Experimental Poetry in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literary Spaces: Socialism, War Transition, and Beyond

Abstract

From historical perspectives, this article points to the interactions between official politics, official literary culture, and radical poetry in socialist Yugoslavia and postsocialist post-Yugoslav cultures. The complexity of parallel political and poetically antagonistically opposed poetry formations and the role of feminism are discussed within this constantly changing social and political environment. At the same time, connections and interactions between different parts of this cultural spaces are revealed, which are concealed within the dominant methodological nationalism approach to poetry studies. The focus is put on the intensive relation between radical poetry and radical art practice connected with transnational flows in Yugoslav socialism from the late 1960s and 1970s, and later its reappearance in 1990s during the war in Yugoslavia. At the end, the article discusses the function of translation of American poetry in articulation of radical postsocialist poetry in Serbia, and the role of feminism as a political frame for this kind of work.