The Desert Called America: Poetry of Boris Maruna and American Popular Culture
The Desert Called America: Poetry of Boris Maruna and American Popular Culture

Summary/Abstract: In the poetry of Boris Maruna (1940–2007), a Croatian modernist poet who is, together with Viktor Vida, considered the best Croatian emigrant poet, one can see the influences of American popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. By living on three continents – Europe, South America, and North America – and having gained education in Los Angeles, Maruna incorporated into his poetic code some of the fundamental and typical determinants of American cultural and subcultural lifestyle. Fast food, television, film, rock/pop music, cars, freedom of sexual behavior… are some of the adopted forms of American culture that Maruna in his narrative poems both thematizes and advocates, but also questions in an extremely critical way. Irony, humor and strong satire represent the aesthetic aspects by which Maruna reveals the hypocritical, vain, and existential face of the United States of America of that period. On the other hand, like a distant Arcadia, there are landscapes and symbols of the homeland that he abandoned, and the desire to one day return into its physical spaces. However, even the so desired homeland cannot go without critical invectives and poetically ironic comments. Even then, Maruna’s liberal “unadjusted” consciousness makes itself heard, outside all the dictates of expected behavior, thus completely isolating him from the matrix of Croatian emigration poets.

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