Editorial: 1 March 2012

February 29, 2012 Throughout the poems from Tanikawa’s Journey (1968) runs the theme of silence in opposition to language and its failings. In ‘Toba 6’, for instance, the poet is “left speechless” after uttering the word “sea”, which fails to encompass the waves crashing before him, while his wife’s body “needs no metaphors”. In her essay ‘Portrait of a poet: A translator’s notes’, Takako Lento notes that “sharing this silence with a reader through words is the poet’s ultimate purpose. Tanikawa hopes to engage with his reader not on the verbal level, but at a more profound and intuitive level.” And so he carries on, despite the paradox of seeking non-verbal communication through language: “I write:/ all poetry is empty words/ and I continue writing”, he states in ‘Toba 7’.

These lines echo with a poem in Tanikawa’s I Myself (2007), written years later, in which the narrator proclaims repeatedly “I have no choice but to continue writing poetry”. In the poems of this collection, the self fragments, and the poet notes the remove he is at from the ‘I’ – or, as in ‘To Meet “Me”’, from the ‘Me’ – that he is writing about. ‘Self Introduction’, for instance, is a list of descriptive sentences about the ‘I’: “I am an old man, short and bald” . . . “I do not dislike mechanical tools” . . . “I am cross-eyed, astigmatic and presbyopic”. Towards the end of the poem, he interrupts himself. “All the above are facts,” he explains, “but/ once I put them down in words like this, somehow they do not ring true.” Once again, language proves inadequate to convey the whole truth. Little wonder, perhaps, that in ‘Goodbye’, the narrator states: “I will have no hesitation to lose myself/ to dissolve into dirt, to disappear into the sky/ to become part of those with no words”.

The poetry of Wendy Videlock, published on the USA domain, is very different to Tanikawa’s, but her short, taut lines portray a similar attitude towards language and silence. “The more we carry on about a subject,” she has said, “the more likely we are to lose its essence.” This is not to say that she doesn’t relish the sound and feel of words: her poems pulse with rhythm, alliteration and rhyme, such as in ‘Hullo’, which begins:

The word, the stone,
the ringing phone,
the part of me
that wants to be alone,

the vow of silence
in the reeds;
God descends
in ravenese.

Reading her work is to enter a world of compelling, almost magical imagery – “bobcat urine’s in the weeds”; “a finch’s beak” lies beneath an owl’s nest; “the woman with a tumor in her neck” has “a scalpel in her boat”; the moon laughs “herself in half”.

Also presented by our USA editors is Stephen Dunn. In the selection of his crafted, vivid poems here, images of architecture and buildings – and their relation to the humans inside them – recur, from the wreckage of ‘Dismantling the House’ to one of three excellent poems about the king of Greek mythology, ‘Sisyphus in the Suburbs’, who sits comfortably in his house and contemplates braving “the cold,/ spireless mall”; from the quiet house that “wasn’t a vicious house, not yet” to “something like a pattern” that emerges out of the randomness of the world below when observed ‘From the Tower at the Top of the Winding Stairs’.

The final poet of this publication is Franz Wright, who was co-translator of work by Valzyhna Mort which was published on this site in 2009. A selection of Wright’s prose poems appears here, along with three other poems. The beautiful, sad love poem ‘Dedication’ seems to be informed in part by Wright’s experience working in mental health clinics:

I would gladly die with you still,
although I never write
from this gray institution. See
they are so busy trying to cure me,
I’m condemned—sorry, I have been given the job
of vacuuming the desert forever, well, no more than eight hours
                       a day.
And it’s really just about a thousand miles of cafeteria;
a large one in any event.

Also touching on psychiatric treatment, ‘Imago’, a long, dense block of prose text, the narrator of which writes “the long-awaited sequel to my Confessions” from his cell, demands the reader to slow down, to sink in, to read and re-read, to get lost in, to find a path through a text studded with striking sentences such as “And before I forget, I’d like to be the first to congratulate everyone who has not committed suicide up until now” or “Under torture—some atrocious form of tickling, for example—I guess I’d describe myself as a fairly good egg in hot water.”

We hope you take time to navigate between the words and the silences in the poems of this issue. We are proud to add four such talented and varied writers to our pages. Image © Niccolò Caranti. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.