We’re just keys

Interview with Pavel Buňata

I have known Pavel Buňata (1969) for over twenty years. Once I went to the editorial office of the former LGBT+ magazine SOHO revue, which in the 1990s was the only printed periodical for the “four‑percent” minority, to thank its editors for their tremendous work. Pavel was among them, the most popular and most widely read member of the editorial team at the time. He wrote columns, reports, occasionally published his poetry, and conducted interviews with well‑known cultural figures. After SOHO revue ceased to exist, he put his editorial experience and talent to use, for example at Prima TV, where he worked for many years as a dramaturge and screenwriter. Alongside photography and painting, Pavel most prefers to express himself through poetry. And it was about poetry and life that this conversation with Pavel took place. 

Poet and songwriter Pavel Buňata and musician Tomáš Ludvíček

Is there any difference between how your poems were born in the past and how they come into being these days?

I used to be hyper‑fertile and there was no contraception that could stop me from bringing a small collection of poems into the world overnight. Today I only create when the muse rapes me. Which has happened only once or twice this year. With age, a lot of changes show not only on the body but also on the spirit. Apparently I’m no longer that sexy to the muses. Or, on the contrary, they’ve decided that a little of a good thing goes a long way.

In your poetry you place emphasis on everydayness; your motifs arise from the ordinariness of human existence and action. What is everyday and what is festive in life for you?

I have never seen it that way, but thanks for the reader’s point of view. It always pleasantly surprises me when someone reads or recites my poems and, through their way of perceiving or delivering them, discovers in them something more than what I myself hid there. I place emphasis on love, and if that is considered the ordinariness of human existence, then I want to be the most ordinary person in the world.

And what is ordinary for me? Every ordinary day... (that sentence goes on)... which I will only know tomorrow was actually extraordinary. I would like to be able to grasp and live every moment as unrepeatable, but apparently I do not know how to do that “yet”. I only appreciate moments once they have become the past. I used to torment myself with what had been and feared what was to come. Today I let the past remain the past. It is true that I am still terrified and horrified by the future, even though I know that nothing but “RIGHT NOW” exists. I keep moving somewhere in the in‑between time between what was and what will be.

The poetry collection “Život je boy” (“Life is a Fight”) spans twenty years of life, between the ages of twenty and forty. Yet an attentive reader will find quite a few “common denominators” in it, such as searching and not finding, finding and losing, the longing for closeness with another person... With the distance of time, how do you see these “common denominators” today, both as an author and as a human being?

When I open my collection, it is as if I were holding a photo album in my hands. Suddenly, memories return of the person I once used to be. It captures the state of my perception in years that have long since passed. As for the reality of the stories it contains, nothing essential has changed since then; I have just grown a bit rotten with age and no longer send out so many new shoots.

You asked how, with the passage of time, I now look at those “common denominators” as an author and as a person. When I am not in love, I write only rhymes and verses; when I am in love, I compose poems. That is probably the essential difference. Love and all its forms, among which, as I like to say, “torn emotions” naturally belong, are for me, both as an author and as a person, the greatest inspiration and, in fact, the only meaningful justification for my existence on this planet.

You are placed among the poets-realists; those who stand more with their feet on the ground than with their head in the clouds. How would you describe yourself as a person over the course of those thirty years during which you have devoted yourself to poetry, feuilletons and, more recently, to writing song lyrics?

When I consider that I wrote my very first little poem at the age of seven, it is actually more like some forty-four years of self-taught verse-smithing. Even as a little boy I wanted to write song lyrics, and as a teenager I wrote dozens of them. Of course, they were complete nonsense (“Love, stay – I’m only yours :)”) just like the piles of notebooks filled with endless poems brimming with pathos and clichés. But only practice makes (I’m afraid to write the word, but that’s how it’s said) a “master”.

I know about you that women play a significant role in your life. As a gay man, you naturally desire men. How would you yourself define masculinity and femininity? Can any common ground be found between these two poles?

Sorry, this may be a bit inappropriate, but I’m reminded of a cartoon where a man is making love to his partner in the missionary position and underneath it says: In every woman you can find a piece of a man.
And in a way, that’s actually how it is, if the joke is put aside. I came to Earth from my mother’s body, so for nine months I was part of a woman, I perceived the beat of her heart, her worries, fears and joys, her view of the world and of life. Things like that cannot fail to influence you. That is the intersection you are asking about.

Your poems have an almost tangible atmosphere. When reading them, there is often a feeling of witnessing an event. Are these your own memories, or a current state of soul that you then embody in verse?

It seems that every poet reveals their most intimate inner self by publishing their verses.

Most of the poems, little verses and metaphors are based on real experiences and the emotions connected with them. A piece of myself and of what has shaped my life is something I try to put into my song lyrics as well, and it makes me very happy when my friends recognize it on their own, for example in the lyrics to the song Není taková, sung by Hanka Zagorová, or in the songs Překročil jsi práh and Spálená from the repertoire of Jana Chádková (by the way, all of them are on YouTube).

In one of the song lyrics that you placed alongside the poems in the collection “Život je boy”, you write that you are pawning space and time. How significant are these two dimensions in your life, and what do they mean to you as a poet?

And there it is, exactly what was mentioned at the beginning of this interview. It is incredibly enjoyable when someone takes away their own feeling from the verses, words and rhymes, a feeling that was not consciously placed there.

The question was what space and time mean in life. A fatalist at heart, convinced that everything happens the way it is meant to, because if it were meant to be different, it would be. Several times in life the same place has been reached without any effort or even desire to get there. Twice there was even a tension felt inside the head, like when two cogwheels stubbornly try to turn against each other by force, testing which one will break the other’s teeth first. In that moment it was as if something from above was signalling: The next path through life will unfold from this moment on, depending on the decision made now. It feels like being an eternal observer. It is a pity that feelings and experiences cannot be shared. Everyone simply has to find their own “truths” alone. Space is the universe, of which one is a part, even if chained by gravity to the Earth and, at present, by lockdown to the borders of the country. And time? The stretch spent on this planet. There is a burning curiosity about that moment when this stay here ends… what will happen next.

Solitude can be closely bound up with space and time...

As the saying goes: Never truly alone. There are always at least five. The self, solitude, nostalgia, depression and a bottle of rum. Sometimes scepticism and loneliness join in. A few times even suicide tried to sneak in, but there were no spare slippers left, so it was left outside the door. And now and then everything gets going with the mites. There is a love for that one or two evenings a year when the wine flows, records are playing, there is only the self for company and everything feels right. Solitude is, at its core, a good friend, but even with friends there is not always the appetite, time or mood.

When poetry is read again after years, there is sometimes the thought that some of those tiny poems, with the benefit of life experience, could now stretch over more stanzas and express more. There is the question whether there has ever been an urge to rewrite them, update them, put more into them.

If anything, the opposite. They would be shortened. Smaller forms are preferable, ones that capture an entire feeling in a few words, rather than long-winded structures,

I know you as a straightforward person and an openly gay man who sometimes feels the urge to express himself in writing. But are there things in your life you haven’t been able to say directly and had to rely on the written word?

I grew up in a time when admitting to being different meant, at best, being despised by society. Pouring fears, sadness and troubles, but also secret dreams, loves and desires into sentences, words and verses was the only solution. But the question is more about the present. Sometimes it is better to sit down and write a letter than to spew out words (especially with the handicap of being an impulsive Aries) faster than thoughts. The last time I tried this was with my mum, to express my love for her and explain that being gay (and on top of that, not having practised for ten years) does not make me a worse person or son. Unfortunately, it was in vain L
However, the written word does not have to help only oneself. I was deeply moved by two stories I would like to share. Once a boy from Slovakia wrote to me on Facebook. He apologised that we did not know each other, but said he felt the need to confide in me. He no longer knew what to do with his life, but then my book fell into his hands and it gave him an incredible boost. That made me very happy, and perhaps even more so the story of a teenager who came out at home and, as sadly is still often the case, was not met with understanding. But then he found my book under the Christmas tree, and through it his mother found her way back to him. It was the most beautiful “fee” I could ever receive.

Lately you have been focusing more on song lyrics. What attracts you to the phenomenon of the pop song?

I only write for pop because so far only one chanson has come my way, the one we talked about a few questions earlier. Still, as I said, everything is as it should be... When it is meant to come, it will come. Otherwise, writing lyrics is an incredible experience for me – being limited by melody, phrasing, form... If writing poetry was elementary school, I see writing lyrics as high school and, if the muse allows, one day I will manage university as well J

Does your slowdown in writing poetry have any real basis? What does a person and poet see around himself these days?

I do not feel it as a slowdown. I do not see my work as mass production, but rather (by the way, a very interesting Czech word) as a limited edition. It is like when, by coincidence, someone is met on the street who has not been seen for a long time and even though both are in a hurry and have lots of other “urgent” plans, everything is thrown to the wind and they slip into the first pub (if only they would open them again) for a coffee. Coffee turns into a beer and beer into a tipsy return at two in the morning with a laughing soul. That is exactly how poems are born. Not by sitting down and saying: So now I am going to write a poem about the end of our interview. J

- How do you see yourself?

If possible, the verses will once again speak on my behalf:

We are only keys

Between earth and heaven

Temporarily locked

In the Melody of Life and Death

František Baďura, autumn 2020

AI-assisted translation