without Snippets" the structure of the work is modified, and the desire of the lyric speaker is declared - who writes on the back of the invitation, on the back of the official, as if opposite everything - the desire to complete the poem itself. Sometimes works shift the focus, direct it to their internal rules, and pronounce them - for example. the rhyme is played out as a mask, as an additional code that hides the whiteness of the author's verses, but rather reminds other languages, other poetics, other types of writing. And in Agent Yuri, Robert Bly translates through the translation and agent, through the transformed quote about the landlord who left for America, the idea of betrayal develops:
"Because people are difficult to give up,
words are easier to convey. "
In the Ball of Tyrants, the word, with its meanings, with its meaning, but also as a symbol of meaning, becomes a measure, a direction for truth and freedom.
And if you betray the words, you betray yourself, you lose your freedom and speak in a foreign and alienated language, a dead language, because you no longer have the right to your own, renounced, hopelessly lost. In remorse or no remorse - you are the embodiment of the language of disenfranchisement, until, like in Refugee, it finds another way, you find yourself…
"Inward - in a rusty word,
further inward - where I get lost,
further down - into a tunnel ... "
and in the end you are not lost forever - and you are gone. The ball goes on…
