Article
Editorial: 1 May 2010
April 01, 2010
My sweetheart washed flowers
with wood and with stones
. . .
she begs for soap
and for washing and neighbours
and a film on the goggle-box.
The sudden swerve into modern slang at the end realigns the fairytale love song with reality. Poetry, here, is both an escape from reality and a reminder that reality can be fantastical.
Also from Belgium, we have a new sequence by Charles Ducal, poet-farmer. ‘After Auschwitz’, as the title suggests, is an excavation of twentieth-century horror, a poem steeped in the grand narratives of memory, human nature, death, faith and hope. Here, “Poetry stands by, a minor unsettlement,/ in which the animal becomes human again.”
Meanwhile, Croatian musician and writer Dubravko Detoni serves up a range of curious and arresting prose poems. Detoni is known as one of the most distinguished avant garde composers alive today. For me, reading his poetry for the first time was like finding buried treasure. He cuts new paths through the forest of language, drawing on his innovative understanding of music.
Chock full of imagery that strikes directly at the heart while leaping through logic, every poem is like a cabinet of drawers, each containing a beautiful artefact. As Miloš Djurdjević says in his introduction, words are used “in a similar vein to all poetry, generated as building blocks and elements used to construct multilayered meanings”. Here the surrealist project of surprising collisions between images creates mini-explosions of ideas and meanings on the page.
Perhaps it’s not best to illustrate Detoni’s work as a whole – which emotionally has great range – by just one line. Yet here is one description of poetry, from ‘Unisons’ that will stay with me for a very long time: “a poem is a cluster of horror imprisoned in a pillar”.
Next, then, to India (poetry, unlike jet planes, is immune to volcanic ash). Arundhathi Subramaniam provides a rich selection from across the country, and across linguistic and historical periods. Two of the poets this month – Dileep Jhaveri and Mamang Dai – are well-established writers, and active participants in literary culture. Their poetry springs from specific geographical and historical sources, drawing on politics and landscape, but with a rich mysticism and philosophical curve to their lines.
As Dai says, in conversation with Subramaniam, “the physical presence of the land is very tangible.” And so her poems are filled with careful observations and laden with sublime beauty. For Jhaveri, landscape is as much a victim of politics as human society. This is best illustrated by his poem, with full title, ‘For those annihilated in riots, enduring and upright, to whom history has granted no justice whatsoever’. The poem, like the title, demands attention, not for itself, but for its subject. The words strain at sense, strain to capture madness, breaking apart under the violence of the historical moment.
The third poet from India is Yash Sharma, no less distinguished by practice. Polished and colloquial, his poetry seems to stem from a tradition I’m mostly familiar with from ancient Japanese and Chinese poetry. Intimate moments are described in a way that builds empathy with the reader, through their specificity.
More importantly, however, Sharma writes in Dogri, a language, we are told, which “was recognised by the Sahitya Akademi as an ‘independent modern literary language’ in 1969, [but] was only as recently as 2003 . . . listed [as] a national language of India in the Indian Constitution.” And so, doing what PIW does best, Subramaniam releases to an international audience some fantastic poetry from an ignored corner of the world.
Welcome to the 1 May edition of PIW. In the busy time leading up to the 41st Poetry International Festival preparations, I’ve been asked to step into Sarah Ream’s shoes for this issue. I’ve taken up the mantle with great delight – PIW is, without a doubt, one of my favourite cultural projects on the internet. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed diving into the international poetry scene to experience yet more diverse cultural and personal poetic styles from around the world.
This issue we have poetry from Belgium, Croatia and India. From Belgium, a young poet (and prose writer), Jeroen Theunissen, casts his inquisitive and precise eye across the facets of love. What really catches me when reading his work is how he plays with different voices, such as in ‘A sweetheart’, to create a sense of language existing outside of time:My sweetheart washed flowers
with wood and with stones
. . .
she begs for soap
and for washing and neighbours
and a film on the goggle-box.
The sudden swerve into modern slang at the end realigns the fairytale love song with reality. Poetry, here, is both an escape from reality and a reminder that reality can be fantastical.
Also from Belgium, we have a new sequence by Charles Ducal, poet-farmer. ‘After Auschwitz’, as the title suggests, is an excavation of twentieth-century horror, a poem steeped in the grand narratives of memory, human nature, death, faith and hope. Here, “Poetry stands by, a minor unsettlement,/ in which the animal becomes human again.”
Meanwhile, Croatian musician and writer Dubravko Detoni serves up a range of curious and arresting prose poems. Detoni is known as one of the most distinguished avant garde composers alive today. For me, reading his poetry for the first time was like finding buried treasure. He cuts new paths through the forest of language, drawing on his innovative understanding of music.
Chock full of imagery that strikes directly at the heart while leaping through logic, every poem is like a cabinet of drawers, each containing a beautiful artefact. As Miloš Djurdjević says in his introduction, words are used “in a similar vein to all poetry, generated as building blocks and elements used to construct multilayered meanings”. Here the surrealist project of surprising collisions between images creates mini-explosions of ideas and meanings on the page.
Perhaps it’s not best to illustrate Detoni’s work as a whole – which emotionally has great range – by just one line. Yet here is one description of poetry, from ‘Unisons’ that will stay with me for a very long time: “a poem is a cluster of horror imprisoned in a pillar”.
Next, then, to India (poetry, unlike jet planes, is immune to volcanic ash). Arundhathi Subramaniam provides a rich selection from across the country, and across linguistic and historical periods. Two of the poets this month – Dileep Jhaveri and Mamang Dai – are well-established writers, and active participants in literary culture. Their poetry springs from specific geographical and historical sources, drawing on politics and landscape, but with a rich mysticism and philosophical curve to their lines.
As Dai says, in conversation with Subramaniam, “the physical presence of the land is very tangible.” And so her poems are filled with careful observations and laden with sublime beauty. For Jhaveri, landscape is as much a victim of politics as human society. This is best illustrated by his poem, with full title, ‘For those annihilated in riots, enduring and upright, to whom history has granted no justice whatsoever’. The poem, like the title, demands attention, not for itself, but for its subject. The words strain at sense, strain to capture madness, breaking apart under the violence of the historical moment.
The third poet from India is Yash Sharma, no less distinguished by practice. Polished and colloquial, his poetry seems to stem from a tradition I’m mostly familiar with from ancient Japanese and Chinese poetry. Intimate moments are described in a way that builds empathy with the reader, through their specificity.
More importantly, however, Sharma writes in Dogri, a language, we are told, which “was recognised by the Sahitya Akademi as an ‘independent modern literary language’ in 1969, [but] was only as recently as 2003 . . . listed [as] a national language of India in the Indian Constitution.” And so, doing what PIW does best, Subramaniam releases to an international audience some fantastic poetry from an ignored corner of the world.
© George Ttoouli
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