Editorial: February 2008

January 31, 2008 The SL film of Mark Boog’s  ‘Our Absence’ is available to view as Clip of the Month (link on left). Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s extract from the poem ‘Lilith’ will be uploaded soon.

The theme of the 39th Poetry International Festival 2008 (7th-13th June 2008) has now been announced: City and Country. Recently, the United Nations reported that in 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the human population will live in cities, and the balance is set to tip still further away from rural living and towards urban life. Urbanisation will fundamentally transform the relationship between the city and the countryside and have implications for both individuals and society as a whole. These implications and their potential impact on poetry will be explored during the festival through programmes, lectures, interviews and discussions dedicated to the subject. It’s also a theme I and our regional editors will be considering in the issues between now and June.

The UK entry has been put together by guest editor Helen Mort whose introduction “Sparks” is well worth a look. She has picked poets who draw inspiration from the quotidian, most paritculary from their local environments. Naturally this results in some fortuitous links to the festival theme. On a country theme, Andrew Greig’s ‘Nine Steps to the Shed’ contributes a vision of the primitive in the country – mammoths, fossils, the remnants of a previous age adding layers of depth to the landscape, reminding us of the short time mankind has been on earth. In Kathryn Daszkiewicz’s ‘Tiger in Waiting’ there’s a contrast of inside with outside, home with external environment and the point the two coincide.

Clare Pollard’s ‘The City-dwellers lament’ conforms to the most distopian visions of urban life and the call of the wild:

Baby screams twist through the block of flats,
then shattering sounds, domestic rows,
TVs saying: lines are open now.
The grey roads swill with rain,
and advertising hoardings turn,
then turn again,
as pizza heats through in my oven.

Something wild calls in me, but no thing calls back.
Can’t stop these stupid, manic fantasies
of deep and pathless forests —
dells awash with bluebells, needles,
rabbit-flesh and pear-flesh;
bats cover the face of the moon
like carnival masks…

And then there’s Michael Laskey’s intriguing poem, ‘Terminus’,  in which the poet charmingly threatens to come back as a “faded floral curtain” overlooking an urban view of buildings which trap and enclose the viewer. In ‘Size of Southwell’ he shares his own intimate stretch of countryside, the views, the pollution. What’s noticeable about all of these ‘environmental’ poets is that their works explore both urban and rural settings, it’s not that they’ve chosen for one or the other.

The Zimbabwean poet of this issue, Togara Muzanenhamo, lived in Europe. His poetry shows clear stylistic influences of his time abroad and an European topology. Here we have another city – Paris, featuring a couple with a wine-buying habit typical of city-dwellers. “Each night we bought red wine from a small supermarket / Not too far from the Seine, where an overweight deaf teller / Smiled whenever we walked in.” (‘Six Francs Seventy-Five’) Here the city is representative of community, routine and the relationship which will ultimately fail.

In ‘Tea and Sandwiches’, Muzanenhamo describes the countryside like an English Romantic poet:

It’s wet underfoot with no paths running through the heather;
I passed a dead sheep on the peak of this moor overlooking the valley
Where the Calder flows beneath the frail cover of winter trees;
Up here, the roar of the wind fills my ears, the cold slaps my face.

Contributions from other countries fall outside of the City/Country theme. The Australian  Philip Hammial is a humorist. His prose poem ‘Bicycle’ depicts a cycle ride becoming a metaphor for life until the rider continues straight into an open grave, it’s almost a Benny Hill sketch. Others of his poems contain instructions for living, a mock didactic trend which goes hand in hand with developments in contemporary art. He also writes about similitude, the intentionist fallacy and uses surrealist juxtapositions. It comes as little surprise that Hammiel works as an artist as well as a poet, I can see his ideas translating just as easily into visual representation as into verse.

The wonderful Herman De Coninck, one of Belgium’s modern classics, joins the site. I love the textual intimacy of ‘Lithe Love’:

come on in, reader, make yourself
comfortable, don’t trip over the
syntax & kicked-off shoes, have a seat.

(meanwhile we kiss each other in this
sentence in brackets, that way
the reader won’t see us.) what do you think of it,
this is a window to look at
reality, all that you see out there
exists, isn’t it exactly
the way it is in a poem?

It is interesting to compare the different translations that have been made of his work, in this one the translator’s addition of the (7o’s influenced?) ampersand is a rather daring intervention I’m still musing over.

To cut a long editorial short, for this is a very full issue, De Coninck is joined by Eddy Van Vliet, and our final poet, José Miguel Silva from Portugal. Until next time...