Ars & Humanitas (Oct 2024)
I Am Reading the Poems of Kristina Hočevar
Abstract
The article takes into account the defining characteristics of contemporary poetry and in this sense introduces innovative approaches to reading Kristina Hočevar’s poetry collection Na zobeh aluminij, na ustnicah kreda (Aluminium on Teeth, Chalk on Lips): a cogmotive and holistic approach that also considers the interpretive focus and lyrical dominant. -At the same time, it also introduces two ways of selecting poems for interpretation, i.e. a very short poem (“give me marbles”) without placing it in a wider context, and a longer poem (“only these walls are your walls”) within the context of the entire collection, the author’s poetics, and lesbian poetry. While the cogmotive approach connects the emotional and rational areas, the holistic approach assumes the impossibility of finding the only meaningful core of the text. When I consider the interpretive focus and the lyrical dominant within the framework of the latter, I am constantly aware that it is more important to reflect the point of interpretation, which is significantly more intense and thus more successful when one tries to focus on the interpretive center and on the dominant poetic qualities separately, rather than both simultaneously. The intertwining of the interpretive focus and the lyrical dominant, i.e. the juxtaposition of the reception and production aspects, enabled the interpretation to be diverse and elastic. If the interpretative center in Kristina Hočevar’s two poems is non-verbal, in the shorter one an allusion to children’s play and in the longer one the feeling of being outcast and at the same time at home in a safe environment, the lyrical dominant in the shorter poem (“give me marbles”) is the metaphorical equation of eyes and marbles, in the longer the action of symbols such as walls, a black sun, crimson, shackles, iron bars, a dancing body. Both poems prove the quality of the poet’s poetics, recognizable in the dynamism of the images, non-naive and non-pathetic sincerity, the depth of the dialogic view, the ironic and grotesque fluidity of the self and the collective, or the transience of identities, in which lesbian determinacy is important.
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