Editorial: June 2005

January 18, 2006 {id="1753" title="Delimir Rešicki"}'s Happy Streets, of which we publish five sections, is considered one of the landmarks of Croatian postmodern poetry. Rešicki takes ephemeral elements from film, painting, pop culture, rock‘n’roll and fuses these with early modernist influences, such as the German poet Georg Trakl, often with defamiliarizing, bizarre results. Melancholy and angst are balanced by humour and a sense of the absurd:

if everybody should indeed become somebody for fifteen minutes,
we have exactly three quarters of an hour
to shoot ourselves.
with water guns.

The darker side of city life – rage, alienation, futility – is expressed in the work of new Chinese poet {id="968" title="Jin Haishu"}:

at 4 a.m.
one by one the various sounds come to life
in the faint dawn glow
the dark goes
leaving me
with blackness in the light

With a degree in philosophy, Jin Haishu is nevertheless a proponent of the ‘plain language’ style in Chinese poetry, like previously featured poets such as Yi Sha or Song Xiaoxian. His philosophical background, argues Chinese editor Simon Patton, comes out in his preoccupation with truth. As Jin Haishu writes in ‘21 Maxims for my Girlfriend on Her Birthday’, “Be brave. Bravery means fighting to keep the truth before you in any situation and not to be scared off by it.”

Indian poet {id="2735" title="Ranjit Hoskote"}, too, addresses distinctly cosmopolitan concerns in his work. Like many other contemporary Indian poets, he finds himself “at home in a world in which the boundary between the local and the global has increasingly been blurred”, and wrestling “with the ethical and artistic dilemmas produced by such a blurring”. Hoskote’s poems are striking in their outstanding use of visual imagery and metaphor. His poetry is “finely wrought, luminous and sensuous”, according to our editor Arundhathi Subramaniam. She provided an interview with Hoskote for this issue, as well as with the other two featured poets: {id="2734" title="Prathibha Nandakumar"} and {id="2738" title="Tarannum Riyaz"}. Where Nandakumar, writing in Kannada, considers poetry “a way of being honest with myself”, Urdu poet Riyaz mentions as her subjects “birds, babies, flowers, gender, ego battles, the problems faced by women in the Kashmir valley in these difficult times, and much more.”

Both women are equally concerned with their role as female poets – what Slovenian poet {id="5037" title="Barbara Korun"} has called the issue of “women as poets and their experience of their own poetic role”. According to Korun, a leading figure in the generation of radical young women poets, “contemporary Slovenian society is murderously disposed towards this woman-ness, it is explicitly gyneco-phobic, because it essentially consists of an elitist cultural ‘brotherhood’.” Her poetry, far from being militant, is subtle, direct and often sensuous:

You can
reach into me
anywhere
deep as you can;

in pleasure,
in pain
I slip away
from you;

in language,
in words,
here
you are breathing
me in,
you inhale me
completely.

In the Dutch magazine we find a preview of the work of seven Dutch poets that will be reading at the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, from June 18-24. One of these, Tsead Bruinja, was already featured in last year’s Frisian special. The other six poets, Judith Herzberg, Anne Vegter, Frank Koenegracht, Gerrit Komrij, Erik Menkveld and Peer Wittenbols, form a mixture of grand names, the well-established and interesting newcomers. More samples of their work will be added to PIW after their performances at the festival.

Finally, as another PIW exclusive in collaboration with the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, we will publish the Defence of Poetry 2005 on the day it is presented by Lars Gustafsson, June 19.