Dejan Stojanovic
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, former journalist, and businessman.
Books of poetry: Circling, The Sun Watches the Sun, The Sign and Its Children, The Shape, The Creator, Dance of Time, THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS (A PENTALOGY) - [Ozar, The World and God, The World in Nowhereness, The World and Humans, The Home of Light]. The Hidden Light, Primordial Spark, Centuries and Steps.
Books of Essays: Creator and Creating, The New Man and the New World.
Anthology: Selected Serbian Plays.
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 writers.
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 to 1992 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.
THEY SAID ABOUT THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS
“(The World in Nowhereness offers) the joy of cognition due to discoveries worthy of the Nobel prize…”
— Milan Lukić
"When I got my hands on Dejan Stojanović's book The World in Nowhereness, I was amazed and read the book with great pleasure. I didn't even believe that there is someone today who could write such a long poem, an epic, as if I opened to read the Iliad, in our time. I recommend this book to all who are believers in poetry because faith in poetry is the same as faith in eternity and eternal life."
— Matija Bećković
“The World in Nowhereness is Dejan Stojanović’s utopian absolute book, a kind of a Mallarméan absolute. An absolute story, or an absolute book, according to Borges, is a desert-like book: sandy, grainily unforeseeable, and corpuscularly innumerable… It is simultaneously a vision and a chimera. Isn’t that precisely why we long for an absolute book? The World in Nowhereness by Dejan Stojanović is, in his way, an embodiment of that dream.”
— Srba Ignjatović
“I have always wondered, even about my poetic work, what a total poem is… Can the pentalogy by Dejan Stojanović be called a total poem, one that every poet of note has dreamed about since the time of Homer? I felt such impulses while reading The World in Nowhereness. This is an absolute poem, of an absolute system of thought that reaches across the totality of our civilizational legacies.”
— Duško Novaković
"Exactly 17 years ago, in the last year of the 20th century, I came across the work of Dejan Stojanović, and then I wrote a text from which I will extract a few sentences. “Dejan Stojanović, in the last two years, made a real feat, he published six books, except for one, all books of poetry.” This first five-book collection was published in the last year of the 20th century, and here we are now with the five-book collection in the XXI century, nearing the end of the second decade. And then I also wrote the following: “Stojanović is a poet who searches for the perfect poetic form because at the same time he searches for the absolute meaning of human existence.” Whether it was a hunch or not, there is the Pentalogy and there is that word, that concept – an absolute, an absolute book, an absolute poem that could be sensed even in that first pentalogy."
— Aleksandar Petrov (January 17, 2018)
"The World in Nowhereness is primarily the result of great literary ambition and faith in literature." — Muharem Bazdulj
“From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.”
“Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers.”
“They grew; they did not talk about growing.”
“They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.”
“If you are good, they say you are weak.”
“You don’t know anything, but I know even less.”
“It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.”
“Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?”
“If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.”
“He confided his deepest secret to you; be always wary of his secret.”
“Don’t pay attention to those who offer too much.”
“Disease often comes with a smiling face.”
“It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.”
“We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.”
“Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.”
“What we call life is only talk of nature.”
“The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.”
“Your head is a lit chamber.”
“Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.”
“Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.”
“Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that.”
“For a game, you don’t need a teacher.”
“Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.”
“All those big words produce disgust today.”
“You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.”
“Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.”
“Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.”
“The game itself is bigger than the winning.”
“There are no winners in real games.”
“We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.”
“If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur.”
“This dwarf still observes the world from his own self-imposed height.”
“He thought others were small; that was his greatness.”
“Now that we are all so smart, we don’t easily find resolutions.”
“His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.”
“Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you.”
“Holy books are an insult to a God with good intentions.”
“A breeze, a forgotten summer, a smile, all can fit into a storefront window.”
“Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.”
“Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.”
“Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.”
“We need knew knights, but without swords.”
“Either you will be you or you will not be at all.”
“Do not look too far for you will see nothing.”
“You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.”
“He did not profess to anybody how to reach others without professing.”
“Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing.”
“We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.”
“How does one say something new and not retell?”
“After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?”