Lina ramona Vitkauskas • evaporating language photographer

Uncovering old projects: ÜMWELT

Back in 2005 (?!) I was a 30-something, passionate-struggling-agency copywriter-poet who began a diary-of-sorts on MySpace about my pending divorce. It was extremely painful, but also liberating and necessary in a very Buddhist-groundless-way (in hindsight) as we reunited after 2-3 years. In tandem, I was researching family stories passed down through old documents and interviews…

Finalist! Cinepoems selected for Ready Freddy Film Festival (8/24)

YES! My White Stockings cinepoems will be featured in the Ready Freddy Film Festival August 24 at The Den Theatre. The festival highlights alternative and original work within the Chicago area as well as international work.

The Conversant (Interview)

Originally published on The Conversant (March 2016)Interview by poet Virginia Konchan Conversant: In your own history, as a first-generation American of Lithuanian descent, you describe feeling a degree of alienation from your relatives who were born in Lithuania or Ukraine—or who had been through the war. Is there a healthy form of displacement—at least in…

Poems in Vilnius Review (2017)

Poems from 2017 issue of Vilnius Review—so grateful to Marius Burokas for publishing them! http://vilniusreview.com/poetry/201-lina-ramona-vitkauskas A sample:— Citizen (Lina) I braided my hair until I found a bloody stalk,yanked up with a sharp breath, as if I’d drowned. My dreams of Gediminas: his tungsten ribcage, fangs flashing, corpus blown apart, singular carbon flecks …

“…poems saturated with chemicals, textures, atmosphere, and media…”

“The ‘trysts’ of Lina Ramona Vitkauskas’ chapbook, A Neon Tryst, are shot through with ‘neon’—that is, they are saturated with chemicals, textures, atmosphere, and media. According to this synthetic cosmology, ‘In an affair/arms laugh,/they become sheer.’ That is to say, they—arms, bodies, weapons, trysts—become both medium and adjective, both see-through and material. As in Antonioni’s great films, the…

“…a Cyrillic voyeur penning captions for a movie that knows its own democracy…”

“Lina ramona’s chapbook, Shooting Dead Films with Poets, is an improbable treasure. These fourteen poems call out to Cocteau and draw from the gamut spanning Georgic bees and a Chicago found to be antipodal to the Volga. Subtitles twine immaculately. They invoke a Cyrillic voyeur penning captions for a movie that knows its own democracy….

“…a feminist enterprise in its daring, toppling film’s male gaze…”

“If film is linear, the ultimate time-based medium, during which we are supposed to listen and watch attentively, passively, Lina’s poems in A Neon Tryst talk back. These poems create simultaneity, layers, and distillations toward new narrative logics like ‘Let’s laugh until panties.’ Vitkauskas is watching for the poem in the film, writing her own…

“…a unique, new kind of mode in the cinepoem genre—bravo…”

“You’ve discovered/invented a unique new kind of mode in the cinepoem genre — bravo…your method in writing the ‘film ekphrastics’ is unique, innovative, and I’ve never read of anyone else doing it before you…” — Bill Knott

“…like a contemporary Tsvetaeva through a landscape of the uncertain and surreal…”

“Splendid, grotesque, violent, but always loving, Lina ramona writes like a contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva through a landscape of the uncertain and surreal; the language is made from the nervousness and energy of every bee in the hive. Part ‘rotten aorta’ and part ‘snapdragon wine’, the poems in HONEY IS A SHE form a buzzing network…

“…she combines Handmaid’s Tale & mad science with the meaningful meaningless dialogue of politics & propaganda…”

Daniel Borzutzky, 2016 National Book Award Winner (Poetry): “It is strange to occupy the world of Lina ramona Vitkauskas’ poems, a world where beef takes nebulous forms, Jacques Derrida and Batman speculatively coincide, where cumin forms into fists, where W.H. Auden sets things on fire, while Sartre cowboys ride into a present tense that combines…