Poetic Migrations within Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement

This article analyzes the Yugoslav poetry festival, The Poetry Evenings in Struga, Macedonia as a catalyst of transnational poetry exchanges on the fringes of Europe between 1961 and 1990. It examines to what extent the organizers, the participating poets and the literary output generated by the festival (anthologies, journals, translations etc.) contributed to the promotion of poetry as world literature. By evoking a migratory poetics through various means and practices, the festival intended to further transnational solidarity as one of the central tenets of the Non-Aligned Movement. The three crucial elements of this migratory poetics were: 1) the subversion of spatial and political categories of the time, specifically those of an eastern and western bloc, invoking an ideal of poetry that was constantly oscillating between the local and the global, and which particularly recognized those marginalized within the dominant political power dynamic; 2) the promotion of multilingualism and translation, particularly from and into minor languages (the festival’s main languages were Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian) and 3) the invitation and recognition of authors who were either internally or geographically displaced from their countries of origin due to their non-conformist and dissident views.