After receiving all the most important poetry awards in the past years, the poet Slave Gjorgjo Dimoski is this year the winner of the "23 October" state award for long-term achievements in the field of culture and art.

The poet Slave Gjorgjo Dimoski has so far received the most important domestic awards and recognitions, including "Brača Miladinovci", "Atso Shopov", "Antevo pero", "Grigor Prlichev" for the best poem, and he has also received international awards in Romania, Russia and in other countries.

Slave Gjorgjo Dimoski is a member of the DPM, the Macedonian PEN Center and the "Ante Popovski" Academy. He is the author of nineteen collections of poems, six books for children, several books of essays and actively sings. He is represented in all anthologies of Macedonian poetry published in Macedonia and around the world after 1982. He received the state award "October 23" for achievements in the field of culture and art.

What kind of feeling does receiving a state award that is dedicated to the Macedonian revolutionary struggle create?

- Although I am too old to talk about any feelings when receiving an award, nevertheless, an award with a "state" sign arouses satisfaction, because the work done in the past decades receives recognition at the highest level. The award carries a date from the brightest moments of our history. I also said that in the speech at the awarding ceremony: The State Award "October 23" is one of the most significant in the Republic of Macedonia, because through the establishment of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization on this day in 1893 in Thessaloniki, and through the Ilinden Uprising in 1903 and the most important document The "Krushev Manifesto", which later translated into Asnom's determination for a free Macedonia and September 8, finally, the Republic of Macedonia being a free independent state is a continuity that expresses the libertarian ideas and ideals of the Macedonian people at the highest level. The name of the award "October 23" is not only a reminder of that historical date, but also a gesture to be engraved in the memory of the Macedonian people who today, although still fighting with those who deny identity, language, history, enjoy the benefits of the age-old struggle for autonomy and independence.

Until now, you have received the most important poetry awards in our country. What difference does receiving a social reward make?

- The other awards I have received are closely related to the field in which I have invested my life, with literature, more specifically with poetry, and they came from different evaluators who were related to the profession, to literature, but this one comes as a rounding off, as a crown of all that. It is a pleasure when society recognizes you as a creator and verifies it with state recognition.

In your speech at the award ceremony, you pointed out that "poetic language is not competitive in today's consumer world." In what sense?

Today's organized systems of this "new world order" teach us to be consumers, not creators. We are faced with difficult and absurd situations present in everyday life and, in a way, the voice of the creator, and above all in the countries with a small speaking area, such as the entire Balkans, including us, is lost in some dark vilayets. In this situation, I can only say that art, or rather poetry, is a kind of spontaneous rebellion against control and against the effort to push us towards the general in which everything is lost, instead of making us more humane human beings.

This is precisely why artists, including poets, are slowly being pushed to the margins of social systems, because any free and independent thinking for them is a subversive act. So the poetic language is not competitive with today's consumer world, that is, that consumer world tends to imperceptibly, quietly silence it.

What is language without poetry?

- Even in the dawn of humanity, people conveyed their feelings through various sounds, screams, vague mutterings, which is the closest thing to poetry. Then through a specific form of expression - through verses, they conveyed messages that we have as a civilizational heritage recorded in the oldest works, which date back two or three millennia, and today there are various means of communication, programming languages ​​are used, and with the development of artificial intelligence who knows how far it will go, but it is certain that the language of poetry will be the right one, the primordial language that marked the millennia of civilization.

Poetic language and expression have changed throughout history, but they have always been specific and precise; language, as I said in a song, is a drop of mother's milk that dripped from the mother's tongue, and that drop of milk is the essence of a spoken language. It would be distasteful to say that language without poetry would be only a language of communication, but if we turn, for example, to our national creations collected by Macedonian tireless collectors in the second half of the 19th century, we will notice the sharpened national spirit of our language , which over the centuries strove to break away from ordinary language, the language for everyday communication, and to present to generations an always fresh language that preserves tradition and offers inexhaustible possibilities to follow contemporary trends in world literature.

Once upon a time, poets were at the top of social life, in managerial or ambassadorial positions. It is no longer the case. What changed?

- Well, the attitude towards the intellectual. This is best seen from the populist-political scene. It's not just here, it's in all the Balkan states that emerged after the collapse of socialism. In order for a political party to get as many votes as possible in important places, they lined up those, popularly known as "stickers of posters". We are witnesses of what happened to Macedonia and the impasse this country has been brought to by "those"; Who is leading "high" politics today?

It is certain that the totalitarian regimes had a different attitude towards the intellectual creators and put a lot of trust in them, because they were presentable in every way. In the former common homeland from Macedonia, the ambassador to Senegal was Aco Shopov. Do the younger people know what he did in those four years as an ambassador? It is enough that he brought and crowned in Struga Leopold Sedar Senghor, president of Senegal and a poet of great voice from the African continent, or, let's mention Kole Chashule. Obviously, the angle of seeing things has changed, the pots have been mixed up. The attitude towards the general intellect has changed.

What does it mean to be a poet today?

- This question is often asked to me and I have answered it differently in different situations, so I will try now: the basic challenge of today's poet is the question: who is he addressing? Does anyone exist on the other side or is there absolute silence? Silence is a natural property of poetry, but poetry also has a natural property of communication. Yes, a dialogue with the "other" is needed, and without the "other" there would be no poetry. Even if the "other" is only one.

The poet today is constantly strained, not engaged, because today's (I deliberately do not use the term modern) poetry in relation to the classical one should follow the spirit of this time, it requires calmness, a careful approach to the object that stares curiously and penetratingly for "poetic" to present it, she requires a careful approach to everything. The question: what does it mean to be a poet today, and as challenging as it is, there is no simple answer, let alone a solution.

The poet today, even though he is a loner, is not lonely, even though poetry is losing its public status. A loses it because "she is not fashion or fun"; it contains the key poetic linguistic glimpses and demands from the reader either sympathy or intellectual exertion. And I return to the beginning: the basic challenge of today's poet is the question to whom is he addressing? He addresses the silence and the stunning echo of the language, and let me return to a sentence from my address to the Macedonian Assembly: if the poet is silent, the soul of the language will also be silent. And the soul of the nation is also the language. To be a poet today is not a privilege, but simply, to be merged in the impersonal mass of everyday life, and to be proud of entangling and untangling luminous linguistic knots.

In your latest collection of poems, Grapes of a Coward, you published "Filipica to the Desperate" and "Filipica to the Defeated". Why?

- In the book "Grapes from a coward" I used philippics as a literary genre in which someone addresses someone with a sharp uncompromising verbal attack. Here the context is clear, and it is clear who are the desperate and who are the defeated. I want to ask a question what is despair and what is the defeat of man today, of the citizen today. The interlocutor is invisible, but deeply defeated, he sings in despair the hymn of the defeat of civilization. But using irony, sarcasm and parody I try or want to believe that the defeat is not complete.

In the last 6-7 years, Macedonia entered a system that swallowed everything in front of it, especially its own culture. Culture is ethical and that is why it is often under ice, because ethics in such systems that recycle everything does not exist. But "some occasions" constantly refer us to the topics of identity, ethnicity, freedom, controlled space for self-expression, poverty, a rather corrupt system... No matter how bitter it is, everything should be recorded, even through poetry, and poetry is a document and witness to/at one time.

In this book, I tried to insert some critical-ironic reflections, which will "talk" about our social-national illusions, but I don't want them to turn towards the defeat imposed by force. Social truth and critical intonation are back in force.

In your verses, the words language, people, homeland are often used. Where does the poet belong?

- Language is a frequent theme in my poetry. Language as a means of creation, interesting knots in language, establishing a relationship between language and reality, the excitement when constructing syntagms, these are all topics that I have come back to in almost all books. But when I talk about poetry, I keep coming back to the number of speakers of the Macedonian language (in our country and in the world) and I state with resignation that huddled in the middle of the Balkans, we ourselves are turned towards ourselves, leaning on our tradition and we make an effort to glimpse what is happening in the literatures of the great language areas, and can we trace them? We may know something about European literature, there is also American literature, but what happens to Chinese, Arabic literature? Maybe something hints at the Struga evenings of poetry, but they are millet grains. Despite all that, the Macedonian writer makes efforts to touch the shoulder of the great literatures, to some extent he succeeds and believes in beauty as an essence that will keep our place somewhere. The beauty of language.

What I am saying may sound carried away, romantic, although I am far from romanticism, but the languages, although Babylonian mixed, are placed within strict limits (you remember the statement of a former minister that the borders of the Macedonian language are within the strictly defined political borders of the Republic of Macedonia ?) are still one language, the language of poetry, comprehensible to all. As for the use of the words "people", "fatherland", they are used in different connotations in the trilogy "Reports of the Fox - Tongue and Bread - Grapes of Coward". When all this is summed up - the "poet" is in the vicious circle: language - people - homeland. It is all diabolically bound in a tight unity.

Do you remember the initial initiation, desire, motive for poetic expression of the world you see and live in?

– As a child, I had a feeling for the singing of the language (my aunts told me this). Later, in my early schooling, I imagined my own worlds that I rhymed, looking for consonance between the words, and they were often vague, incomprehensible and did not mean anything, I invented them; all that mattered was some kind of sonority.

In the upper grades, something was already more concrete, and from the second half of the third year of high school and the entire fourth year, the poems from the first book "Engravings" were created. With those poems, I destroyed my previous poetic world, and it all happened when I fell into my hands a small, white-covered, book entitled "Poetry" by Rimbaud, with a cover of Vlada Urošević. Then I realized that there are other poetic worlds, apart from the "school" ones. Even today, I think that my poetic profile was formed by the encounter with Rimbaud's verses, but I did not enter into his frame. My further poetic development is what I am today.

(The interview was published in "Kulturen Pechat" number 254, in the print edition of the newspaper "Sloboden Pechat" on 2-3.11.2024)