CMOK to
YOu To presents the 2015 email correspondence of the Serbian-born poet, art critic and playwright Nina Živančević
and Canadian cultural theorist Marc James Léger. In December of 2014
Léger invited Živančević to contribute a text to the second volume of
the book he was editing, "The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It
Means Today." Taken with each other’s idiosyncrasies, their
correspondence gradually shifted from amiable professional exchanges and
the eventual failure to organize a scholarly event to that of
collaborating on some kind of writing project. Several titles were
attempted for the eventual book – "Marshmallow Muse: The Exact and
Irreverent Letters of MJL and NZ," "The Orange Jelly Bean, or, I Already
Am Eating from the Trash Can All the Time: The Name of This Trash Can
Is Ideology," "The Secreted Correspondence of Mme Chatelet and
Voltaire," and "I’m Taken: The E-Pistolary Poetry of Kit le Minx and
Cad" – but none of these proved to be more telling than CMOK, the
Serbian word for kiss, which sums up the authors’ quest for “harmony” in
an altogether imperfect world and literary medium.
Nina Živančević is a Paris-based poet, playwright, fiction writer, scholar, performer and art critic. Marc James Léger is an artist and independent scholar living in Montreal.
