Article
Editorial: 1 November, 2003
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January 18, 2006
WHY –
that question-house with broken windows,
uninhabitable city in whose cobwebs you don’t know any longer how
to connect your mornings with your evenings
Disconnection is also evident in a new Poets’ diary by Hebrew poet and PIW editor {id="387" title="Rami Saari"}, who juxtaposes poetry readings at the 6th International Poets’ Festival in Jerusalem with the terrorist and retaliation attacks taking place elsewhere in his country.
Finally, Ukrainian {id="5525" title="Oleh Lysheha"} is perhaps one of the most unusual poets we’ve had so far on PIW. A "living legend of Ukrainian poetry", he has turned his back on modern society and now goes around barefoot, jobless and, as our Ukrainian editor reports, occasionally catches fish with his teeth (we hope to bring you photographical evidence of this some day soon). Lysheha’s poetry, however, is by no means lacking in sophistication in its descriptions of life in the wild. In {id="5637" title="‘Horse’"}, for instance, the eponymous narrator – drawn in red clay on a cave wall – ponders why he became domesticated:
(-) I
love to stand under the alder tree, as its sap drips one me —
we share a similar fate, dark and fragile — a few more
millennia and the alder will disappear — in the meantime
only thanks to the gift of transformation can the alder
pretend to be like the pine, domesticated, although
actually the alder is related to the ichthyosaur . . .
Every poet has written at least one poem about, well, writing a poem. Many have written more than one; some poets write about little else. Croatian poet Hrvoje Pejakovic expressed it as follows: "you assemble a bird-cage out of shadows/ you sort the sparks/ you give what you do not have".
Indeed, {id="1755" title="Pejakovic"} (1960-1996), who gave much, died young and was deeply mourned, had an abundance of sparks to sort. One of Croatia’s finest poets of the 80s and 90s, he possessed both great literary taste and an unfaltering ethical instinct, writes our editor Sibila Petlevski. His work is concerned with existential questions that still go to the bone, as his poem {id="1907" title="‘On unnecessary question marks’"} shows:WHY –
that question-house with broken windows,
uninhabitable city in whose cobwebs you don’t know any longer how
to connect your mornings with your evenings
Disconnection is also evident in a new Poets’ diary by Hebrew poet and PIW editor {id="387" title="Rami Saari"}, who juxtaposes poetry readings at the 6th International Poets’ Festival in Jerusalem with the terrorist and retaliation attacks taking place elsewhere in his country.
Finally, Ukrainian {id="5525" title="Oleh Lysheha"} is perhaps one of the most unusual poets we’ve had so far on PIW. A "living legend of Ukrainian poetry", he has turned his back on modern society and now goes around barefoot, jobless and, as our Ukrainian editor reports, occasionally catches fish with his teeth (we hope to bring you photographical evidence of this some day soon). Lysheha’s poetry, however, is by no means lacking in sophistication in its descriptions of life in the wild. In {id="5637" title="‘Horse’"}, for instance, the eponymous narrator – drawn in red clay on a cave wall – ponders why he became domesticated:
(-) I
love to stand under the alder tree, as its sap drips one me —
we share a similar fate, dark and fragile — a few more
millennia and the alder will disappear — in the meantime
only thanks to the gift of transformation can the alder
pretend to be like the pine, domesticated, although
actually the alder is related to the ichthyosaur . . .
© Corine Vloet
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