Poetry International Poetry International
Article

Editorial: 15 February 2011

February 14, 2011
Welcome to the second February 2011 issue of Poetry International Web, a rich offering of writing from the southern hemisphere, with original poems in Indonesian, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans and English.
The PIW Indonesia domain introduces Afrizal Malna and Joko Pinurbo, both of whom are known for the incorporation of quotidian images and objects from Indonesian life into their poetry.

Afrizal Malna’s poems strike a unique balance of playfulness and melancholy in the way everyday situations – cleaning a floor, sitting on a train – segue into surreal imagery, imagery that is sometimes picked apart as soon as it is employed, for instance in the wonderful ‘I just mopped the floor’, in which the accelerando rhythm and self-reflexive repetitions of the first section are counterpointed by the slowing, yet also repetitive second section, an ultimately quiet and tender expression of love.

The selection of Joko Pinurbo’s poems published on PIW reflect his exploration of the relation between language and power, highlighting the role of the poet in the disruption of the political status quo, as well as the way language evades being owned by any single person: “Words are goblins which come out in the middle of the night,” he writes in ‘Goblins’; and in ‘Night Raid’, “Words are like butterflies competing for flowers”. Pinurbo’s ‘Patrol’, a prose poem which begins “Rows of armored vehicles move backwards and forwards through the sad lines of my poems”, is perhaps the most striking of his poems commenting on the role of language vis à vis authority.

The multilingual Gcina Mhlophe, presented on the South Africa domain, also recognises the power of words in the struggle for political change. Her rousing invocations addressed to her fellow citizens, such as ‘History is a Heavy Matter’, ‘Lead Us, Son of Tambo!’ and ‘Strengthen Love’ cast her in the role of poet as message-bringer, an advocate of the people, a bearer of hope and urger of change: speech, after all, has the power to alter the world around us, and Gcina Mhlophe draws on rich African oral traditions; according to Njabulo S. Ndebele, who introduces her on PIW, “she takes the audience into her performance of stories or poetry or drama through total movement: her body, her arms, the movements of her facial muscles, of her eyes, and the modulations of her voice: they all become one. Language and voice and movement converge into performance; and a reader of her poetry in her physical absence involuntarily invokes her presence.”

The Afrikaans poet Wilma Stockenström also has a performance background, having worked as a dramatist and an actress before beginning to write poetry. However, her poetry is not performative in the way Gcina Mhlophe’s is. Instead of poetry underpinned by a hope for what words can do, Stockenström’s complex and engaging poetry displays anxiety about the limits of language – somewhat akin to Pinurbo’s view that words have a life of their own and cannot always be harnessed by the poet. In ‘The Comet Visits the Cape of Rape’, for instance, she laments the silence of victims, and of violence which she cannot overcome through poetry:  Because I don’t know how to translate the voices of raped / children, here, in this poem, / that they be heard”. Her translator, Johann de Lange, notes Stockenström’s “individual approach to syntax reveal[ing] a strong Germanic influence”, as well as her invention of neologisms – strategies evident in the outstanding English translations published here.

Our final poet of this excellent issue is the South African {id="19041" title="Stephen Watson"}, whose formally taut lyrical poetry interrogates both exterior and interior landscapes and the passing of time. ‘The Wind Chime’ is an evocative articulation of the way poetry is able to capture and immortalise a moment, even if the physical instant can never be returned to, while ‘On the Great River’ movingly communicates the overwhelming experience of being human and attempting to comprehend our tiny lives in relation to awe-inspiring, ancient natural environments: “We know only a stone against whose rind / of stone we feel the softness of our internal organs, / the soft chalk, accident of our bones.”

We hope you enjoy the work of these five poets, whom we are delighted to welcome to the pages of PIW.
Sponsors
Gemeente Rotterdam
Nederlands Letterenfonds
Stichting Van Beuningen Peterich-fonds
Prins Bernhard cultuurfonds
Lira fonds
Versopolis
J.E. Jurriaanse
Gefinancierd door de Europese Unie
Elise Mathilde Fonds
Stichting Verzameling van Wijngaarden-Boot
Veerhuis
VDM
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère