Zero Readership

So, when he jokes that he’s “forgotten how to be a surrealist” the poet is reminding us that all great poetry must forget its ancestors, must start over with each page, no matter how loyal one might feel towards certain aspects of the past. As John Wieners wrote in the opening pages of his journal in the spring of 1958: “I must forget how to write. I must unlearn what has been taught me.” I mention Wieners because he’s one of the “ancestors” (comrades, really) one finds hovering throughout Marinovich’s poetry. Not necessarily in a direct manner, but in the poet’s awareness that there is no true separation between life and poem, that they bleed into each other constantly.

Guillermo Parra on Filip Marinovich.