Oh, this may be the most difficult part of any interview. I believe that I've been learning something different about myself every day I wake up and face the world. I think one of my reasons why I'm a writer stems from my desire to "learn thyself first", simply putting it. false modesty aside. And for the biographical data, I think everyone can find me through my websitewww.ninazivancevic.com
Was your creativity affected in anyway during the lockdown? Did being lockdown make you feel inspired or deflated?
I think it was a very difficult lockdown for me personally; I came down with COVID in mid-March so I felt physically weakened and tired to read and write. However, a few friends encouraged me to write something I had entitled "Corona Beer dailies"
I came to chapter no.4 and then I stopped.
Was it therapeutic doing creative work during lockdown?
Not really, I felt it as an artificial timing before I was going to face greater challenges in terms of life vs. death.
How did you occupy your time?
Well, I slept a lot, but I gave myself some precious time to rethink some major issues like "where do we come from" and... where do we go after all this was over.
What was the main thinking behind your poem submitted to Together Behind Four Walls ?
Something going along the lines that life is worth living after all, and that I was given that precious time to write or express myself creatively in spite of other daily impositions on that precious time...
What inspires most of your poems?
Well, it is the search for the meaning of them all, combined with the experience of sound or music which are imminent to all my writing, so to speak.
Do you have any favourite poems, from all the poems you have written?
Well, my "favorites" are those which grabbed me unexpected, and these might be the least crafted of them all. I realised that I write the best, or that people love to hear those poems which were written in some sort of outrage or anger. Most of these poems could be found indeed in my new and forthcoming book of poems "Roller-skating Notes" which is really a book-composite of my favorite poems (it starts with some poems I wrote as far in time as in the 1980s and includes some most recent ones). In general, these are poems with a very strong political background with social issues. The book will be published with my American publisher Coolgrove Press later this year.
Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote or one of the first?
Oh yes... The first ones I wrote in the late 1970s and I think of them today as of a bunch of aborted Surrealist attempts- although I got a very prestigeous award in Serbia for my first book of poems, entitled simply "Poems"... but I would not bragg about it today nor I would like to discard it entirely from by bibliography- they were just cute exercises in poetry written by a very young person.
Do you ever think of poems before going to sleep or just after waking up?
Oh yes, in fact, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I feel I should write something down, which is a certain heritage from my great poetry teacher, Allen Ginsberg with whom I worked for a number of years in the U.S.
Do you hand write poems or go directly on to your computer?
Well, it depends- all the media forms I view lightly in terms that WHAT I have to write seems always more pertinent to me than the facility being offered to be at that particular moment. There is a certain nostalgia for a sheet of paper that installed itself in my heart, quite recently, as I have noticed that I tend to use computer and my smartphone more than anything else these days.. And yes, I do remember that old adage expressed by a great American poet Robert Creeley who once noticed that "the form and the format we use in writing decides the very content of our thoughts".. Interesting.
Do you ever give up on poems you have started?
I do and I don't. There are some poems which I had started writing, then I'd give up on them.. only to return to them- through some serendipity (like the other day when I had found a very old unfinished poem in my drawer and then reworked it kind of, worked on its ending). I think this may be a very positive and liberating exercise: to start writing a poem, let it "simmer" for a couple of years, and then work on it again, I mean give it a totally fresh and different ending, endowed with some new meaning to it.
Do you do any other creative activities?
Ha! Yes, it is like that line in one of my poems entitled "Birth of the Avant-garde" where I wrote "as I was not working on anything- I was doing everything!" I've been interested mostly in the relationships between poetry and music, then poetry and visual arts, in a more concrete and stable ways then those already contained in these respective arts. In other words, we can say "this painting, or this film is pure poetry", but how do we get our written poetry applied to these stable genres, well, that interdisciplinary field have always puzzled me the most.
Do you only focus on poetry or do you also write prose?
Well you see- I can barely distinguish these two 'genres'; I must admit that I have always read Poe, Joyce, Hedayat, Calvino, Proust, Woolf, Crnjanski, Huncke for instance- as pure poetry. Something that they call at the university "the hybrid genre" or the 'poet's novel'. For the rest of so called prose or fiction I have very little patience, but that's just my personal take. It would be presumptuous and preposterous to say that these genres do not exist separately... I must agree though that my heart always goes to poetry, it's kind of more 'vertical' than the prose.
Do your poems ever have strong messages?
Well I do not know, but I hope so...
How would you describe the tone of your poems?
Both angry and melancholic, somewhat in that Romantic lineage of Percy Busshe Shelley's, at least let me flatter my ego that way, ha!
If you had to write a poem about yourself, how would it start?
Oh, I'm afraid I've already written a lot of these self-reflective verses, my major concern would focus now on writing a poem which would deal with my possible "end of the line". Yes, how would I check out of this terrible confusion called life.. with measure and dignity devoid of those unnecessary morose undertones...