Article
Editorial: September 2008
August 29, 2008
I thought about this experience when reading ‘A Breath of Awe’, a poem by Chris Mann featured in this month’s excellent and diverse selection of poetry from South Africa. Mann’s poem captures well the strange mix of enlightenment about and separation from daily reality felt when reading in a library. In Grahamstown Public Library, the narrator marvels at what he reads about the biology of humans, yet on leaving the educational shelter of the quiet library, he witnesses the tedium and suffering of human life that his personal, scholarly revelations had caused him to forget – “the anxious faces hurrying past / and huddled beggars, as before”. His poem implicitly raises ethical and philosophical questions about the relationship between reading or writing about the world and living in it.
In ‘Rosa Mundi’, the Irish poet Theo Dorgan writes of “faith in the human flow of talk”. A silent library arguably presents an impediment to fully experiencing poetry, which is intrinsically linked to speech and performance. In ‘Come People’, South African performance poet Isabella Motadinyane stresses the importance of oral communication: “come, let us talk / come in peace”, while Vonani Bila infuses his poem ‘A Visit to Oom Brown’ with the speech of characters who tells tales, talks in tongues, whisper and speak out loud. In ‘David’s Hands’, Petra Müller likens Michelangelo’s statue of David to “a man at the point of discovering speech”. Significantly, although the statue does not speak to the narrator, she is inspired to rethink her own written words:
I saw you there.
I ran home and rewrote
what I had written before.
A unique subjectivity and voice are created when an inanimate object is given speech in Portuguese António Osirio’s ‘A Tractor Speaks’:
I don’t like this grasshopper body.
I’m constant, I tremble, others use me,
a slave of the land. I tear open and lay flat.
Irish poet James Harpur also writes dramatic monologues. In ‘Verbum’, speech is given to a divine being. Ironically, the voice of the narrator tells the listener that language in fact obscures the essence of the divinity’s existence:
Remember this: I do not have
A name or face, or form,
And words and paint prolong the lie
That I can be depicted
Manuel António Pina, from Portugal, also questions through his work whether language can express an external, objective reality. Certainly he recognises a need for words and speech even if they are inadequate as representations of the world. In his introduction to the Portugal issue this month, editor Miguel Queirós sums up the dilemma explored in Pina’s poetry: “on the one hand, there are too many words and everything has already been said, yet we cannot stop uttering them . . . On the other hand, it would be a good thing if words were lacking, since that lack would indicate the existence of a dimension whose primordial silence was still intact, untouched.” Pina’s strange and haunting poem ‘Hit and Run’ begins with the line, “More than silence was needed”, and yet silence, an unsettling stillness in the aftermath of death, persists: “and no one asked a thing and no one spoke aloud”. This finds a parallel in South African Megan Hall’s poem ‘Fourth Child’, which describes the inexpressibility of death through language, and the loss of language with death: “She took the words we needed with her. / Though I sift her ashes, I won’t find them, know they’re gone.”
The image of someone physically searching for words that can express thought and emotion is emblematic of the poet’s struggle, which editor Patrick Cotter refers to as “the artist’s tension in trying to articulate the Inarticulate” and Petra Müller, in ‘Slow Motion’, succinctly portrays as her impulse and necessity to write, conjuring words out of silence:
There is something about time
which I must describe here with my hand
clutched round a pen
I hope you enjoy the carefully chosen words of the poets in this month’s issue of PIW.
I recently became a patron of the Itinerant Poetry Library, a remarkable initiative founded and run by Sara Wingate Gray. Part travelling library, part performance art, each installation – which may pop up anywhere, from a park to a bookshop or a café – gives people the chance, for free, to read unique and forgotten poetry from around the globe. The selection of books changes each day, and the library is constantly on the move around the world. Although the library is physical rather than virtual, in its eclecticism and global nature, I saw in it many parallels with PIW: through very different mediums, both projects aim to make poetry accessible and appealing to an international audience.
Unlike PIW, however, the Itinerant Poetry Library imposes strict (though playful) rules for its readers. At one point, the librarian walked past me with a disapproving look, waving a small flag denoting “a zone of silence” – an increasingly rare thing in city life today. I stopped talking, and concentrated on the words on the page. And, as often happens in the act of focused reading, the written words pushed everything else out of existence for a time.I thought about this experience when reading ‘A Breath of Awe’, a poem by Chris Mann featured in this month’s excellent and diverse selection of poetry from South Africa. Mann’s poem captures well the strange mix of enlightenment about and separation from daily reality felt when reading in a library. In Grahamstown Public Library, the narrator marvels at what he reads about the biology of humans, yet on leaving the educational shelter of the quiet library, he witnesses the tedium and suffering of human life that his personal, scholarly revelations had caused him to forget – “the anxious faces hurrying past / and huddled beggars, as before”. His poem implicitly raises ethical and philosophical questions about the relationship between reading or writing about the world and living in it.
In ‘Rosa Mundi’, the Irish poet Theo Dorgan writes of “faith in the human flow of talk”. A silent library arguably presents an impediment to fully experiencing poetry, which is intrinsically linked to speech and performance. In ‘Come People’, South African performance poet Isabella Motadinyane stresses the importance of oral communication: “come, let us talk / come in peace”, while Vonani Bila infuses his poem ‘A Visit to Oom Brown’ with the speech of characters who tells tales, talks in tongues, whisper and speak out loud. In ‘David’s Hands’, Petra Müller likens Michelangelo’s statue of David to “a man at the point of discovering speech”. Significantly, although the statue does not speak to the narrator, she is inspired to rethink her own written words:
I saw you there.
I ran home and rewrote
what I had written before.
A unique subjectivity and voice are created when an inanimate object is given speech in Portuguese António Osirio’s ‘A Tractor Speaks’:
I don’t like this grasshopper body.
I’m constant, I tremble, others use me,
a slave of the land. I tear open and lay flat.
Irish poet James Harpur also writes dramatic monologues. In ‘Verbum’, speech is given to a divine being. Ironically, the voice of the narrator tells the listener that language in fact obscures the essence of the divinity’s existence:
Remember this: I do not have
A name or face, or form,
And words and paint prolong the lie
That I can be depicted
Manuel António Pina, from Portugal, also questions through his work whether language can express an external, objective reality. Certainly he recognises a need for words and speech even if they are inadequate as representations of the world. In his introduction to the Portugal issue this month, editor Miguel Queirós sums up the dilemma explored in Pina’s poetry: “on the one hand, there are too many words and everything has already been said, yet we cannot stop uttering them . . . On the other hand, it would be a good thing if words were lacking, since that lack would indicate the existence of a dimension whose primordial silence was still intact, untouched.” Pina’s strange and haunting poem ‘Hit and Run’ begins with the line, “More than silence was needed”, and yet silence, an unsettling stillness in the aftermath of death, persists: “and no one asked a thing and no one spoke aloud”. This finds a parallel in South African Megan Hall’s poem ‘Fourth Child’, which describes the inexpressibility of death through language, and the loss of language with death: “She took the words we needed with her. / Though I sift her ashes, I won’t find them, know they’re gone.”
The image of someone physically searching for words that can express thought and emotion is emblematic of the poet’s struggle, which editor Patrick Cotter refers to as “the artist’s tension in trying to articulate the Inarticulate” and Petra Müller, in ‘Slow Motion’, succinctly portrays as her impulse and necessity to write, conjuring words out of silence:
There is something about time
which I must describe here with my hand
clutched round a pen
I hope you enjoy the carefully chosen words of the poets in this month’s issue of PIW.
© Sarah Ream
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