Living with diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, I am prone to psychotic states when under a lot of stress. In 2023 I was finishing my Master’s, I was learning the ropes at a new job, trying to juggle it all with my new-found literary success and its demands, and I also took the time to attend a literary residency in Nova Gorica that I was invited to. The residency was unfortunately designed as a writing sweatshop, and the added disrespectful attitude of the organizer made me fall into a minor psychosis. The night before I prematurely left the two-week residency (and transferred back the 100€ I was given) I sat on the balcony of a stranger’s apartment (I was housed in), chain-smoking, drinking beer can after beer can, downing antipsychotic after antipsychotic, and frantically typing down all the grievances I felt in the moment. What came to be (with later editing) was a very long poem that I titled ‘Izbruhijada’. In it, I took inspiration from the Nova Gorica environment and in a direct, vulgar, (hopefully) humorous manner (as well as in the Gorenjska dialect) wrote about what was pestering me; the omnipresent homophobia, the suicide attempts of my friends, the stories of pedophilic abuse, the racism, the xenophobia, the poverty, the shame, the guilt, the hypocrisy, the unending cognitive dissonances of our time. The second half of the poem also became a poetic homage to the literary styles of Andreja Štepec and Karlo Hmeljak, both of whom I obsessively read at the time. A year later, in 2024, the poem was included in my third poetry collection Megalomast in Izbruhijada, published by the Črna skrinjica publishing house, whose head editor is Dejan Koban. I read the poem in its entirety (approximately 30 minutes) many times, always accompanied by Mrtvo Rođena Živa Lešina on the accordion. I also recorded my reading at Jaka Berger – Brgs’ studio. The animator Blaž Sovdat created the animation that was projected onto me and the accordion player at the book launch. The cover art of my third book (that is used also as the cover graphic for this Poetry Expo article) of me as a fat, hairy Venus was created by Maja Poljanc. (And my profile picture was taken by Asiana Jurca Avci.) For Poetry Expo 2026, I decided to adapt ‘Izbruhijada’ into English, creating ‘Eruptusseia’ (an Odyssey or Odysseia of eruption). I recorded it with Jaka Berger – Brgs again. The accordion stayed the same. The audio was then combined with a 33-minute version of Blaž Sovdat’s animation and uploaded to Youtube.
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Disrupted Realities – Poetry and the Politics of Truth, Hybrid Selves – Gender, Identity, and Posthuman Intimacies, Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.
Author
Pino Pograjc
Pino Pograjc (1997, Ljubljana) graduated from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, with a double MA in English and Comparative Literature. He grew up in Kamnik, where he attended gymnasium and first read his poems in front of an audience at slam poetry competitions at the Kotlovnica Youth Center and won several times. In 2022, the publishing house Črna skrinjica (‘Black Box’) published his debut poetry collection, Trgetanje, for which he won the prize for the best literary debut awarded at the 38th Slovenian Book Fair. In March 2024, his second collection of poetry, Trepete, was published by ŠKUC – Lambda, after which he won the Mlado pero (‘Young Pen’) award, which is given out by the Delo newspaper. His third collection, Megalomast in Izbruhijada, was published by Black Box in November 2024. It has been listed by literary figures as one of the ‘books of the year’ in Delo, Dnevnik, Mladina, on the Disenz platform and in the 10 Books from Slovenia 2025 bulletin, which is published by the Centre for Slovene Literature. On the initiative of the curators of the Mediterranea 20 biennale (as part of the European Capital of Culture – Nova Gorica project) he compiled Schizofag, a chapbook of his poems, which he translated into English. Pograjc organises a series of LGBT+ literary events Kviropisje at Club Tiffany. In November 2024, the Ministry of Culture granted Pograjc the status of self-employed person in culture. Before that he worked at a car wash, at a restaurant as a waiter, at a lottery booth as a cashier, as a television program subtitler and translator and as an English tutor. In his writing, Pograjc focuses on the intersections of his different identity markers and experiences through an oftentimes prosaic, confessional, diary-like style – he writes mostly about being queer and living with diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia.
Photo by Goran Tomčić
