Editorial: 1 April 2011

March 31, 2011 What are the ethics of enjoying happiness and comfort when others are suffering? Can and should happiness be guilt-free? How does an individual’s exile or displacement from community, family or memory intersect with these considerations? Croatian poet Nikola Petković’s subtle and moving poem ‘Bagels’, written in English during his stay in the USA, explores such issues from a personal perspective, taking a bagel, a symbol of his daily life in the States (though also originally a European food), as a starting point for reflection on his dying grandmother: “Bagels mean nothing to her,” he writes. “In WWII she ate potato pills, some wet flour and a young colonel / but she would never discuss the circumstances of that meal.” Thoughts of the inner lives of his family members back in his homeland are contrasted with the present moment: “I am here, twenty-two thousand miles away from dreams thought out in Latin tongue, eating / a bagel, / slowly and detached. / It makes me happy.” PIW Croatia editor Miloš Đurđević writes that Petković recognises a global world which can’t “be understood, or even exist, without its very local core” – the world is, in fact, a web of other people’s experiences of ‘here’. Where these individual heres coincide, there is community and support, which mitigates the pain of separation of others. “I am here,” he also asserts in the beautiful ‘My Friend’ –

and I am her friend when
everyone
else
is
asleep
or
crossing telephone lines
diagonally
like a promise.

If the ‘here’ of Petković’s poems is experiential and personal, in the work of our second poet of this issue, Daniel Falb, it is linguistic and collective. Writes PIW Germany editor Heiko Strunk of Falb’s collage-like poems, which reference phrases and slogans from the various discourses of the world around us, “There is no reflective ‘I’ [ . . . ] engaging in conversation with himself and with the world; the reader is constantly being drawn in to a collective ‘we’ and being reminded, without it being explicitly stated, of a common task. Exactly what that is is left to the reader to decide [ . . . ] The poetic text, according to Falb, becomes a mechanism for recording the dominant forces and formative processes in society, thus bearing testimony to the way a society produces itself and its individuals.”

Approaching Falb’s resolutely non-narrative poems, a reader negotiates fragmentation, non sequiturs, word associations, interrupted syntax, and unusual juxtapositions of images which nevertheless speak to each other through the very fact of being brought together within the tight framework of the poem:

......................... superior forms of shame, of sterilization, when you’re a kitten.
the production of the face as hair removal and world fair.

crystal palace exhibits the very fire of nations and of natality................. here is
the address of a shrub, a small leaf, a clump of cells.

(from ‘observe these families of behaviour . . .’)

As delicately wrought as it is disarming, Falb’s poetry might be seen as a filter, through which percolates, into some sort of aesthetic order, the chaos that is our text-saturated world.

And, as we announced in our last newsletter, Order and Chaos happens to be the theme of the 42nd Poetry International Festival, which will take place in Rotterdam between 14 and 19 June this year.

The twenty festival poets of this year are:

Armando (The Netherlands)
Ann Cotten (United States / Austria / Germany)
Eduardo Espina (Uruguay / USA)
Jacob Groot (The Netherlands)
Robert Hass (USA)
Doina Ionaid (Romania)
Yan Jun (China)
Bachyt Kenzjejev (Kazakhstan / Russia / Canada)
Admiel Kosman (Israel / Germany)
Erin Moure (Canada)
Ion Muresan (Romania)
Les Murray (Australia)
Daljit Nagra (UK)
Gampiero Neri (Italy)
Øyvind Rimbereid (Norway)
Amina Said (Tunisia / France)
Eugène Savitzkaya (Belgium)
Truong Tran (Vietnam / USA)
Serhiy Zhadan (Ukraine)
Nazih Aba Afash (Syria)

In the coming months, as we lead up to the festival, we’ll be introducing you to these poets and their work, and will give you a taste of the events taking place in June. During the festival itself – which this year takes on a new format, with more events packed into fewer festival days – we’ll be live-streaming readings and interviews again this year, so wherever you are in the world, you’ll be able to witness the poetic goings-on in the Rotterdam City Theatre. Have a look at our PIW festival page to learn more about the annual event and to review what went on during our previous festivals.