Dejan Stojanovic
Dejan Stojanovic, Belgrade, 1981
Dejan Stojanovic was born in Pec, Kosovo (the former Yugoslavia), in 1959. Although a lawyer by education, he has never practiced law and instead became a journalist. He is a poet, essayist, philosopher, and businessman and published six critically acclaimed books of poetry in Serbia: Circling, The Sun Watches Itself, The Sign and Its Children, The Shape, The Creator, and Dance of Time.
In 1986, as a young writer, he was recognized among 200 writers at the Bor (former Yugoslavia) Literary Festival. He also received the prestigious Rastko Petrovic Award from the Society of Serbian Writers for his book of interviews with major European and American artists and intellectuals.
In addition to poetry and prose, he has worked as a correspondent for the Serbian weekly magazine Pogledi (Views). His book of interviews from 1990 to1992 in Europe and America, entitled Conversations, included interviews with several major American writers, including Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow, Charles Simic, and Steve Tesic.
He has been living in Chicago since 1990.
Poems
Being Late
From where do simplicity and ease
In the movement of heavenly bodies derive?
It is precision.
Sun is never late to rise upon the Earth
Moon is never late to cause the tides
Earth is never late to greet the Sun and the Moon
Thus accidents are not accidents
But precise arrivals at the wrong right time
Love is almost never simple
Too often, feelings arrive too soon
Waiting for thoughts that often come too late
I wanted too, to be simple and precise
Like the Sun
Like the Moon
Like the Earth
But the Earth was booked
Billions of years in advance;
Designed to meet all desires,
All arrivals, all sunrises, all sunsets
All departures
So I will have to be a little bit late.
Dejan Stojanovic
Wallace Stevens
The sea was the house and the world was the nave
You were the sea and you were the nave
The nave was stormy, the sea was calm
While the house was waiting for the world
To come in by the navy of the sea
The sea was a nave, the world was a house
You were the nave in the sea—
The house and the world
The world was the navy in the sea
And the sea was the house
Dejan Stojanovic
Sadness and Happiness
It is not possible to express the most precious insights,
To see all that craves to be seen,
To visit even the closest neighbors in the universe,
To learn all that needs to be learned,
To live without dying,
And I am sad about it.
But I lived
And I am happy about that.
Dejan Stojanovic
A New Friend
Tell me something less significant
Something about our biology, for instance,
About what you hear while sitting under the tree
About lonely lions in the prairies
Forget decorated generals
Tell me about Private Ryan
Tell me something only you know
And make a new friend
Dejan Stojanovic
A Star Deep In the Mind
I see a new star on the horizon
It’s not the Morning Star;
It’s a star without light
This star without the light is the brightest
Because its light stays within.
The biggest star doesn’t take any space
It lives within,
Feeds all other stars, all other matter.
Without space, there is no time,
Without time, there is no aging,
Without aging, there is no death
A star without light never dies
It cannot be seen in the outer space
It can only be sensed in the mind
Dejan Stojanovic
An Island in the Mind
Dream, flying out from the head
Becomes a bird flying over the sea
The Sun, sprouting from the sea
Makes the sea alive and blue
The flying dream that hovers in space
Becomes an island in the sea
The island—the dream emanating from the head
The bird, the air, the sea, and the light.
Dejan Stojanovic
William Butler Yeats
To Helen Vendler
To accomplish the simplicity
Of words that learned how to dance
Without much support from a dancer
Who learned the steps of deserved living
From the vigor of his dancing mind.
Is it a dance or the dancing?
Is it to live or to be lived?
It was not the dancer, but the dancing;
It was not the life, but the living mind;
The truth of living found in dancing.
If he had chosen only to live,
The dance would have been much less lively.
It was the dancer who followed the dance;
The dance, living the dancer’s life.
Dejan Stojanovic
Big Miniature
To transform a grimace into a sound
Sounds impossible, yet it is possible
To transform a vision into music
To go outside an enslaved personality
To become impersonal by transforming
Into sand, into water, into light,
To feel the air and breathe the air
By becoming the air, become
A bird, the first cell, the first man,
Become a wandering comet,
A dying star, a newborn cluster of stars
And hear the melody of galaxies
Love making of black stars
Sense the hellish or heavenly nature of quasars
Be in everything and come back
To a miniscule particle of personality
To find out how great all is
Dejan Stojanovic
Bright Moments
There can be no forced inspiration,
But there can be mergers with the world
There can be a flowing of feelings
Quiet, yet overwhelming
Flying outside to unite
Flying inside to find
The melody of the moment
When the yellow corona appears on the horizon
And blue light appears over the mountain
And the world becomes mellow
Hospitable and generous,
And you fly into the heart of the mountain
To find an egg of an unborn bird
Able to break out and fly as a newborn eagle
Dejan Stojanovic
Unusual Love
Our desires flew like birds in the mornings
When we were waked by the bells of dreams
Hypnotized and ready for another round of living
We would walk down the street of a foreign city mesmerized
By our own history seen on the streets and in the gardens
Filled with exotic flowers and the grass. You loved the grass
You said you would teach me everything
I never found out really what but I accepted you as mentor
To learn whatever might be
I accepted the usual, but unusual, ways of life
And lived a life I never thought I would.
It became a typhoon passing through paradise.
You accepted my gifts but perhaps not my ideas
I thought I knew you
Although I hardly knew if I knew myself;
I learned to accept your unusual, but usual, ways
Your strange thoughts about living and dreaming and mixing living with dreams
I learned to like your usual ways of presenting unusual desires
What about psychology?
There is no way to analyze the working of the brain machine,
Working billions of cells, transmitters, and neutrons
Flying, fighting, competing
How do ideas come to life?
That was another hard question.
I was not able to find out anything about anything,
Except that I was alive and felt alive and yet felt dead as well;
I watched rain, fog, horses, birds, and trees, and I watched the blue;
I really loved watching the blue every day;
You loved the same, although maybe for different reasons;
Maybe we loved each other for different reasons too.
Did we hate each other?
I felt I hated you not a few times.
Did you hate me? Maybe you did as well sometimes
And maybe you still hate me
When you think of that July when the blue was everywhere
With the white dot in the middle, shining like the first time
When everything was green
And you were glistening in the middle of the blue, the green, the summer,
But I was not there.
Dejan Stojanovic
In 1986, as a young writer, he was recognized among 200 writers at the Bor (former Yugoslavia) Literary Festival. He also received the prestigious Rastko Petrovic Award from the Society of Serbian Writers for his book of interviews with major European and American artists and intellectuals.
In addition to poetry and prose, he has worked as a correspondent for the Serbian weekly magazine Pogledi (Views). His book of interviews from 1990 to1992 in Europe and America, entitled Conversations, included interviews with several major American writers, including Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow, Charles Simic, and Steve Tesic.
He has been living in Chicago since 1990.
Poems
Being Late
From where do simplicity and ease
In the movement of heavenly bodies derive?
It is precision.
Sun is never late to rise upon the Earth
Moon is never late to cause the tides
Earth is never late to greet the Sun and the Moon
Thus accidents are not accidents
But precise arrivals at the wrong right time
Love is almost never simple
Too often, feelings arrive too soon
Waiting for thoughts that often come too late
I wanted too, to be simple and precise
Like the Sun
Like the Moon
Like the Earth
But the Earth was booked
Billions of years in advance;
Designed to meet all desires,
All arrivals, all sunrises, all sunsets
All departures
So I will have to be a little bit late.
Dejan Stojanovic
Wallace Stevens
The sea was the house and the world was the nave
You were the sea and you were the nave
The nave was stormy, the sea was calm
While the house was waiting for the world
To come in by the navy of the sea
The sea was a nave, the world was a house
You were the nave in the sea—
The house and the world
The world was the navy in the sea
And the sea was the house
Dejan Stojanovic
Sadness and Happiness
It is not possible to express the most precious insights,
To see all that craves to be seen,
To visit even the closest neighbors in the universe,
To learn all that needs to be learned,
To live without dying,
And I am sad about it.
But I lived
And I am happy about that.
Dejan Stojanovic
A New Friend
Tell me something less significant
Something about our biology, for instance,
About what you hear while sitting under the tree
About lonely lions in the prairies
Forget decorated generals
Tell me about Private Ryan
Tell me something only you know
And make a new friend
Dejan Stojanovic
A Star Deep In the Mind
I see a new star on the horizon
It’s not the Morning Star;
It’s a star without light
This star without the light is the brightest
Because its light stays within.
The biggest star doesn’t take any space
It lives within,
Feeds all other stars, all other matter.
Without space, there is no time,
Without time, there is no aging,
Without aging, there is no death
A star without light never dies
It cannot be seen in the outer space
It can only be sensed in the mind
Dejan Stojanovic
An Island in the Mind
Dream, flying out from the head
Becomes a bird flying over the sea
The Sun, sprouting from the sea
Makes the sea alive and blue
The flying dream that hovers in space
Becomes an island in the sea
The island—the dream emanating from the head
The bird, the air, the sea, and the light.
Dejan Stojanovic
William Butler Yeats
To Helen Vendler
To accomplish the simplicity
Of words that learned how to dance
Without much support from a dancer
Who learned the steps of deserved living
From the vigor of his dancing mind.
Is it a dance or the dancing?
Is it to live or to be lived?
It was not the dancer, but the dancing;
It was not the life, but the living mind;
The truth of living found in dancing.
If he had chosen only to live,
The dance would have been much less lively.
It was the dancer who followed the dance;
The dance, living the dancer’s life.
Dejan Stojanovic
Big Miniature
To transform a grimace into a sound
Sounds impossible, yet it is possible
To transform a vision into music
To go outside an enslaved personality
To become impersonal by transforming
Into sand, into water, into light,
To feel the air and breathe the air
By becoming the air, become
A bird, the first cell, the first man,
Become a wandering comet,
A dying star, a newborn cluster of stars
And hear the melody of galaxies
Love making of black stars
Sense the hellish or heavenly nature of quasars
Be in everything and come back
To a miniscule particle of personality
To find out how great all is
Dejan Stojanovic
Bright Moments
There can be no forced inspiration,
But there can be mergers with the world
There can be a flowing of feelings
Quiet, yet overwhelming
Flying outside to unite
Flying inside to find
The melody of the moment
When the yellow corona appears on the horizon
And blue light appears over the mountain
And the world becomes mellow
Hospitable and generous,
And you fly into the heart of the mountain
To find an egg of an unborn bird
Able to break out and fly as a newborn eagle
Dejan Stojanovic
Unusual Love
Our desires flew like birds in the mornings
When we were waked by the bells of dreams
Hypnotized and ready for another round of living
We would walk down the street of a foreign city mesmerized
By our own history seen on the streets and in the gardens
Filled with exotic flowers and the grass. You loved the grass
You said you would teach me everything
I never found out really what but I accepted you as mentor
To learn whatever might be
I accepted the usual, but unusual, ways of life
And lived a life I never thought I would.
It became a typhoon passing through paradise.
You accepted my gifts but perhaps not my ideas
I thought I knew you
Although I hardly knew if I knew myself;
I learned to accept your unusual, but usual, ways
Your strange thoughts about living and dreaming and mixing living with dreams
I learned to like your usual ways of presenting unusual desires
What about psychology?
There is no way to analyze the working of the brain machine,
Working billions of cells, transmitters, and neutrons
Flying, fighting, competing
How do ideas come to life?
That was another hard question.
I was not able to find out anything about anything,
Except that I was alive and felt alive and yet felt dead as well;
I watched rain, fog, horses, birds, and trees, and I watched the blue;
I really loved watching the blue every day;
You loved the same, although maybe for different reasons;
Maybe we loved each other for different reasons too.
Did we hate each other?
I felt I hated you not a few times.
Did you hate me? Maybe you did as well sometimes
And maybe you still hate me
When you think of that July when the blue was everywhere
With the white dot in the middle, shining like the first time
When everything was green
And you were glistening in the middle of the blue, the green, the summer,
But I was not there.
Dejan Stojanovic