Global Journal of Human Social Science, G: Linguistics and Education, Volume 22 Issue 9

delusion: the imaginary panopticon, which is a cause for estrangement, is momentary (according to critics, Urošević is “the poet of the unrepeatable moment”), but for the child, it has a meaning of a whole cosmos. This poem (“Shadow Theatre”), according to the principle of construction and according to the final solution, interacts with the poem “The Drunken Boat” by Arthur Rimbaud. The series of images of exotic areas in the last part of Rimbaud’s poem ends with the appearance of a child that plays with paper boats in a pond. The areas the child’s imagination creates are poetic and much more impressive than the prosaic reality. The program principle for foregrounding the miraculous and miraculization of the ordinary, crystalized in Urošević’s first collection, remains a constant mark of his poetry. However, in the following books, it receives different shapes and functions. At the beginning ( Another City ), the outcome of exploring the city labyrinth carries amazement and joy (so that, as in Chagall’s paintings, “the sleeping lovers to the sky depart,” the night bus, “a joyous monster, a scarecrow” “always takes us to unseen thing”). Later, in those (almost always a little oniric) urban adventures, there is always a feeling of repulsiveness (“The city tightens around like a noose” – we read in the poem “Dusk in April,” Diving Bell ). There is no longer “a surprise waiting” for you behind the corner (as one verse in the first books of this author says), but most often, the wanderer through the city streets colored with the shadows of a dream, feels a threat lurking: “The pursuit follows me: / tanks chase me through the waking city,” “Helicopters, cyclists – everyone chases me” (“Erased space”); or: “If falls. What falls? Poisonous caterpillars / fall on the city. The city is emptying” (“Fake news”); or: “The smoke drops like a curtain upon the sight / of the city that writhes in spasms of alarm.” (“Alarm” ) 8 Where do these horrifying visions come from? Are they a result of the memories of war scenes seen in childhood? Of the innate, natural tendency for a kind of catastrophe? Or a reflection of the events in the contemporary world (wars, natural disasters, refugee crises, etc. which do not differentiate between time and space)? “City” – a character in the novel The Dragon’s Bride ( Невестата на змејот ) by Urošević says – “a dangerous place for living.” Still, regardless of whether the views of the urban cityscape are attractive or catastrophic, Urošević very lucidly builds his estranging outline of the city, revealing its poetic qualities, in the style of his great predecessor – Baudelaire. Baudelaire, in the “wasteland” of the city, managed “to sense a previously undiscovered secret beauty” (Hugo Friedrich). That paradoxical, and unusual beauty is full of the attractive power of the ugly. In this sense, Urošević’s poems in which the topos of monsters appear . 8 The poems: “Erased Space” and “Fake News” are from the collection Diving Bell . (especially the cycle “A Tower with Monsters” in Hypnopolis ) are paradigmatic as a manifestation of the animal-like: “Warm and sleek, handsome and cruel, monsters creeping out of the corners in the twilight. Their fur glistens like ancient velvet, the white of their eyes is like porcelain. (...) They are all around, horrible and enchanting, even, the child stretches its arms toward them.” (“Monsters”) This poem demonstrates the poetic nature of the ugly, which simultaneously frightens and amazes. About the “terrible beauty,” understood in Blake’s sense, Urošević says: “The unusual that attracts me contains the two elements – on the one hand, the unusual frighten, because it is outside of the norms and understandings that persist in our way of thinking, but it can simultaneously amaze.” 9 The irrational in this poetry offers the reader an encounter with an incredible, exciting world. Among the The monsters, “lazy and slow,” are sometimes rendered concrete, and have mythological (“Minotaur”), Biblical (“Behemoth and Leviathan”) or alchemical symbols ( Secret Gold / Тајно злато ), sometimes they have unusual forms that the scientists admire: “three pairs of legs each / and their tongue twists as snakes’ ones” (“Tamed Monsters”), and sometimes a whole arsenal of composite creatures walk through Urošević’s verses as a projection of the unconscious (oniric): “lions with horns on their head,” “a lion with donkey’s head,” “evil women with bodies like birds,” “half dog-half bird,” “people-fish,” “people with legs of grasshoppers...” The poems whose theme is monsters are illustrative of the interweaving between the imaginary and the realistic in the poetry of Vlada Urošević. The monsters, by rule, break the laws of the world/cosmos order, they are a sign of the out-worldly. They symbolize the irrational forces (chaos), but our author situates them in the space of the city (cosmos) or, possibly, on its periphery, in a separate tower, so again in some kind of a building, construction – an embodiment of the human. (For Urošević, the tower “represents a road to the celestial heights and the depths of the earth, so towards both poles of the Unknown.”) In this way, the animal-like does not begin where the human ends. Still, it penetrates the “normal,” and suggests the concept of the interweaving both seemingly contrary realities in the dual division of the world: visible-invisible, lightness-dark (day-night, cosmos-chaos), good-evil, conscious- unconscious, reality-dream, human-animal... Perhaps even the world in its essence is “monstrous”?! 9 В . Јанковски , Огледало на загатката (conversations with Vlada Urošević), op.cit., p. 100. Additionally, Urošević is also the author of an essayistic book titled Miracles and Monsters ( Чуда и чудовишта ) ( Скопје , Магор , 2001), dedicated to the fantastic in literature. © 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue IX Version I 25 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 G Poetry as Playfulness and as Riddle (On the Poetry of Vlada Urošević)