Saturnalia Books: Your book of poetry, In Another Country, won Saturnalia’s 2022 Book Prize, which is how we know you. However, your art traverses genres and mediums, and I was struck by how fluently this collection of poems travels through different realms, both concrete and spiritual. You mention on your website that your visual art explores “imagined geographies,” a concept that seems to manifest in your poetry through dreams. How do you view the role of the unconscious in relation to these shifting perceptions of landscape in your poetic works?
Andrea Jurjević: I left my native Adriatic coast in my early 20s, thinking I’d return to Europe. That never panned out and I never stopped missing the home shores, particularly the sea. I’ve been living in the American South for over two decades now, and while I have learned to see its beauty, along with those of other places I have traveled to, it is the Adriatic that I carry inside me primarily. Agnes Varda put it perfectly: “If we opened up people, we’d find landscapes.” Inside me, this would be the sea, the shores, ports, docks, woods, and rivers.
And this memory of places comes out in my creative life. There is an obvious connection between painting and poetry—focus on imagery and tone— but for me this link has also been very personal. I came to writing poetry through painting and music. Writing in a nonnative language is hard work and visual expression offers a relief from the world of words. Painting is also a great way to loosen up the creative flow and engage more physically with one’s creativity. Both practices require a kind of attentiveness, attunement to the world, and seeing the “aesthetic reality within the actual reality,” as James Agee said. More than anything, visual expression is a language, too.
As for the unconscious, intuition is a big part of the creative process, and that intuition, I imagine, feeds off the memories, experiences, sensations, perceptions, and dreams we carry within us. The ability to make creative choices and to respond to the work on paper—be it a poem or a drawing—is part of engaging the unconscious intelligence with imagination and technique.
SB: On the topic of landscape, In Another Country marries nature and eros. Sexuality extends beyond the body as a perpetual undercurrent in the environment. In “Nastic Movements,” the ocean takes on a sensual quality; in “Mouth Gags and Shadows,” the narrator describes the universe as “nothing / but a broken sex toy.” I am curious about the role of the erotic in your poems, particularly within human-nature relationships.
AJ: I grew up in a culture and time that didn’t censor sexual content from TV, film, music, print media, arts, etc. In addition to that, my father was a passionate nudist who believed that human bodies were natural and nothing to be ashamed of. My mother was a nurse her entire life, and she often took care of old people with chronic skin conditions and family members who battled cancer. Her attitude toward the human body was one of care and healing. So, between the two of them I saw the human body as a fact of life. When you go to nudist beaches you see bodies of all ages and shapes. It’s not a sexualized environment. Same with hospitals. And same with art.
People often confuse nudity with erotica, and eroticism with beauty. Eroticism doesn’t hinge on nudity or on whatever notions of perfection or beauty are currently trending. In fact, eroticism requires imperfection. (Perfection is plain, there is no tension in it, no point of interest.)
For the erotic to exist, there has to be some limitation. This limitation engages fantasy, which in turn opens up space for experience that goes beyond the ordinary. Eroticism shakes us from the daily life and potentially offers transcendent moments, and in turn, those moments can prompt artistic expression. So, erotic moments in poetry deal primarily with transcendence. I suspect that’s why inspiration feels a lot like lust. The Greek god Eros, after all, personifies creative power.
As for nature, sexuality never finds satisfaction within itself and tends to project outwards. That’s why it’s easy to pick up innuendo or sexual metaphors all over the place—in kitchens, in laboratories, in hair salons, in churches, not just in nature. To me, this is life recognizing itself.
SB: Similar to eros, war is a lingering presence in many of these pieces–sometimes explicitly and sometimes as “a wandering existence. / Or in a body.” How has your relationship with darkness or tragedy in the world been shaped or changed by creating poetry?
AJ: My father died at the start of my senior year of high school. At that point the war in Croatia had already been raging for two years and had started in Bosnia the year prior. My world was collapsing, and by the end of senior year, I dropped out of school and proceeded to cope with the circumstances in ways that I don’t want to get into here. The future was bleak, and at the time I didn’t realize that I was very depressed. Even though my father was an avid reader, I was surprised when we, while cleaning his desk in the wake of his passing, discovered that he wrote poetry. There were several poems I remember. In one he imagined his own funeral in a Neruda style verse, and in the other he wrote to his estranged daughter from his first marriage. I wish I knew he wrote while he was still alive. I think it would’ve given me the necessary courage and confidence to try to do the same, as he was instrumental in my lifelong love of books. So, in my mind, death and poetry dance together.
It took years after that before I wrote my first poem, in English. Since then, writing has allowed me to make practical use of difficult experiences—to turn them, albeit momentarily, into art. Writing poetry has also taught me to see value in grief, to accept conflicting emotions, and to embrace uncertainties. Poetry provides comfort not just in times of tragedy but with daily matters, too.
SB: Lastly, these poems are stunning in their ability to be simultaneously grounded in place while maintaining a sense of the foreign. A “citizenry of in-betweenness” forms the narrative frame of this collection, leaving the reader to wonder what it means to be “home.” Where do you find home, either in these poems or yourself?
AJ: There’s nothing I love more, no place I feel more at home than sitting on the shore and looking at the open sea. The pleasure and calm from watching the sea and the sky is immeasurable. What is home to me? My home is my home to me. My place of origin. America is my adopted home. This is where I raised my children and where, as an immigrant working and living in her non-native language, I write as an act of making a home. So, my heart and my home are bi-continental.
Andrea Jurjević is a Croatian poet, writer and literary translator. She is the author of two poetry collections and a chapbook: In Another Country, winner of the 2022 Saturnalia Books Prize; Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize; and Nightcall, which was the 2021 ACME Poem Company Surrealist Series selection. Andrea’s book-length translations from Croatian include Olja Savičević’s Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Marko Pogačar’s Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry.
Interview by Priya Garmhausen
