“The practice of appointing a ‘Poet Laureate’ has failed before being consolidated as a process”
By Dr. Mujë Buçpapaj
In the history of literature, the title Poet Laureate has never been a merely ceremonial decoration, but a symbolic act of consolidating aesthetic hierarchies. From the appointment of Ben Jonson in England in 1616 to the American model, where the President acts upon the recommendation of the Library of Congress, the poet laureate has consistently represented not only creative freedom, but also a recognized aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and national standard.
In Albania, this practice remains fragile and unconsolidated and, unfortunately, exposed to a confusion between aesthetic value and public noise, between poetic daring and banal provocation, and between emancipation and cultural marketing. The appointment of Rita Petro as “Poet Laureate” for the 2025–2027 term by the National Center for Books and Reading, an institution under the Ministry of Culture, reopens this issue not as a personal debate, but as a principled question of literary criteria.
I. The problem is not the poet, but the criterion
From the outset, it must be clarified that my skepticism does not stem from denying Rita Petro’s right to write whatever she chooses, nor from any form of provincial moralism. Literature is free, and the author is sovereign within her own creative territory. The institution, however, is not an author, and an award is not an act of creation, but an act of judgment.
When a state institution appoints a poet laureate, it does not merely reward an individual style; it proposes a model, a reference point for the contemporary canon, and a representative figure for literary education—especially when this title is accompanied by initiatives in schools and public spaces. It is precisely here that the core problem begins.
II. Poetic daring or the inflation of provocation?
As a scholar of literature, I am struck by the jury’s motivation, which speaks of “the treatment of daring themes,” “the transgression of moralistic taboos,” and “an influential energy for individual and social emancipation.” These are ideological formulations rather than aesthetic categories.
In aesthetics, daring is not measured by what is said, but by how it is said. Erotic, bodily, and intimate poetry has a long tradition—from Catullus to Neruda, from Bataille to contemporary feminist poetry—but it has always maintained a clear boundary between eroticism and pornography, between aesthetic transgression and verbal shock.
The problem with works such as Vrima (The Hole) by Rita Petro is not that they “disturb taboos”—they are, in fact, average works—but that they often fail to construct a poetic tension capable of justifying the disturbance. When language is reduced to biological naming, without metaphor, ambiguity, or symbolic layering, poetry loses its autonomy and becomes mere declaration. Taboos are not overturned by naming them directly, but by transforming experience into aesthetic form.
III. Aesthetics is not energy, but form
A literary text is not evaluated by the “energy it releases,” as the jury’s motivation claims, but by the aesthetic pleasure it produces, by the form it gives to experience, by the richness of its linguistic inventory, and by its capacity to generate multiple meanings.
The jury’s motivation sounds more like a sociological or therapeutic statement than a literary judgment. The phrase “individual and social emancipation” is a language we have heard before, in other forms, within systems where literature was instrumentalized for extra-literary purposes. Ironically, during the period of socialist realism, works were rewarded for their “social impact,” but usually with third-tier prizes, so as not to fully compromise aesthetic judgment. Today, it appears we have taken a step backward: the criterion is not only politicized, but trivialized.
IV. The poet laureate and the school: a delicate relationship
The idea that the poet laureate should engage with schools is, in itself, positive. However, not every poetic profile is automatically suitable for literary education. This is not censorship; it is pedagogical responsibility.
In a society shaken by transition, where the family, the school, and cultural authority have been weakened, the model offered to young people must be aesthetically consolidated and ethically unquestionable. Rita Petro’s work has generated numerous debates, including public petitions and reactions from dozens of literary figures and intellectuals in 2015. In this context, the statement issued by the Ministry of Culture on December 23, 2015—according to which the “Lumo Skëndo” prize for Vrima was not awarded for its content but for its cover and design—remains symptomatic of a broader crisis of criteria. Recent reactions, including the public protest of Natasha Lako, further demonstrate that no critical consensus exists regarding this appointment.
The poet laureate is not a rebel against everything; he or she is a point of reference. The volume Vrima (2014), interpreted institutionally as a breaking of moralistic taboos, was perceived by a significant segment of criticism as an example of what Theodor W. Adorno would call aesthetically unfiltered negativity: the direct exposure of content without the mediation of form. Extreme themes are not processed symbolically but presented declaratively, shifting poetry from the realm of art to that of the provocative gesture.
Naturally, the author has every right to this choice; creative freedom is non-negotiable in a free society. I have respect for Rita Petro as a person, as a family figure, and as an important publisher of school textbooks. The problem arises when this body of work, with all its aesthetic ambiguity, is elevated by a state institution to the rank of a cultural and moral model.
V. The final allegory: the Laureate and The Hole
In the classical tradition, the poet laureate is the one who raises the dome of language above the chaos of the age. But when aesthetic criteria turn into a “hole” into which values, friendships, power, and noise fall indiscriminately, we no longer have a canon, but a vacuum. And a vacuum does not produce poetry; it produces only echo.
My skepticism is not nostalgia for old moralisms, but concern over the loss of criteria. For when everything is called daring, nothing truly is. And when every provocation is labeled poetry, poetry itself is left defenseless.
To avoid reproducing and legitimizing literary mediocrity—especially in contexts involving state institutions—a radical re-examination of aesthetic evaluation mechanisms and their relationship to political power is essential. The institution of the Poet Laureate, consolidated in countries with long literary traditions such as England, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, and New Zealand, functions as an aesthetic filter rather than a ceremonial ornament. Any deviation from this principle strips the title of its cultural function and transforms it into a simulacrum of prestige, exposing poetry to an inflation of value and institutions to a crisis of credibility.
