Article
Editorial: April 2009
March 27, 2009
By chance this month, in the first publication of a new PIW Iran domain, we feature the work of another female poet living in exile in Sweden, Rohab Moheb. Exile has perhaps provided Moheb with the necessary distance to freely express herself: in the short poems drawn from her collection god’s small beings, she uses abstract, parable-like imagery to examine and deconstruct binary oppositions such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’, contradicting, notes editor Sam Vaseghi, “in a courageous act the dualistic perspective of the world as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – as expressed in the words of the Koran”.
Overseas travel also informed Armando Orozco Tovar’s political views and social conscience. Following time spent in Cuba, he once planned to start an armed revolution in Colombia. Instead, upon returning to his homeland, he decided to promote social change through his writing and through protest actions. His poetry, he says, is “on the side of the life and destiny of suffering individuals and peoples”. In ‘The Embera Woman’, a poem similar to Amanda Hammar’s ‘a man is dying for a piece of bread’ in its focus on an individual as a representation of widespread suffering, it is only “the poet” who observes on the city street an indigenous woman, divorced from her origins: “She no longer has woods, / only fish without wings / empty in her eyes, / and a son sown in the cemetery.” Notably, “the poet” in this poem is neither a passive, contemplative figure bending over a notebook, nor a direct interventionist; rather, he plays the role of protester, making visible the systems of oppression and suffering ignored by others in his shout of “Let someone stop the assassin!”
Eugenia Sánchez Nieto’s narrators also cast their eyes on cityscapes populated by a variety of people going about their daily lives – whether with vigour, violence or sadness. In ‘Windy City’, the wind is a force that “elevates” and “embraces” “the drunkards”; it is democratic, as likely to ruffle the “schoolgirls’ hair” as brush past “the model on her high heels almost losing her balance”, while in the darkly violent ‘Circle’, “the dance of the wind lifts up bodies, clothes, dust”. ‘Circle’ describes “such a variety of actions” – from stabbing to running to flirting – which, along with the lives of those performing the actions, are interwoven to form the fabric of a city, a place in which diverse individuals are crammed together, all following different trajectories but continually crossing paths with each other.
William Agudelo, a Colombian now living in Nicaragua, takes equal delight in portraying human life through his writing, though his focus tends to be more optimistic and centred on individuals or small groups of people; with vivid imagery and exuberant rhythm, he paints joyful, tender and detailed portraits of people he has known, from jazz musicians and his class of female Chemistry pupils to “Grandpa Joaquín”, with his “great moustache like a yellow bird”, an “allowance of shiny coins / for the grandsons” and a “white apron spattered with blood / on Sunday afternoons”.
The long narrative poems of Japanese poet Wakako Kaku may be influenced by traditional Japanese story-telling techniques, but they do not shy away from references to popular culture and, like many of the other poems featured this month, revel in the small details of everyday life in their portrayal of protagonists – from a “slapdash lunch” eaten alone at the kitchen table to the purchase of a piece of tofu at the market. Perhaps the most memorable of Kaku’s characters is the middle-aged housewife whose energy is liberated with the apparition of “a square-shouldered Ogre” in the humorous though ultimately dark poem ‘Ogre Inside’.
In addition to the poets featured in this April 2009 issue of PIW, you can also read poems by the poets who will perform at the 40th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, which takes place this June. Visit the festival page to see a list of poets and links to some of their poet pages. Every two weeks over the coming months we will be publishing poet pages for further 2009 festival poets.
In addition, on our ‘Sound of the poet’ page, which is linked to the festival page, we will be featuring special audio archive recordings from the last 40 years of the festival. So far we have published recordings of: 1992 Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia) reading the second part of his poem ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ during the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in 1989; Danish poet Inger Christensen reading ‘Alphabets’ during the 1993 festival; Lars Gustaffson, a Swedish poet, novelist and scholar, reading his poem ‘Aristotle and the Crayfish’; an audio fragment from Makoto Ooka, a Japanese poet and literary critic; Carol-Ann Duffy, one of Britain’s most popular living poets, reading ‘Circe’ and acclaimed Australian writer David Malouf performing ‘An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton’. More audio recordings will be uploaded regularly from now until the festival. For copyright reasons some of them can only stay online for a limited period of time.
Do keep checking the festival page for links to new poems and biographies, information about the festival programmes and events, and special archive recordings. If you haven’t yet signed up for our newsletter, you can do so below. From April onwards we will be sending newsletters twice a month, as new festival poet pages are added.
Welcome to the April 2009 issue of PIW. This month, the main focus of the featured poets is social rather than natural: human interactions, fantasies, fears, desires, suffering and daily patterns of life form the substance of a varied selection of poems.
In an interview with Sean Hunter Christie published on the Zimbabwe domain this month, poet Amanda Hammar argues for “for a more historicised and complex version of individual or collective identification” and justifies her expression of communal suffering “or just plain humanness” through her poetry. She recognises the ethical, racial and artistic issues that returning and exiled diaspora poets face in writing about their homeland and its peoples, but for Hammar, a white Zimbabwean living in Sweden, communality is not necessarily dependent on real-world shared individual experience and consciousness; rather it is linked “to the empathetic sharing of suffering with those who suffer, especially those who feel so directly part of [her], as Zimbabweans do”. By chance this month, in the first publication of a new PIW Iran domain, we feature the work of another female poet living in exile in Sweden, Rohab Moheb. Exile has perhaps provided Moheb with the necessary distance to freely express herself: in the short poems drawn from her collection god’s small beings, she uses abstract, parable-like imagery to examine and deconstruct binary oppositions such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’, contradicting, notes editor Sam Vaseghi, “in a courageous act the dualistic perspective of the world as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – as expressed in the words of the Koran”.
Overseas travel also informed Armando Orozco Tovar’s political views and social conscience. Following time spent in Cuba, he once planned to start an armed revolution in Colombia. Instead, upon returning to his homeland, he decided to promote social change through his writing and through protest actions. His poetry, he says, is “on the side of the life and destiny of suffering individuals and peoples”. In ‘The Embera Woman’, a poem similar to Amanda Hammar’s ‘a man is dying for a piece of bread’ in its focus on an individual as a representation of widespread suffering, it is only “the poet” who observes on the city street an indigenous woman, divorced from her origins: “She no longer has woods, / only fish without wings / empty in her eyes, / and a son sown in the cemetery.” Notably, “the poet” in this poem is neither a passive, contemplative figure bending over a notebook, nor a direct interventionist; rather, he plays the role of protester, making visible the systems of oppression and suffering ignored by others in his shout of “Let someone stop the assassin!”
Eugenia Sánchez Nieto’s narrators also cast their eyes on cityscapes populated by a variety of people going about their daily lives – whether with vigour, violence or sadness. In ‘Windy City’, the wind is a force that “elevates” and “embraces” “the drunkards”; it is democratic, as likely to ruffle the “schoolgirls’ hair” as brush past “the model on her high heels almost losing her balance”, while in the darkly violent ‘Circle’, “the dance of the wind lifts up bodies, clothes, dust”. ‘Circle’ describes “such a variety of actions” – from stabbing to running to flirting – which, along with the lives of those performing the actions, are interwoven to form the fabric of a city, a place in which diverse individuals are crammed together, all following different trajectories but continually crossing paths with each other.
William Agudelo, a Colombian now living in Nicaragua, takes equal delight in portraying human life through his writing, though his focus tends to be more optimistic and centred on individuals or small groups of people; with vivid imagery and exuberant rhythm, he paints joyful, tender and detailed portraits of people he has known, from jazz musicians and his class of female Chemistry pupils to “Grandpa Joaquín”, with his “great moustache like a yellow bird”, an “allowance of shiny coins / for the grandsons” and a “white apron spattered with blood / on Sunday afternoons”.
The long narrative poems of Japanese poet Wakako Kaku may be influenced by traditional Japanese story-telling techniques, but they do not shy away from references to popular culture and, like many of the other poems featured this month, revel in the small details of everyday life in their portrayal of protagonists – from a “slapdash lunch” eaten alone at the kitchen table to the purchase of a piece of tofu at the market. Perhaps the most memorable of Kaku’s characters is the middle-aged housewife whose energy is liberated with the apparition of “a square-shouldered Ogre” in the humorous though ultimately dark poem ‘Ogre Inside’.
In addition to the poets featured in this April 2009 issue of PIW, you can also read poems by the poets who will perform at the 40th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, which takes place this June. Visit the festival page to see a list of poets and links to some of their poet pages. Every two weeks over the coming months we will be publishing poet pages for further 2009 festival poets.
In addition, on our ‘Sound of the poet’ page, which is linked to the festival page, we will be featuring special audio archive recordings from the last 40 years of the festival. So far we have published recordings of: 1992 Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia) reading the second part of his poem ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ during the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in 1989; Danish poet Inger Christensen reading ‘Alphabets’ during the 1993 festival; Lars Gustaffson, a Swedish poet, novelist and scholar, reading his poem ‘Aristotle and the Crayfish’; an audio fragment from Makoto Ooka, a Japanese poet and literary critic; Carol-Ann Duffy, one of Britain’s most popular living poets, reading ‘Circe’ and acclaimed Australian writer David Malouf performing ‘An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton’. More audio recordings will be uploaded regularly from now until the festival. For copyright reasons some of them can only stay online for a limited period of time.
Do keep checking the festival page for links to new poems and biographies, information about the festival programmes and events, and special archive recordings. If you haven’t yet signed up for our newsletter, you can do so below. From April onwards we will be sending newsletters twice a month, as new festival poet pages are added.
© Sarah Ream
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