Editorial: July 2005

January 18, 2006 Indeed, at times it seems that Zimbabwean poets only need to describe what they see around them on a daily basis to touch upon the surreal. As {id="5749" title="Tinashe Mushakavanhu"} writes in ‘Entrepreneurship’:

A faded signboard
hung on our sagging fence
reads:

WE DIE FADED JEANS

but on the gate
instead hangs
an exhibit –
a threadbare napkin
soiled and holed
a flag of indigenous
entrepreneurship
waving our poverty
to passers-by

The ten new poets published here all took part in the Crossing Borders workshop, a pan-African literary project promoting “writing development, creative reading, cultural exchange and a greater knowledge of contemporary literature”. “The ideas reflected by these ten writers are significant because they are a departure from the norm,” states Ignatius T. Mabasa, who also draws attention to “disturbing trends” in Zimbabwe which have “nipped promising talent in the bud”, in his accompanying {id="5729" title="article"}.

German poet {id="2219" title="Thomas Kling"}, who sadly passed away last April, aged only 47, created ‘language installations’ like a magician. Taking his inspiration from every posible source he could find, and then cutting up, tearing down and reassembling his material, he wrote the kind of poetry in which 19th-century literary heroine Effi Briest gets a washing machine from her husband: “1 washing machine, electr./ tin-opener, bodystockings (=‘modern apron’) and words”. As well as using the techniques of new media, he could also criticize the mechanisms (‘eye-caricature’) those media employ, as in his powerful long poem on 9/11, ‘Manhattan Mouthspace Two’:

dead land, an algorhythmic wind
and everything as if coated in breadcrumbs.

busy
the continually looping eye.

The Portuguese magazine has devoted this month’s issue to {id="4653" title="Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos"} and {id="4641" title="Alexandre O’Neill"}, outstanding poets by any criteria and the two most prominent representatives of the relatively short-lived surrealist movement in Portugal. Both Cesariny and O’Neill delivered scathing poetic indictments on Portugal, and the repressive Salazar regime in particular; Cesariny most famously so in ‘you are welcome to elsinore’:

Between us and words there’s molten metal
between us and words there are spinning propellers
that can kill us     ravish us     wrench
from our inner depths the most worthwhile secret
between us and words there are burning profiles
spaces full of people with their backs turned
tall poisonous flowers     closed doors
and stairs and ticking clocks and seated children
waiting for their time and their precipice

O’Neill, on the other hand, seemed to wage a more personal battle with his home country:

Portugal: an ongoing discussion with myself,
a soreness to the bone, an unrelenting hunger,
an attentive bloodhound with no nose and no ducks,
a spruced-up nag,
a dingy fair,
my regret,
my regret for us all . . .

For both, poetry was a way of life rather than a career, with personal and artistic freedom as its highest goal – an attitude spendidly voiced in a ‘communiqué’ of the Portuguese Surrealists in 1950: “Man will only be free when he has destroyed any and every kind of political-religious or religious-political dictatorship and when he is universally capable of existing without limits. Then Man will be Poet and poetry will be Explosive Love. (…) Our last word to country, church and state will always be SHIT.”

Lastly, we are pleased to announce that the Dutch magazine has completely updated its June issue with new work from all seven Dutch poets who attended the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam: Tsead Bruinja, Judith Herzberg, Anne Vegter, Frank Koenegracht, Gerrit Komrij, Erik Menkveld and Peer Wittenbols.