Are there peoples without poetry?

Are there peoples without art!?

Poetry is written in thousands of languages... But it speaks In One Language – that of the HUMAN SOUL.

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Up until the time of the war, in Kosovo, under almost all regimes, a hostile environment had been created toward books in general, and toward literary creation in particular, entirely for non-literary reasons—for political, oppressive, and enslaving reasons. With this same oppressive environment, the Slavic and pre-Slavic regimes, and the communist regimes, also dealt with the collective freedoms of peoples and citizens in general.

1. Memory of the Written Word

Under these circumstances, the creators themselves distributed and gifted their books in the absence of libraries, so that the book as a public medium could be close to its lovers. Meanwhile, the library and the Albanian book suffered a tragic fate, just as the people themselves experienced. Many among the creators experienced the Slavic genocide right to the marrow: many had their libraries, manuscripts, and important, irreplaceable cultural values burned. It is not surprising, therefore, why an ancient Egyptian inscription says: “The book is more valuable than all the monuments carved in figures, because the book itself builds monuments in the heart of the one who reads it.” And the creator did not stay silent, publishing hundreds of literary and other books.
But today, in entirely different conditions, in the conditions of breathing freedom, when hundreds of publishers operate, when thousands of books are published, so many newspapers, so many magazines, print and electronic media, the world of the internet and modern information technology, what can the publication of a book mean, and what does it mean to engage in artistic creation? Creators can only continue their former mission of caring for the Written Word, for the Artistic Word, these “daughters of earth,” as an English creator puts it. Just as yesterday they showed their inclination against the politics of the day, with that sacred right that the other be given the right to think differently, to act differently, to feel differently, to converse differently, against One Thought, One book, One doctrine, One newspaper, One radio-television, One party, thus against the monism of social life, just so today the writer can do this with the wise and prudent word against the furies and waves of empty words that say nothing. We understand that today everyone wants to speak, everyone wants to write, to publish a book, everyone wants to have the right to speak, but few of all these have anything to say. Unfortunately, even today, as the American scholar Hart Wagner notes, contemporary society has turned into a hostile environment for the book: “Here the reader encounters a society where the highest goal is to be happy; books are burned because they cause dissatisfaction. Keeping books is forbidden. Even reading, as if it were a hostile activity, has been outlawed.”
The issue is always the television screen, the internet society that grips the viewer to itself. How many times has it been said that burning books leads to burning people. Therefore, it is no wonder why in a society where the decadence of reading takes on alarming proportions, where the death of reading and the death of the book are demanded, the murder or burning of people might not also be demanded. And culture is the first victim, as always throughout history, of this mindset and politics. If writers have been and always are those ideal and idealistic readers, thirsty for knowledge and with faith to change life, then opening a book constitutes a sacred act. And creators ask for nothing more than for this sacred act to be respected.
Then poetry weaves its signs of reflection, becomes more meditative, so that, against “objective” reality, strangely and paradoxically, it strips itself of metaphor and the dimension of experience. But Theodor Adorno would say: “Artistic experience becomes autonomous only when it rejects experience. The path that leads to this goes through disregard, while the emancipation of art disregards pornographic products, empty pleasures… but, if we remove or do not accept every trace of experience and sensation, the question will immediately impose itself on us: then why does the work of art exist at all? In truth, in works of art, it would seem as if the less we experience it, the better we understand it.”

2. Misunderstandings in the Reader-Poetry Communication Relationship

It has been said: poetry abounds, but it also demands to be abounded; it is constructive, but it also demands to be constructed. Therefore, conflicts and misunderstandings are bound to arise in the reader-poetry communication relationship. Because poetry seems to move toward a chosen reader, as if seeking this elite reader, having proclaimed to the world its aesthetic elitism, avant-garde, modern, and postmodern currents, the intellectualization of the lyric song, while declaring poetic hermeticism as its norm. Let us not forget: the hermeticism of the ’70s and onward was taken as a literary “norm,” weaving its own “forms” with its suggestive, allegorizing, associative discourse, precisely because of the ideological censorship that existed here. Meanwhile, it has preserved the aristocratic elitism of expression even today. It is as if poetry is slowly giving up on the public, which constitutes a socio-literary phenomenon. If the contemporary reader often levels accusations against modern poetry because of its obscurity, because the lyric speaker curls up, shrinks, and cowers within himself, because of the reduction and diminishing of the force of poetic communication with the reader, or because this poetry does not take into account whom it is addressing; then it is the obligation of the critic and of critical reading to clarify this hermeticism or obscurity, to find and define the very sources of the essence and existence of the poetic act, to unravel and remove the fogs and the fleeces of these fogs from confusions, and not to mystify them. More precisely, to separate, notice, distinguish, and differentiate obscurity from deep wisdom, the incomprehensible from delirious speech, the discourse of hidden wisdom from empty puns, or semantic multiplicity from aimless exhibitionism with poetic figures. In the “horizons of expectation or reception,” critical reading takes into account that well-known trichotomy of author-work-reader, or, as is said in the traditional theory of criticism: to be a bridge between the reader and the work.

3. Spiritual Time

But Time resides within the human being, within the creator; it is a spiritual time that is reflected and woven within poetry.

Even though language opens and creates the possibilities of unraveling life's enigmas, the secrets of the earthly globe or of the universe in general, the possibilities of realizing our being as humans, nevertheless “language is not a cipher, a ciphered writing” (F. G. Jünger). At the very least, the poet invites the reader to savor the poetic word, to take part in the pleasure of reading, “in the pleasure of the feast of language” (R. Barthes).

4. Criticism, Free Reading

Reading does not like boundaries, just as no boundaries can be placed on the interpretation of a literary text; literature inherently encompasses a multiplicity of readings. Ultimately, do not the holy books also encompass Reading as a primordial craft and inclination, from the Holy Book of the Hebrews, the Talmud, or, as it is said, from the Talmudic knowledge of the 49 layers of meaning or semantics in each fragment of the Torah; or does not the reading of the stars, which two people do in a painting, ultimately suggest a system of reading codes? And so you are forced to reflect on the phenomenology of reading and interpretation...
The text itself creates its own Interpreter, while criticism always finds itself in the company of its sister who stands by its head through all difficulties, which is the Practice of Reading. In any case, the critic is like that prince in the fairy tale with kings, who has to overcome so many difficulties and obstacles to reach his Cinderella, in this case, to reach the essence of the work: first of all, to define this essence as a literary text and then as a genre or literary typology... from there, to extract the essences of art and aesthetic values. And values have such a nature: they are experienced more than they are understood. But the critic sometimes has to clash with the world of essences and notions in this way, to create them himself, to extract the cores of this essence of art, to shape and form theories and interpretations after reading the work. Ultimately, Free Reading, which we suggested above, forces critics to surpass the romantics’ demand for the literary critic, who supposedly had to understand the text better than the writer himself. Once again: just like the Prince of the Fairy Tale who has to be more agile than the rest, to always suggest new semantic shores. And, in this regard, the dilemma will always be posed: will he be completely identified and merged into the image of the text and the author? Will the critic, or the work and the author, be merged and identified in the critic’s Model of interpretive and reading writing? Therefore, is it not the critic who creates new faith in the text, who thus creates new meanings, new semantizations of the text, of wisdom or of the other shore; to reveal doubts, dilemmas, and to desecrate cults and dictatorships; and, consequently, from faithful readers, to once again create secular readers, new heretics, from the secular to create the faithful, from the faithful heretics.
The creative minds of the third millennium desperately want to find the path and the solution to the secrets of consciousness, to the illumination of creative impulses, to find the meaning of life and literature. Well then, let them tell us what the true values are, what the Consciousness of the Text is. Meanwhile, art remains even now a secret, a universe full of enigmas and endless labyrinths, as it encompasses those ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs of the magical secrets of the world that surrounds us, of the dreams that give us so much faith and promise, of the love that never yields (never bows down), and of the life that takes from us more and more each time and gives us nothing. Criticism always comes after the work, even though sometimes it also leads it with the cultural and social context of the moment in which it is created, written; just as Hegel would say: “This is the spirit of the age, forged by thoughts.” Therefore, it is not said in vain that every era and even every author has their own Buzuku, their own De Rada or Naim, their own Fishta, Lasgush, or Migjeni. However, every critic has their own model of reading. The Modern Era demanded only the Reading of the Text, whereas from Nietzsche onward, it demanded only Interpretation. And, let us remember: literary criticism also goes beyond this “only reading of the text or only Interpretation,” as long as the aesthetics of reception suggests the aforementioned contexts, or structuralists and authors like Barthes etc. will extract the trichotomy of Author-Work-Reader. Or between Wisdom and Creation.

5. The Knowledge–Art Interchange

Why not literary criticism too, when its author likewise cannot explain this lucid intoxication, as the ancient Indian sages used to say—that is, cannot explain this artistic impulse or impression that has urged him to write the literary work or create a book. Meanwhile, the paths of reading and of life lead you to ever-new shores. And yet, however much academic criticism aims for a pure notional, scientific Discourse, devoid of metaphorical speech, it cannot escape criticism’s primordial demand and inclination to stand between creation and knowledge, between art and science. The very essays in this book that do not deal directly with a single work offer you this exact idea. Contemporary literary theories—such as Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist criticism, reading theory, antithetical criticism, American New Criticism, structuralist literary knowledge, or Wayne Booth’s and Meyer Abrams’s theories on the necessity of plurality in the study of literature—on the one hand; or various cultural techniques, manuals and rules of discourse, the semantics of the figure or the logic of the media; the economy of needs or the present day, marked as a time of extraordinary technical achievements, of globalizing tendencies where we possess as little knowledge as possible and become as unifiable as possible, to make completely different things identical or very similar, to make them uniform, equal, the same... all of these have led to numerous and countless adventures in writings on criticism and on the reading of the literary work. And the knowledge–art, wisdom–creation interchange seems unceasing as a Consciousness of the Text: thus, Reading and Interpretation as Knowledge are transformed into creation, the chosen critical method creates its own object, creating its Own Art, whereas Creation dictates and articulates the Notion to you, the artistic Work reveals the Metaphor of the Intellect to you, just as we are reading the very title of this book as such a metaphor. And all of these together, then, just as we emphasized above, create the Consciousness of the Text. Within this harmony, Reading as such compels us to say that Critical Art helps guard us against the gridlocks, apparitions, and phantoms of literary theory, whereas Knowledge, Intellect, or Wisdom help us not to lose our way beyond the boundaries of reading or of the Consciousness of the Text. Meanwhile, the critic clashes with and confronts all these multiplicities: of time, of knowledge, of arts, of impulses.