Dialogism in Contemporary Slovenian Poetry: Persona Poems and Persona Collections as an Aspect of External Dialogism

Abstract

This article presents an introduction into a broader project that deals with the articulation and configuration of subjects in contemporary Slovenian poetry. In the theoretical part, I provide a brief outline of the different aspects and forms of dialogism defined by Mikhail Bakhtin and propose some conclusions reached after my re-reading of Bakhtin’s thoughts on the monologic nature of poetry. In the empirical section, I situate the chronological landmarks of the increased use of dialogism in recent Slovenian poetry and list the key authors involved. An introductory difference is made between the dialogic strategies that concern the structuration of the poetic discourse and its subjects on different levels of discourse (the speaking positions and the position of the enunciative subject) on the one hand, and representations of the decomposition of the “hard” conceptions of the (philosophical) category of the subject and/or the (sociological) category of the individual by using monological procedures in the structuration of the poem on the other. From the standpoint of poetic strategies, recent phenomena of dialogism on the level of the poem are often incorporated into the apparent monologic model of the subject configuration: the plurality of the poetic subject is introduced foremost in the macro-system of the book and less in the micro-system of the poem or even the utterance. The remainder of the paper presents one of the two aspects of external dialogism that, according to Bakhtin’s typology, would be considered the external type of the two-voiced word: the introduction of the persona poem. In the end, a short analysis of five poetry collections is provided (Ivo Svetina’s The Cloud and the Mountain, Taja Kramberger’s Opus quinque dierum, Milan Dekleva’s The Exorcists of Sense, Katja Gorečan’s The Sorrows of Young Hana, and Krištof Dovjak’s Hemingway’s Lips).