Dejan Stojanović

Early life

Dejan Stojanović was born on 11 March 1959 in Peć, Autonomous District of Kosovo and Metohija, PR Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia. In 1972, he moved with his family to Sutomore, near Bar, Montenegro, where he completed his secondary education. He attended the University of Pristina at Kosovo. While he was predominantly interested in philosophy and the arts during his youth, he earned a degree in law.

Poetry

He began to write poetry in the late seventies and kept his work private for three to four years, after which he published his poems in literary magazines in the former Yugoslavia. Serbian magazines in which his work was published include Stremljenja (English translation: Trends) and Jedinstvo (English translation: Unity) in Priština, and Gradina in Niš. By 1983, he became a member of a literary club (Karagač) in his hometown of Peć. During this time, he was named as the secretary and later promoted to president of the club. In this role, he conducted interviews with some local artists from Kosovo.

In his early adulthood, Stojanović developed a philosophical system of ideas that dealt primarily with metaphysical questions and the structure of the Universe. He wrote several hundred pages in his notebooks exploring these ideas, along with essays on language and literature. In 1999, these manuscripts, along with his library of more than a thousand books (carefully chosen for years), were lost due to fire shortly after the war in Kosovo ended. His books, along with his manuscripts, were held temporarily in his brother's office in the center of downtown Peć.

Publishing

In 1990, Stojanović established a private publishing firm known as Metoh (English translation: the church's land). While the organization was located in Peć, the firm planned to publish a literary magazine in Kosovo. The firm's staff included writers from Belgrade, one of whom was Alek Vukadinović, a Serbian poet who supported Stojanović's plan to publish a magazine. While Stojanović's first book of poetry, Krugovanje (English translation: Circling) was ready for publication in 1983, it was not published until 1993. During those ten years, several poems that were initially planned for inclusion in the book had been replaced by newer poems, which had been written between 1983 and 1986. The last poem in the book had actually been written in Chicago, in 1991.

Journalism

In early 1990, Stojanović joined the writing staff of Serbian magazine, Pogledi (English translation: Viewpoints). At this time, he began a series of interviews with several Serbian writers in Belgrade, including Momo Kapor, Alek Vukadinović, and Nikola Milošević. During his second visit to Paris in May and June 1990, he interviewed Ljuba Popović, Petar Omčikus, Miloš Šobajić, and Jacques Claude Villard. In December 1990, he went to the US as a foreign correspondent, planning to stay six months to a year. During this time, he conducted interviews with prominent American writers, including Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow, Charles Simic, and Steve Tesich. He did not return to his homeland in summer 1991, when the Yugoslav Wars started in the former Yugoslavia, and has been living in Chicago since 1990. In honor of his series of interviews published in Conversations, published in 1999 by Književna reč of Belgrade, Stojanović received the Rastko Petrović Award, presented by the Association of Writers of Serbia.

Style

Stojanović’s poetry collections are characterized by sequences of compact, dense poems, simple yet complex in carefully organized overall structure, and that is why some more visibly than others appear as long poems. This is especially characteristic of the books, The Sign and its Children, The Shape, and The Creator (Znak I njegova deca, Oblik, Tvoritelj ), in which, with a relatively small number of words repeated in different contexts, Stojanović built his own poetic cosmogony. For that reason, writer and critic, David Kecman, described him as a cosmosophist.

In his poems, he covers the smallest and the largest topics with equal attention, often juxtaposing them to the level of paradox and absurdity, gradually building new perspectives and meanings that are not only poetic either in origin or in purpose. Some themes and preoccupations, be they stones or galaxies, are present in all of his books and it can be said that his poetry books are, in themselves, long poems and that all of them serve as ingredients of a hyper-poetry book that is still in the making.

He used many poetic forms never used before in Serbian poetry and also created some new forms. “If elegance is represented by simplicity, then these are some of the most elegant verses imaginable," Branko Mikasinovich stated.

Published works

The majority of Stojanović's poems, initially written in Serbian and compiled into six volumes of poetry, have been translated into English and a selection of his poems has been translated into French.