Editorial: 1 January 2010

December 10, 2009 PIW Israel editor Lisa Katz presents a fascinating issue centring around nano-poetics, a trend characterised by what Gilad Meiri identifies as “miniaturised forms, reduction of content, nonsense and duplication”. In an excellent overview of nano-poetic movements in Israeli poetry, Meiri examines the work of several poets, including David Avidan and Admiel Kosman. While Avidan’s work employs nano-poetic techniques in its use of ordinary language and its engagement with apparently ordinary objects and situations, Admiel Kosman’s embrace of miniaturisation in his parodic poems invites spiritual intimacy. As Lisa Katz notes, Gilad Meiri’s own poems also hone in on small, everyday things – “messy living rooms, zippers clanking in dryers, the entire menu of family picnics” – as a means of looking at larger issues such as violence, history, fear and greed.

The focus on everyday, seemingly trivial subject matter is interwoven with reflections on nature and ‘larger’ themes in Japanese poet Yosuke Tanaka’s work. With a day job as a molecular cell biologist, perhaps it’s unsurprising that he values the small and seeks to articulate the interrelatedness of things. ‘A River in Summer’, for example, is a wonderful evocation of a hike which alternates, both with humour and serious intent, between the prosaic and the lyrical, between a focus on manufactured objects and observations of nature:

Okay, so I’m decked out in my raingear, but I can’t find the cover for my backpack, I’ve got the bag I usually keep it in,
But the cover for the backpack itself is gone, should I just continue on (leaving things as they are)?
I struggle with this feeling as I look through the messed up contents of my backpack, searching through one thing at a time,
Searching,

I am transparent to my very core.

In this poem, interaction with material things is not simply presented in opposition to a human relationship with nature: rather the two are intertwined within the experience of a hike and the decisions made during it. Like Gilad Meiri, these ‘Struggles with Meaningless Things’ (to borrow the title of another poem by Yosuke Tanaka) are considered by him to be just as relevant to human experience and worthy of poetic focus as traditional grand themes.

Up next . . .

In our next issue, published in mid January, we’ll be featuring two Dutch poets: Ramsey Nasr and Tsjêbbe Hettinga. Ramsey Nasr is the Netherlands’ current Poet Laureate, while Frisian poet Tsjêbbe Hettinga has been commissioned to write a poetry pamphlet for the Dutch and Flemish National Poetry Day on 28 January. The issue will include new translations by David Colmer and Susan Massotty, as well as an interview with Ramsey Nasr.