Editorial: May 2005

January 18, 2006 The division into geographical areas of our website – for practical reasons but ultimately random when it comes to the geography of poetry itself – continues to raise issues, and particular hard ones for our editors who, after all, have to select the poets that then appear to ‘represent’ their country on our site. Having been online for exactly two years now, our Ukrainian editor Kateryna Botanova looks back and perceives “the creeping subjectivisation of poetry” on her web pages – and happily so. For, she announces, she will remain “steadfastly subjective in the selection of poets and in the manner of their introduction, […] defending subjectivity as a principle for the critical treatment of creative writing in general.”

Her choice for this month, {id="5527" title="Vasyl Makhno"}, a Ukrainian poet living in New York, raises the question of what it actually means to be a ‘Ukrainian’ poet. Having gone beyond the boundaries of what he calls “the Ukrainian ghetto”, Makhno has paradoxically become one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Ukrainian poetry. His work, neither ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Western’ but somewhere in between, as he explains in an {id="5504" title="interview"} on this site, reverberates with the cadences of the New York School of poets:

in december – in downtown new york –
                               drinking coffee in Starbucks – i watch
two mexicans laying marble wall slabs
                                        in the entrance to the building

an irksome Jingle Bells keeps playing in the café
new yorkers shimmer with their christmas gifts and cars
street peddlers sell the tourists all kinds of crap
the policemen snooze peacefully in their warm car
there’s a line to get into a church – no, today’s not Sunday –
                                              the opening of some exhibit

In a lucid introduction to the Australian magazine, editor Michael Brennan examines these issues of nation and the international in great detail, central as they are to the work of the three new Australian poets of this month: {id="666" title="Adam Aitken"}, {id="672" title="Jane Gibian"} and {id="674" title="John Kinsella"}. Tellingly enough, when Brennan approached Kinsella about contributing to the magazine, the poet “raised a series of concerns regarding the very nature of the ‘Australian’ magazine, and the development of discrete sites orientated around the idea of ‘nation’ as a way of presenting literature or indeed any form of discourse, premised as it is on closed notions of community.” Indeed, we’d expect no less of a poet whose poetics are indivisible from his politics, for whom language – “the natural environment” – is essentially political. Yet Aitken and Gibian, too, in their own way challenge the received notions of ‘Australia’ and ‘Australian’ poetry. As Aitken writes in ‘Rock Carvings, Sydney’,

Some days I pass the handiwork of tribes, that tribe that’s gone,
Why make their loss
speak for us or me, the nation’s patchwork
constitution?

In Colombia, poetry, like the country itself, is torn between extremes: violence and intimacy, silence and protest, a narrow, inward-looking concept of what’s ‘Colombian’ and an international outlook. The work of one of our new poets, {id="1283" title="Piedad Bonnet"}, plays with many of these contradictions:

Everything so unremarkable so apparently simple
the irate Friday noon with its buzz of a fly in Summer
and  Bogotá green and vibrant
its parks suddenly gay through the taxi’s window
and in it the torpor the slow drive to wholly alien places
the song on the radio like a spider’s net growing and growing
life here could be real
but death
has a carnival mask on and laughs

However, in the eyes of our other Colombian poet, {id="1266" title="Carlos Obregón"} (1929-1963), Colombia was merely an oppressive place to flee from, and the issue of nation largely irrelevant. Drawn to catholicism and of a strongly mystical bent, Obregón had an entirely different concept of transcending physical boundaries: “So much world without body or inhabitant,/ so many mortal footsteps tonight.” This near-forgotten contemporary of the ‘Mito’ group is perhaps the best-kept secret of Colombian poetry, going all the way back to the great Spanish tradition of mysticsm:

Passenger of the wind
the bonfire raises its incantation
of ecstatic silence
tempers with steely love
the essence the eternity that quivers
evasive and awake
tense is the night where God lights it.

This mystical theme is continued in the Israeli magazine, which follows last quarter’s worldly, ‘scandalous’ issue with two profoundly spiritual poets – once again showing the extraordinary scope and multi-facetedness of Israeli poetry. {id="3159" title="Amir Or"}, a secular poet who is deeply interested in myth, old religions and cultures, in an {id="3150" title="interview"} on this site described his late work as ‘mystical research’ – although he prefers to think of it as ‘existential research’.

{id="3156" title="Zelda"}, who was born in Ukraine in 1916 (would that make her a ‘Ukrainian’ poet too, one wonders?), was an ultra-orthodox woman who nevertheless enchanted large numbers of secular as well as religious readers with her deceptively straightforward and highly spiritual poems. Considered by many a symbolic poet, Zelda herself had the ultimate answer – deceptively straightforward and highly spiritual – to the question of meaning, according to the following anecdote from her translator Marcia Falk. When Falk went to ask her what a certain much-discussed image meant, the poet fell silent.

“Why,” she asked, looking at me with an expression of genuine bafflement, “do people always seek what is complicated? I always intend the simple. By ‘golden fish’ I meant a golden fish.”