Poetry collection “Mafioso and Stromboli”
My poetry collection “Mafián a Stromboli”, is being published after a very long time, more than thirty years since the poems were written. This is because only relatively recently did I find the time and courage to look into the materials from my youth, which included several notebooks and a lot of written papers. Everything was scribbled in a handwriting that I could hardly read.
I started to study the texts. I mainly copied them into the computer and, surprisingly, I found that for me personally they have a strong informative value, expressing the authentic atmosphere of the time when they were written. At that time, I was a student at the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem and later at the Prague Umprum (1988 – 1994). This is therefore a turning point in time full of changes caused by the Velvet Revolution. I was one of the revolutionary students and therefore experienced this time with maximum intensity, which, in my opinion, was imprinted in my poems.
Graphic design of the book – Jan Brož
Illustrations – Jiří Černický
Mafián a Stromboli
At that time, I strongly perceived the wild and destructive devastation of society and nature, burdened not only by the communist regime, but also by the chemical industry and coal mining. This manifested itself in a kind of futuristic escape into parallel worlds crystallised by the imaginations of a crazy visionary, a kind of foolish hero who utopianly tries to lead the ignorant inhabitants of the devastated landscape away to the world of his dream worlds. It is clear that his struggle must have been in vain, but the almost imperceptible spark of hope is the energy from which, even at a time when it seems that no one is interested in poetry anymore, the vitality of enthusiasm spurts, feeding the creeping change.
Mafián a Stromboli
ON THE POEMS OF JIŘÍ ČERNICKÝ
Viktor Pivovarov
Only very naive people do not believe that muses really exist. The collection of poems by Jiří Černický is direct proof of their real existence. During the revolutionary months of the Velvet Revolution, one flew through the window to a twenty-three-year-old art school student and dictated an entire notebook of poems to him. Why did she choose him and not some experienced poet? And what’s more, not in Prague, where the most important revolutionary events were taking place, but in some backwoods, in Ústí nad Labem, good only for filming a gloomy detective series. What can I say – muses fly wherever they want! And when they want. This one dictated a lot of poems to the novice artist and flew away. That’s the end of it! It seems that she never flew again. If she did fly, it was another muse.
The poems that the author discovered years later are, in my deep conviction, a real event. And for several reasons. They undoubtedly offer the key to understanding Černický’s visual work. Thanks to them, it is possible to understand his paintings and installations more deeply and precisely. But even if Černický had not become a recognized visual artist, his early poems would have remained an event in the field of poetry. They are an original and powerful example of the so-called expanded poetic consciousness, a consciousness that transcends the boundaries of the human, the consciousness of the micro and macro cosmic.
And that’s not all. Since, as the author himself says, the creation of these poems was directly related to the atmosphere of the Velvet Revolution, it can be assumed that the muse who flew to him at that time wanted to leave her own testimony about these events. Testimony that the November coup was not just an event in the history of a small European country, nor just an ethical event, as many of us think, but an event of cosmic, cosmic significance. I think we had no idea about this dimension of the Velvet Revolution. And that muse could not find a poet anywhere else who would hear her voice. Černický heard him.
Viktor Pivovarov
