The Linguistic Turn and Slovenian Experimental Poetry

Abstract

This article outlines the political and philosophical context of the development of Slovenian experimental poetry during the 1960s, and links the concept of the linguistic turn to problematizing the referential function in modern poetry. In determining the meanings of the type of experimental poetry that uses words as its main means of expression, one must take into account two extremes: the traditional view on language (according to which words reflect reality) on the one hand, and the complete loss of referential function on the other. Words cannot be ascribed a meaning when they cannot be linked to referents (which occurs in the case of fabricated words), when their use or the play in which they are included cannot be identified (due to syntactic irregularities or semantic anomalies), or when the meaning is deferred because Derrida’s play of signifiers is at the forefront. – The four Slovenian poets discussed in this article in terms of experimental poetry dealt with the language issue with various intensity. The referential function was absolutely rejected by Iztok Geister and Niko Grafenauer in their poetry studies texts; Franci Zagoričnik rejected it most radically in his glossolalic poetic texts, whereas Tomaž Šalamun merely indicated the potential linguistic turn. Geister’s exploration of the semantic links between words that are free of conventional usage is substantiated in his criticism of humanism. Grafenauer began creating emotionally charged structures because he rejected the sense and reestablished poetry as an autonomous aesthetic phenomenon; his poems can be ascribed a social-critical role, just like Zagoričnik’s experiments and, last but not least, Šalamun’s poetry of fragments. What the four poets have in common is their distance from the modern world of consumption and false ideologies, rather than the modes and radicality of their linguistic turns.