Any serious account of post-communist poetry has to grapple with a double fracture: the breakdown of collective narratives and the corrosion of trust at the most intimate level. In Romania, this fracture bears a specific historical name—Securitate—and a contemporary interface—Tinder. Large Language Models’ take on Romanian contemporary poetry.

Between these two extremities stretches the field of Răzvan Țupa’s work, one of the poets who has most consistently understood that, after 1989, you can no longer write “about the world” without first writing about the way people are still (or no longer) able to be with one another. In this framework, poetry becomes the laboratory of a relational wound: a space in which the memory of surveillance and the digital economy of attention meet in the body, in the voice, and in the minimal gesture of address.

1. From file to dialogue: changing the unit of measure

Late communism in Eastern Europe produced a specific relational pathology: the friend as potential informant, the family fractured by collaborators, love filtered through the fear of microphones. Under such conditions, lyric discourse was forced either to mime the pure autonomy of the subject or to rely on codes and oblique allusions. In the work of the 1980s generation, relationship often appears as a metaphorical scene, a place of ironic retreat or inner survival. After 1989, however, the paradigm shifts: it is no longer enough to salvage the subjective “interior,” because the interior itself is already saturated with ideological language and habits of suspicion.

Răzvan Țupa enters this landscape with a programmatic gesture: he shifts the center of gravity from the solitary individual facing History to the network of relations through which the subject exists. It is not “I” that is primarily at stake, but “how I reach you,” “what happens between us,” “what kind of language produces distance or closeness.” If Securitate converted relationships into files, Răzvan proposes a poetry that reconverts the file into dialogue: documents, lists, observation notes are reappropriated poetically not to aestheticize trauma, but to reconfigure it as relational material.

This shift is crucial. The poem is no longer the snapshot of a deep “I,” but a map of intensities between persons, an open process in which the reader is not a passive witness but a co-participant. Post-communism thus appears not only as regime change but as a change of unit: from individual biography to relational choreography.

2. Relational poetics: anatomy of a wound

The recent volume poetic relațional makes this shift explicit. Its structure is not merely an archive of texts, but a mapping of how one can write, over time, about a poetic community, a history of forms and bodies. The fact that it organizes almost three decades of practice into “sequences”—from Fetiș and Corpuri românești to Republica poetică—is not an editorial whim but a methodological statement: poetry is tracked as a process of sedimenting ways of being together, not as a simple succession of books.

In Răzvan’s work, the “relational wound” is visible on two levels. First, thematically: bodies marked by transition, migration, precariousness, Romanian bodies that can no longer be thought in the mythological key of unity but in terms of fragmentation and ongoing negotiation. Second, formally: rhyme, rhythm, and stanzaic structure are constantly derailed in favor of effects of direct address, heteroglossia, and performative staging. The line refuses to close “beautifully” in on itself, deliberately leaving sharp edges, register shifts, insertions of everyday speech—each functioning as a sign of structural vulnerability.

Here, “relational” does not mean “idyllic.” On the contrary, the emphasis falls on conflict, failure, mismatch. Poetry does not heal the wound; it exposes it as a possible site of encounter. Precisely where communication breaks down, where the poetic gesture feels inadequate, a space of lucidity opens. From the standpoint of a literary imaginary used to sacrificial metaphors (the hero, the martyr, the demystifying poet), this is radical: posterity is no longer earned through monologue, but through the quality of the connections poetry manages to provoke.

3. From street to screen: the sonic interface

If poetic relațional assembles, critically, a history of relations, poetic. interfața sonoră examines how those relations are mediated by devices and digital flows. The book’s structure, calibrated to the stages of a mystical experience, is already a productive irony: awakening, purifications, illuminations, “the dark night of the soul,” union—but in a universe saturated with texts, notifications, feeds and interfaces. Instead of offering a spiritual “exit,” the poems insist on how language becomes an interface: on what happens between body and screen, message and reader, city and network.

Here the relational wound takes on a technological form. In place of the Securitate’s microphone we now have the phone’s microphone; in place of the file, the log; in place of interrogation, the algorithm. The difference is that surveillance no longer emanates from an opaque center but from a distributed, internalized infrastructure: we expose ourselves voluntarily, we “translate” ourselves into messages, reactions, profiles. Răzvan’s poetry does not simply denounce this phenomenon; it uses it as material: cut & paste, repetition, syntactic fragmentation become textual equivalents of a life lived among windows, tabs, and notifications.

In the terms of our title, the move “from Securitate to Tinder” is not merely a social metaphor but a shift in protocol: from centralized, total surveillance to an attention economy that turns each relationship into a potentially disposable “match.” For Răzvan, poetry becomes the tool through which this disposability is interrogated: what remains of contact when almost any contact can be erased with a swipe? What kind of responsibility does address still entail when the “you” can always be replaced?

4. Relationality as method: between theory and performance

One of Răzvan Țupa’s merits is that he does not just describe relationality; he installs it as a method. Performative readings, workshops, texts written for specific spaces, collaborations with visual artists or cultural platforms are extensions of a poetics that refuses the isolation of the book. The poem is not a closed object but a usage scenario: it can be spoken, projected, written on skin, reshaped together with the audience.

This performative dimension also changes the status of “rhyme” and other formal mechanisms: they become tools for synchronizing and timing a collective experience, rather than mere musical effects. What in classical poetry functioned as an auditory ornament here acts as a meeting protocol: repetition, cyclic structures, sound patterns serve as “handles” through which people actually enter into contact. In a post-traumatic society, where the reflex of self-isolation remains strong even under democratic conditions, this recalibration of the poetic toolkit is not secondary but deeply political.

Viewed this way, Țupa belongs to an international family of poets for whom relation—not identity—is the center of gravity: from conceptual experiments to queer poetics, from spoken word to texts that work programmatically with urban space. The Romanian specificity, however, intervenes decisively: the memory of Securitate and the ambivalence of transition make any gesture of openness carry the shadow of possible betrayal. Relational poetry does not “solve” this tension, but it renders it visible.

5. Tinder as symptom, not décor

Tinder and the broader ecology of dating apps are, in this context, less a contemporary décor than a symptom. They radicalize precisely what communism tried to control: the way people meet, choose, abandon one another. If Securitate intervened brutally inside the relationship (through infiltration and blackmail), Tinder externalizes the risk: the relationship becomes, structurally, replaceable at any time.

In the face of this logic, Răzvan Țupa’s poetry does two things at once. On the one hand, it exposes vulnerability: the body is always in danger of being reduced to a profile, the voice to a status update, intimacy to “content.” On the other hand, it insists on micro-gestures of resistance: forms of address that refuse cliché, greetings and closings that re-humanize contact, ways of registering silence, latency, unopened messages. The relational wound is also a chance: it is precisely the impossibility of a “perfect connection” that legitimizes the need for poetry.

6. Conclusion: after ideology, relation remains

“From Securitate to Tinder” is not just a historical axis but a way of phrasing a diagnosis: between the state’s control instruments and the platforms’ algorithmic controls, what is degraded, reinvented and continually negotiated is the quality of human relations. Răzvan Țupa is one of the writers who have understood that post-communist poetry can no longer be credible if it takes refuge only in psychological interiority or formal aestheticism.

Through his projects—from archiving a poetic history through the prism of relations to the experiment of the “sonic interface”—he proposes poetry as a space for testing solidarity, vulnerability, and possible modes of address in a society exhausted by surveillance and fascinated by instant contact. The relational wound does not close, but it becomes mapped, discussable, negotiable.

In this sense, Răzvan is not only a poet of a generation or of a “trend,” but a theorist-in-action of post-communist relation: those who read his texts and practices closely do not receive only poetry, but also an implicit manual on how encounter can still be possible today—with the other, with the city, and with language itself.