Article
Editorial: 1 October 2010
September 10, 2010
American poet A.E. Stallings, who lives in Greece, is also a translator (from Greek), and writes her own English-language poems. Her writing been compared to W.B. Yeats, Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost. She employs regular rhyme-schemes and tight metres, which heighten the packed tautness of her poetry – the rhythm drives the reader on, sometimes with a sense that things are slipping past, and her poems, in the richness of their ideas and fresh imagery, demand multiple readings. ‘The Catch’ is an eerie and insightful subversion of idealised new-baby poems, while ‘Actaeon’ offers an alliterative apostrophe to the eponymous hunter from Greek mythology who was changed into a stag and killed by his own hounds, "All fleet of foot, and swift to scent, /Inexorable once on the track, / Like angry words you might have meant, / But do not mean, and can’t take back.”
Like A.E. Stallings, Randall Mann also works with regular forms, rhyme-schemes and metres, which allow him to “approach more comfortably the personal [and] harden argument”. Set against themes including sexual encounters, politics, violence and love, the clarity of his language is appealing and has clout: take for instance the ending of ‘Last Call’, in which so much is summed up in a few almost tauntingly simple, crafted lines: “It’s closing time. / You were not at fault. / I drain my glass / and lick the salt”.
Rae Armantrout, one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets, also writes poems notable for their form. She eschews regular forms, however, in favour of short lines that often seem to be elliptical distillations of something once much longer, or of thoughts that can’t be fully conveyed through language without fragmentation and juxtapositions. The resulting gaps, leaps and silences bristle with rhythmic and emotional energy. In the selection of poems published here, Armantrout often examines the body and death with quiet and moving resonance, pitting ‘big questions’ alongside colloquialisms, pop-culture and domestic detail. “What’s a person to us / but a contortion / of pressure ridges / palpable / long after she is gone?” she asks for example in ‘Missing Persons’, the unexpected yet apt associative response to this question following in the next section: “A thin old man in blue jeans, / back arched, grimaces / at the freezer compartment.”
And . . .
This month we’ve added some new audio from the Poetry International Festival 2010. From Germany there are readings by Ron Winkler, and from the USA poems read by C.K. Williams, Christian Hawkey, Katia Kapovich and Michael Palmer. Enjoy!
In our first issue of October, we bring together an exciting range of contemporary poetry from three American poets and one American-born poet who writes in German and English.
After a period without publications, we welcome the German domain back to the pages of PIW. This issue features Ann Cotten, a USA-born writer who moved to Vienna at a young age and now lives in Berlin. Ann Cotten translates her own German poems into English, creating new versions which often diverge from the semantic content of the original poems in their reinterpretation of aspects such as sound, rhythm and wordplay. In both English and German, Cotten experiments with neologisms, misspellings and incorrect forms, shaking off the respectable orthographic veneer of words to challenge our relationship with language. “It does radical things to the truth status of a word to misspell it,” she writes. “Suddenly you are no longer accepting a correctly wrapped gift, but guessing and stumbling and feeling the rocks of language.” Crucially, for Ann Cotten a poem does not offer up a paraphrasable hidden meaning; nor is its role to convey a poet’s emotions or experiences through metaphor and imagery. Reading a poem by Cotten is to interact primarily with the world of words and sounds; and the subsequent negotiation of the meanings offered up by these words becomes a complex and playful experience. Begin exploring Ann Cotten’s work by listening to her read ‘Solidus’, a poem she describes as working “kind of like a snow shovel”, swerving off in a different direction in the English version “because the roads are different”.American poet A.E. Stallings, who lives in Greece, is also a translator (from Greek), and writes her own English-language poems. Her writing been compared to W.B. Yeats, Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost. She employs regular rhyme-schemes and tight metres, which heighten the packed tautness of her poetry – the rhythm drives the reader on, sometimes with a sense that things are slipping past, and her poems, in the richness of their ideas and fresh imagery, demand multiple readings. ‘The Catch’ is an eerie and insightful subversion of idealised new-baby poems, while ‘Actaeon’ offers an alliterative apostrophe to the eponymous hunter from Greek mythology who was changed into a stag and killed by his own hounds, "All fleet of foot, and swift to scent, /Inexorable once on the track, / Like angry words you might have meant, / But do not mean, and can’t take back.”
Like A.E. Stallings, Randall Mann also works with regular forms, rhyme-schemes and metres, which allow him to “approach more comfortably the personal [and] harden argument”. Set against themes including sexual encounters, politics, violence and love, the clarity of his language is appealing and has clout: take for instance the ending of ‘Last Call’, in which so much is summed up in a few almost tauntingly simple, crafted lines: “It’s closing time. / You were not at fault. / I drain my glass / and lick the salt”.
Rae Armantrout, one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets, also writes poems notable for their form. She eschews regular forms, however, in favour of short lines that often seem to be elliptical distillations of something once much longer, or of thoughts that can’t be fully conveyed through language without fragmentation and juxtapositions. The resulting gaps, leaps and silences bristle with rhythmic and emotional energy. In the selection of poems published here, Armantrout often examines the body and death with quiet and moving resonance, pitting ‘big questions’ alongside colloquialisms, pop-culture and domestic detail. “What’s a person to us / but a contortion / of pressure ridges / palpable / long after she is gone?” she asks for example in ‘Missing Persons’, the unexpected yet apt associative response to this question following in the next section: “A thin old man in blue jeans, / back arched, grimaces / at the freezer compartment.”
And . . .
This month we’ve added some new audio from the Poetry International Festival 2010. From Germany there are readings by Ron Winkler, and from the USA poems read by C.K. Williams, Christian Hawkey, Katia Kapovich and Michael Palmer. Enjoy!
© Sarah Ream
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