Article
Editorial: November 2004
January 18, 2006
The poets featured in the Ukrainian magazine fan out on their own distinct paths: feminist and philosopher Oksana Zabuzhko, for instance, in the company of re-imagined cultural figures, while new Poet of the quarter, provocateur–story teller Andriy Bondar, catapults naked through the immediacy of contemporary sensation:
my present lifestyle and the way I test my health is an altogether different question
how we all fuck up and shit over our health inhale tobacco smoke drink chlorinated water
keep sleepless nights get up at noon suffer from stress wives betray us we betray our wives
every single day we die from jealousy shepherd our property hold on to our wallets on the bus
sit in front of computers for hours
on the one hand ads call us to healthy living
to healthy sex and cheer us up in various ways
on the other it’s so hard to put on a condom
already at 29 it’s so hard to put on a condom
from ‘Genes’
For Michael Brennan, the recent conservative majority win is a dispiriting moment in the ongoing venture called ‘Australia’. Five Australian poets offer a compelling counter-argument, he says, of “opposition and insight, politics, polemics and poetics.” Writing of an era for which we might be tempted to feel nostalgia, for instance, Jennifer Maiden remarks:
“Pax Americana” sounds like a modern rose.
“Souvenir de la Madeleine”, perhaps
would have intrigued the Empress once.
When she was talking war but not bombing
quite so much, the secretary’s brooch
became a huge dragon. She has worn a gold snake
to torment Iraq, which called her one. Mrs. Rabin
hopefully gave her a dove pin.
from ‘Madeleine Albright Wears Two Lapel Pins’
In her introduction to this month’s Indian issue, editor Arundhathi Subramaniam acknowledges the role of translators. Poets themselves are translators, from experience into language, from language to emotion, as in these lines by Manushya Puthiran:
In a house where
children were
and are now no more,
again and again
the two broken wheels
of a toy car.
from ‘House: Two Scenes’
And poetic practice and physical sensation mirror each other in this image from Noel Rowe’s ‘Next to Nothing’, as the poet weighs the moment and the world:
he gave me once one of the old wire strainers we used
putting up fences with our father to get the tension right
I hold it now to feel the way
its weight takes up my hand.
Among the new poems by Croatian writer, scholar and critic, Sibila Petlevski, ‘Show Me’ brings us back full circle to the poet’s role. She reminds us that “time makes miracles”, invoking and translating Maurice Maeterlinck for our own era:
Eagles spread their wings like flags. Their nature wins:
it divides the space into the plots of power and with each take off
it pierces the indigo of the dusk, with each flight over the frame of
densely compressed mountains it lets you know that behind the
picture the night is swallowing there is another sky smeared with the
colors of the liver. The fear of crucified gods lets out the smell of
urine and blood, while hunger doesn’t ask: What’s the matter with
you? Haven’t woken up yet? Aren’t you ill perhaps? Get up!
In this month’s issue of PIW, the world is very much with us, (pace William Wordsworth). Five poets pattern sound and silence to be audible against the “deafening clamour” of Indian metropolises, while two very different Croatian poets “grasp the shaded and blurred side of daily experiences”. For our editors in Ukraine and Australia, national elections frame expectations of poetry as “a citizen’s strongest message”.
In nineteenth century Ukraine, “the poet was no longer seen as just a spokesperson, but as a national messiah”, Yuri Andrukhovych tells us, hopeful that this autumn will end “the epoch of Ukrainian uncertainty . . . and Ukrainian poetry will have a path by which to survive”. The poets featured in the Ukrainian magazine fan out on their own distinct paths: feminist and philosopher Oksana Zabuzhko, for instance, in the company of re-imagined cultural figures, while new Poet of the quarter, provocateur–story teller Andriy Bondar, catapults naked through the immediacy of contemporary sensation:
my present lifestyle and the way I test my health is an altogether different question
how we all fuck up and shit over our health inhale tobacco smoke drink chlorinated water
keep sleepless nights get up at noon suffer from stress wives betray us we betray our wives
every single day we die from jealousy shepherd our property hold on to our wallets on the bus
sit in front of computers for hours
on the one hand ads call us to healthy living
to healthy sex and cheer us up in various ways
on the other it’s so hard to put on a condom
already at 29 it’s so hard to put on a condom
from ‘Genes’
For Michael Brennan, the recent conservative majority win is a dispiriting moment in the ongoing venture called ‘Australia’. Five Australian poets offer a compelling counter-argument, he says, of “opposition and insight, politics, polemics and poetics.” Writing of an era for which we might be tempted to feel nostalgia, for instance, Jennifer Maiden remarks:
“Pax Americana” sounds like a modern rose.
“Souvenir de la Madeleine”, perhaps
would have intrigued the Empress once.
When she was talking war but not bombing
quite so much, the secretary’s brooch
became a huge dragon. She has worn a gold snake
to torment Iraq, which called her one. Mrs. Rabin
hopefully gave her a dove pin.
from ‘Madeleine Albright Wears Two Lapel Pins’
In her introduction to this month’s Indian issue, editor Arundhathi Subramaniam acknowledges the role of translators. Poets themselves are translators, from experience into language, from language to emotion, as in these lines by Manushya Puthiran:
In a house where
children were
and are now no more,
again and again
the two broken wheels
of a toy car.
from ‘House: Two Scenes’
And poetic practice and physical sensation mirror each other in this image from Noel Rowe’s ‘Next to Nothing’, as the poet weighs the moment and the world:
he gave me once one of the old wire strainers we used
putting up fences with our father to get the tension right
I hold it now to feel the way
its weight takes up my hand.
Among the new poems by Croatian writer, scholar and critic, Sibila Petlevski, ‘Show Me’ brings us back full circle to the poet’s role. She reminds us that “time makes miracles”, invoking and translating Maurice Maeterlinck for our own era:
Eagles spread their wings like flags. Their nature wins:
it divides the space into the plots of power and with each take off
it pierces the indigo of the dusk, with each flight over the frame of
densely compressed mountains it lets you know that behind the
picture the night is swallowing there is another sky smeared with the
colors of the liver. The fear of crucified gods lets out the smell of
urine and blood, while hunger doesn’t ask: What’s the matter with
you? Haven’t woken up yet? Aren’t you ill perhaps? Get up!
© The central editors
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