Tudor Crețu
- Romania -
Tudor Crețu (b.1980), writer, manager of the „Sorin Titel” Timiș County Library. He writes prose, poetry, literary criticism. POETRY: Dantelăriile Adelei [Adela’s Lacery], Mirton, 2001; Obiectele oranj [The Orange Objects], Vinea, 2005. Fragmente continue. Poeme live [Continuous Fragments. Live Poems], Printpress, 2014. The Poetry Book of the Year award of the Romanian Writers` Union, the Banat branch. studio live, an anthology, Printpress, 2015; [Curses & more], CDPL, The Poetry Book of the Year award of the Romanian Writers` Union, the Banat branch. FICTION: Omul negru [The Bogeyman], Cartea românească, 2008, nominated at The ``Euridice`` National Prize. Casete martor [Witness Tapes], Tracus Arte, 2013. The book earned the author a nomination as the Young Prose Writer of the Year, at the Romanian Young Authors` Gala and the ``Ioan Slavici Prize``, awarded by the Romanian Writers` Union, the Banat branch. S…(Casete martor II) [S… Witness Tapes II], Tracus Arte, 2015. Maluri [Riverbanks], Vellant 2023, The Novel of The Year Award of the Romanian Writers` Union, the Banat branch. CRITICISM: Developări literare [Literary Developments], Editura Universității de Vest, 2010. DIARIES: Jurnal fantasmatic [Phantom Diary], Paralela 45, 2016. He published in the most important Romanian literary magazines and also in The Kenyon Review online, buenosairespoetry.com, thepunchmagazine.com, levurelitteraire.com, etc. He was a guest of literary festivals in: Bolivia, Colombia, Croatia, Ecuador, Honduras, Serbia, Turkey, The Czech Republic etc.
Tudor Crețu. Collage Portrait. Landmark – A Futurist Album. studio live.
What I managed, with eyebrow tweezers or the sharpened tip of a quill, to extract from the book on a gentle spring afternoon. Possible portraits into which I would no doubt misplace him, following the sinuous, dense, richly suggestive path (and perhaps, for that very reason, misleading) of the studio that leaves its doors wide open for a while—letting in the light, letting everything turn either to dust or into a fine beam of starlight:
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Tightrope walker
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Hermit
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Basketball player, tennis player, boxer
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Professor, theoretician
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Sculptor
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Tailor
What would result from blending these terms together? Something else entirely—a portrait far too sophisticated to be described in words.
Tudor Crețu is an author who absolutely loves to play, in an erudite way, across (para)subtle surfaces, through spherical, uncontrolled, image-filled spaces revved up differently according to mood. He never tires of knotting, hemming, extracting meanings, taking words apart into their components, into particles, into atoms—like an old watchmaker accustomed to recognizing both the refinement and the assembly flaws of Swiss mechanisms. For him, “the poem must be tested scientifically / experimentally.” . (...). He is a solitary tightrope walker, devoted to poetic innovations that he himself savors (and dissects) before any interpreter does—criticizing them mercilessly, or merely gazing at them from afar, fascinated, like finished paintings in which, truth be told, he can find no flaw. And often, in this unstable contemplation of texts, a mirage appears—the optical effect of Fata Morgana.
I have heard him speak several times, at book fairs or various launches, about poetry and poets—but not only that. He is a consummate theoretician, charismatic, a very gifted speaker—and I should hurry to end this string of superlatives, lest I be suspected of some improper literary collusion. He is unsettling, because he ironically pricks at the hems of good manners, at the scales of the page stretched to its utmost. One imagines he could write instantly and never intervene afterward. His literature is one of diaristic extract—raw in expression, like spring delicacies: quickly enticing and quickly gone. Tudor Crețu displays an impatience in sincerity, a kind of extraterrestrial will within postmodern letters.
He practices a dynamite-like stylistics, insufficient unto itself. Nor do I believe he especially wishes, at any cost, to enlist in the ranks of the postmodernists. Rather, like a hermit withdrawn into learned interpretations of days and nights, he devises exercises meant to save the literary species—even the creative species itself, the human exemplar endowed with the force to remain in writing, as tennis players remain in a match. Somewhere within him there is the fabric of an athlete—and I do not mean merely the bearing of a basketball player who abandoned sport for the love of other arts. Tudor Crețu is a dazzling, commanding presence, with a tone of expression that can freeze blood in veins and drinks in glasses.
He likes to explain, to display, to gloss, to dazzle, to split hairs. In the anthology studio live. 2015–2000, poems, published in Timișoara by Printpress in 2015, he cannot refrain from explaining—right from the opening accompanying pages, those in which the coordinates are laid out—how things stand regarding the decidedly uncommon structure of this book: more album, more instruction manual for the use of all Tudor Crețu’s writings than anthology or collection of texts. We witness an unspoken warning, only implied: “Ideally, you should read it like this!” Whatever you do, you do not dare stray from the path indicated by the author, even though he later lures you toward other routes as well. Still, you feel compelled to take him seriously, to read him like a classic of the genre. But which genre? The diaristic genre, as I wrote above. The lyrical genre, perhaps. The epic genre—why not? He plays, and he does not play. He does not necessarily want to be perceived as playful. He truly lives, and yet does not truly live. There is something artificial—deliberately artificial—in his texts. Like fireworks that burn bright: visible now, then five seconds later vanish into their own luminosity. Into shadows and half-shadows. Into points and counterpoints.
The album studio live has the great merit of being readable however you, the reader, happen to approach it—and that is immensely cool; rarely does one encounter such an invitation, such total freedom to manipulate the object under the deciphering lens. You enter various rooms; whether or not you yourself hold a camera in hand. You discover things, and at intervals you begin to doubt the aesthetic value of the lines you’ve read. Then suddenly, illuminated, you come across several verses that make you stop and think. You would cut them out—if the poet allowed you—and reassemble them into a poem made of fragments, his and yours alike. At another entrance in this vast studio, you even find a swinging door inviting you into a stratospheric laboratory. It is an experiment the author conducts, drawing on already published fragments by his fellow writer Bogdan Lipcanu (Fuck Tense, CDPL, 2010). He explains in footnotes what he is doing and how. He warns that parentheses will follow—that is, “interpretations / additions / spontaneous insertions into / alongside several poems.” He considers it an experiment, one that could be extended to other authors. In truth, he is playing: writing hot-off-the-cuff in the margins of books, literally—an ancient practice—intervening, adding, cutting, questioning, deciding, as though it were his own text. There is also a certain joy in this schizoid act, a kind of ecstasy in the one who pours forth in continuous streams.
He experiments a great deal, and consciously. Paradoxically, within all this dynamic, bewildering back-and-forth—within the word, but also beyond it—there exists a cerebral discipline, a harnessing of everything that can be gathered into a book, whatever kind of material that may be, with all its incongruities. Alongside the dizziness often produced by the unrestrained counterpoint of thought, there is also an almost obsessive need for perfection. A riddle within perfection. Tudor Crețu is not someone to be taken lightly. He stands behind me now, watching me—but without striking my hand away. Is he laughing slyly? Ironically? Calmly? Does he pass, like a shaman, through the orange objects nearby? He stands behind whoever intends to write about him. He is everywhere.
He has avant-garde ideas; he is not content with little; he seeks a kind of sensation that, through fragmented repetition, becomes obsession. I have the impression he writes his books by means of this subterfuge: giving coherence to incoherence. He writes chaotically and, in the end, forces himself to follow a plan for crafting the text—forces himself to weld himself together, to acclimate to the ethereal matter of words. By virtue of one common denominator: POETRY. At times he carves down to the bone, to the marrow of the word. He carves like a sculptor, in varied materials, never the same. He does not resemble himself from one book to the next, and yet all his books are traversed by the same unperturbed essence—dynamite-like, constructivist—a linguistic fluid from another conceptual galaxy, indefinable, capable of binding sequences forever, like glue, like SUPER GLUE, like cement. An immense transfinite collage. Sequentialized imagery, pierced by what seem like deliberate renunciations, the utmost dissemination of small experiences that by no means make up a portrait. A flamboyant, explosive rhetoric. Fanned out like a peacock’s tail—dazzling, staggering.
Poetry
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I. / I.
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II. / II.
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III. / III.
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IV. / IV.
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V. / V.
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VI. / VI.
