Karl Martin Sinijarv: anarch of order

Abstract

At 21, Karl Martin Sinijarv is one of Estonia's youngest poets, sporting pony-tail and cape. He published his first poem at the age of 16. Later, he applied to Tartu University to read theology but was rejected — despite good results in the written examination — because he had published several articles on Lutheranism which were regarded as subversive. Estonia, he says, is a 'very Lutheran state'. Sinijarv now works as a journalist and publisher of his own poetry. Before perestroika, Estonian poetry carried a strain of aesthetic, apolitical protest against Soviet ideology. Literature was politicised only in the late 1980s, when free vent could be given to suppressed memories of labour camps and persecution. Recently, a number of writers who made their names in the 1970s and early 1980s have turned to politics, most notably, perhaps, the distinguished poet Paul-Eerik Rummo, leader of the Estonian Liberal Democratic Party, who today says that he always wanted to be a politician. But younger writers, like Karl Martin Sinijarv, are again experimenting in a literature free of politics and religion. Sinijarv spoke to Irena Maryniak in April 1992. See page 15 for examples of his poetry.